A New Shoah, Meotti $15.95
Reviewed by Seth J. Frantzman
Tel 97-57-855-4551, sfrantzman@hotmail.com
4 Baruch Ben Nariah, Jerusalem, 94502
February 2010
When I made Aliyah to Israel, at the tail end of the Second Intifada I was surprised by the lack of memorials to the victims of terror. The Palestinians and their friends in Israel call this the “presence of absence” when they describe the lack of commemoration for their former villages. However, a closer look reveals that there are a plethora of tiny signs and memorials for the all too numerous victims. Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist, has set out to do these victims justice.
This is a tough and necessary job. There have been few books in English that chronicled the Second Intifada from this point of view. There have been even fewer that dared to examine the suffering inflicted on Israelis by the murderous attacks. This is primarily because of the content. It’s easier to write some puff piece about crying Palestinian children and their mother sheltering in a tent outside their freshly ruined house that was supposedly just demolished by a tank to make a road wider. It’s easier to write about soldiers than it is about blown up buses. And in general the supporters of Israel tend to shy away from the gore, from the semi-pornographic obsession with death and the slaughtered, preferring a different moral high ground.
Meotti’s point of departure is that there is a line that connects the victims of terror in Israel and the victims of the Holocaust. Hence the title, which many will consider over the top, A New Shoah. For him there are two reasons to draw this parallel. First is that those who carry out terrorism are often motivated by similar types of anti-semitic hatred; “Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the terrorist organizations that seek the destruction of Israel, call the Jews ‘pigs’, ‘cancer’” and other terms that conjure up a dark era. But the author also aims his argument at the West which he believes has betrayed the Israeli victims of terror; “why is Ofir’s story never held up as an example of what ethnic-religious hatred can do?” He continues, “whenever a Palestinian dies, even a suicide bomber, the newspapers fall all over themselves to publish his story and photographs…today in the West there is a faulty conscience-indifferent to the parade of young Palestinians putting on explosive belts....[this] has obliterated the fate of thousands of Israelis murdered because they were Jews.”
Meotti attempts to create a memorial for those who lost their lives in terrorism through a large number of vignettes. Many of the stories seem oddly similar in their tragedy. Take Corporal Ronald Beer who had “arrived from Russia 14 years before he was killed.” He desired to go the army because “someone has to protect them. If I don’t do it, who will?” There is Gadi Rajwan, an immigrant from Iraq, who employed seventy Arabs. And there is Nava Applebaum, daughter of an American immigrant.
The author tries to emphasize the humanity of the victims. He provides them with a story, a history and a future that was cut short. Like so many other he emphasizes how humane they were and how humane Israeli society is in general; “during the Second Intifada, Israeli hospitals continued to provide medical care to Palestinian patients.” Too many of the victims are sons and daughters or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Too many, it seems to the reader, are immigrants. Too many are on their way to get married.
Meotti’s book is jarring as it is a little scatterbrained. There doesn’t appear to be a great deal of organization, from one vignette to the other. But the overhanging theme never changes; Israeli Jews deserve to have their stories told and those that have ignored them under the banner of anti-Zionism are simply anti-semities in a new garb. The author isn’t always exact on his facts. He notes that there were “eighty-six Israelis [who] lost their lives during the First Gulf War, killed by Iraqi missiles, by panic, by suffocation.” This is a massive exaggeration, only 2 Israelis were killed and 230 injured. Where did he come up with 86? But this slight mistake can be overlooked, he has provided an important testament to the victims of terror. It is too bad there are not more like him.
Book Review
The Future of Islam by John L. Esposito, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 234 pages, (Hardcover), 2010 $24.95
Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 281 pages, (Hardcover), 2010, $269.95
Reviewed by Seth J. Frantzman
Tel 97-57-855-4551, sfrantzman@hotmail.com
4 Baruch Ben Nariah, Jerusalem, 94502
December 2010
Most Muslims are moderate, are lurching towards pluralism, support women’s rights and if only we in the West will take the “next step” and “recognize that the Children of Abraham are part of a rich Judeo-Christian-Islamic history”, abandoning “Islamophobia”, we can move beyond the clash of civilizations. This, in essence, is the message of John Esposito, Professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University and founding director of the Alwaleed Bin-Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.
Juan Cole, a Professor of history at the University of Michigan, argues in his lukewarm account that we need to engage with the Muslim world and dispel the myths about it which have grown up in the West where “Islam Anxiety” has become wide spread. Cole provides a laundry list of apologies for every Islamic fanatic society, from Saudi Arabia’s gender apartheid to Iran. He even goes so far as to make outlandish claims: There is “lack of good evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program”; “The [Muslim] Brotherhood has never been big enough [in Egypt] to count as a mass movement”; He calls the Bin Laden “a wealthy and much better organized version of Timothy McVeigh” the Oklahoma City bomber; “Lebanon and Senegal, have much better human rights records [than Saudi Arabia]”; “the [Persian] Gulf is actually among the more cosmopolitan places in the world.”
Is it worth debunking these assertions? Iran is developing nuclear weapons, the Muslim Brotherhood is a mass movement, Bin Laden is not comparable to Timothy McVeigh, Lebanon does not have a wonderful human rights record even compared with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states can only be considered “cosmopolitan” in a 19th century slavery owning American South kind of way. After all, what other societies in the world house foreign workers, who make up a majority of the population, in work camps where their passports are confiscated and they are worked like slaves so that a tiny minority of wealthy people may enjoy the good life?
Cole, Esposito and Karen Armstrong, who writes the forward to Esposito’s book, are examples of popular Muslim apologists in the West. According to Armstrong there is an “entrenched reluctance to see Islam in a more favorable light” in the West and it is the responsibility of people in the U.S and Europe to not only view Islam in a positive light but change their foreign policies and cultures to take into account the feelings of Muslims since “western foreign policy has been one of the causes of the current malaise in the [Muslim] region.” Like Armstrong (who was a nun), Esposito burnishes his “Christian” credentials and talks about how he spent years in a “Capuchin Franciscan monastery.” The author notes in The Future of Islam that his two former books, What Everyone Needs to know about Islam and Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, were included on a “reading list” for high ranking soldiers being deployed to Iraq. It is not clear how Future of Islam differs from his previous two books in terms of explaining “what Muslims really think” (the title of another of Esposito’s books) but he claims to introduce us to Islam, again, show how religion plays a role in Muslim politics, examine Muslim reform initiatives and discuss America’s role in the Muslim world.
The main problem with Esposito’s book is that, despite his claim that he has attempted to organize it into themes, there is almost no logic to the way in which the argument is presented. The author is careful to make use of Muslim converts who have Western names. Towards this end he discusses the case of “Dr. Ingrid Mattson”, a Canadian convert to Islam and scholar at Hartford Seminary who was involved in a controversy at the Democratic National convention in 2008. There is also Timothy Winter, a Cambridge University Professor and “prominent Muslim religious leader” who “rejects extremists” and believes Islam should return to its “classical cannons” of Islamic law. But how many Muslims have heard of Winter and Mattson?
Esposito, who is mired in the swamp of American politics, tends to believe that his reader is deeply familiar with American evangelical preachers. Thus the name John Hagee appears numerous times alongside other “preachers of hate” and “hard-line Christian Zionists” such as “Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson [and] Rob Parsley.” Cole uses a similar tactic, comparing radical Islamists to the “gun culture” in the United States. Esposito wants us to believe that Muslim fundamentalists are “like that of the radical Christian Right.” The problem here is that this gives these preachers and right wing gun owners more importance than they have in order to set up a straw man that can be compared to Islamic extremism. Let’s be honest, Islamic terrorists have killed tens of thousands of people in the last decades from India to Africa and the New World. How many people have American gun loving terrorists like McVeigh or followers of pastors like Hagee killed? Less than 200. Even compensating for the population differences from whence the radicals are drawn, 350 million Americans versus 1.3 billion Muslims, there is no comparison.
Future of Islam oddly provides a sort of how to guide on how to convert to Islam (“there is no God and Muhammad is the messenger of God”), for some reason in the chapter entitled “the many faces of Islam.” Yet both authors acknowledges that “Islamic law in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan and the Taliban’s Afghanistan has been used to restrict women’s rights and to mandate stoning of women charged with adultery (Esposito)” and other savage punishments.
In the end Esposito’s book is like blast from a shotgun. The author believes that if he lays out enough short little arguments that some of them will hit the mark. Cole prefers a more direct refutation of the West’s long held beliefs about Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and Iran. Unfortunately for him, the West is correct, these countries are either run by nefarious regimes or are cauldrons of violent extremism.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Terra Incognita 131 Misunderstanding Egyptian Democracy
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=207387
Terra Incognita: Careful what we wish for
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/08/2011 22:16
Chaos has a much better track record of producing more tyranny and fascism, than it does democracy.
Talkbacks (2)
‘Egyptians want what Americans have, they want freedom. [US President Barack] Obama needs to tell [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak, ‘You are not leaving in September, you are leaving now; we are not giving you seven months.’” Those were the words of Fox News contributor Tamara Holder.
The mantra that Egyptians want freedom and democracy has swept the world. Alongside this argument is a romantic attachment to the Egyptian protesters, a weird admiration for the “people” and the “mob.”
All the misinformed support ignores the reality: Just because people riot or protest for something doesn’t mean they are democracy-loving moderates.
The lesson being taught to the Egyptian people by statements like “Mubarak must go now” is that democracy is about rioting and protests. Roger Cohen of The New York Times argues that an “election in September is unimaginable.” Maybe an election in America in November is unimaginable, if enough people protest, say 2 percent as in Egypt; perhaps we too should just change elections based on their demands. Haaretz asks, “Is a democratic Egypt too much for Israelis to take?” But what we are seeing isn’t a “democratic” Egypt.
The Israeli and American Left is especially euphoric in its embrace of the Egyptian masses.
Anshel Pfeffer writes that “people are scaring us with talk of an Islamist takeover of our big neighbor.
But doesn’t Egypt deserve democracy too?” He elaborates: “We’re all suffering from Orientalism, not to say racism, if the sight of an entire people throwing off the yoke of tyranny and courageously demanding free elections fills us with fear rather than uplifting us, just because they’re Arabs.”
According to the doyens of the Left, Israel is a “Western outpost” that does not integrate into the Middle East and thus didn’t prepare for the uprising in Egypt.
IN THE US, all the op-eds by the likes of David Brooks and Maureen Dowd are toasting the crowds in Egypt. Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institute explained that we must not fear an Islamist takeover. “We overlearned that lesson and we need to get beyond that panicky response. There’s no way for us to go through the long evolution of history without allowing Islamists to participate in democratic society.”
Kagan also argues that the US shouldn’t support a slow transition from Mubarak, like elections in September, but rather the immediate removal of the tyrant.
The message is clear from all over the Western world: Egypt’s protesters are true democrats. They are romantic; they are Americans without knowing it and to support them we need to have the government of Egypt vanish overnight and have some sort of chaotic transition. There is no greater sign of democracy than chaos. The Islamists all want democracy; we shouldn’t fear them, but embrace them because they represent the genuine feelings of the people. We are racists because we see large numbers of people marching, shouting and burning, and we fear their rage.
Democracy isn’t about burning down the headquarters of the other party. It isn’t about paralyzing the state so that no business can be conducted and nothing can happen. Oddly, democracy isn’t about mass protests and riots. Democracy is primarily about voting and peaceful transitions of power. The other freedoms that follow from that, like the press, assembly, religion, equality and free speech, are products, hopefully, of democracy.
Democracy has, since its inception in ancient Greece, always been plagued by its evil twins, fascism and tyranny. It is strange to hear, but democracy’s opposite is not tyranny; it is monarchy.
Tyranny is the antecedent or result of democracy.
“Tyranny” comes from the Greek word tyrannos, defined by Plato as “one who rules without law, looks to his own advantage rather than that of his subjects and uses extreme and cruel tactics – against his own people as well as others.”
Tyranny came about through the rise of popular cults associated with war heroes and wealthy men who seized power through coups. Syracuse, an ancient city state, was a democracy from 467 BCE but in 407 a man named Dionysius I seized power and became a military dictator. The philosopher Plato, a product of Athenian democracy and a democrat himself, became a friend and supporter of this tyrant.
Rome, a republic for many years before it became an empire, suffered from tyranny as well. Sulla, a military leader, was made “dictator” by the Roman Senate for the purpose of “making of laws and for the settling of the constitution.” Like the tyrant of Syracuse, Sulla murdered those he suspected to be enemies of the state.
TO UNDERSTAND tyranny’s relationship with popular democracy, we must fast forward to the period 1917 to 1950. In that period almost all of the liberal democracies in Europe were brushed aside by popular fascist or communist movements. It began with Russia where a brief period of democratic government in 1917 was followed by the communist seizure of power.
The fascists and their enemies used mass protests and chaos, including rioting, to secure power against weak democratically elected patricians who proved incapable of dealing with the street. Yet those who look to Egypt and admire the protesters don’t see that these types of mass protests, while they demand democracy, also walk hand in hand with dictatorship.
It isn’t about the Egyptians being Arabs. It isn’t about Israel “integrating” into its region. It’s about the fact that no one notices that what is going on in Egypt is not a sign of democracy, it is just a sign of chaos and mass protest. Mass protest may cause a government to implement democratic reforms.
But as we have seen in Tunisia, when the government simply collapses and runs away, that doesn’t represent a “democratic transition.”
Chaos, as there is in Egypt, has a much better track record of producing more tyranny and fascism, than it does at producing democracy.
Those who journeyed to Iran in 1979, like the popular French philosopher Michel Foucault, believed they were witnessing “democracy.”
But they were witnessing the rise of Islamic fascism.
No one remembers that. No one who teaches Plato and Foucault recalls that despite all their ideals, they flirted with tyranny; it was sexy, it was strong, it was popular and muscular and in the streets. Our philosophers were wrong. And we are wrong today when the very existence of a mob, rather than orderly lines at the ballot box, makes us feel that “democracy is happening.”
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Terra Incognita: Careful what we wish for
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/08/2011 22:16
Chaos has a much better track record of producing more tyranny and fascism, than it does democracy.
Talkbacks (2)
‘Egyptians want what Americans have, they want freedom. [US President Barack] Obama needs to tell [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak, ‘You are not leaving in September, you are leaving now; we are not giving you seven months.’” Those were the words of Fox News contributor Tamara Holder.
The mantra that Egyptians want freedom and democracy has swept the world. Alongside this argument is a romantic attachment to the Egyptian protesters, a weird admiration for the “people” and the “mob.”
All the misinformed support ignores the reality: Just because people riot or protest for something doesn’t mean they are democracy-loving moderates.
The lesson being taught to the Egyptian people by statements like “Mubarak must go now” is that democracy is about rioting and protests. Roger Cohen of The New York Times argues that an “election in September is unimaginable.” Maybe an election in America in November is unimaginable, if enough people protest, say 2 percent as in Egypt; perhaps we too should just change elections based on their demands. Haaretz asks, “Is a democratic Egypt too much for Israelis to take?” But what we are seeing isn’t a “democratic” Egypt.
The Israeli and American Left is especially euphoric in its embrace of the Egyptian masses.
Anshel Pfeffer writes that “people are scaring us with talk of an Islamist takeover of our big neighbor.
But doesn’t Egypt deserve democracy too?” He elaborates: “We’re all suffering from Orientalism, not to say racism, if the sight of an entire people throwing off the yoke of tyranny and courageously demanding free elections fills us with fear rather than uplifting us, just because they’re Arabs.”
According to the doyens of the Left, Israel is a “Western outpost” that does not integrate into the Middle East and thus didn’t prepare for the uprising in Egypt.
IN THE US, all the op-eds by the likes of David Brooks and Maureen Dowd are toasting the crowds in Egypt. Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institute explained that we must not fear an Islamist takeover. “We overlearned that lesson and we need to get beyond that panicky response. There’s no way for us to go through the long evolution of history without allowing Islamists to participate in democratic society.”
Kagan also argues that the US shouldn’t support a slow transition from Mubarak, like elections in September, but rather the immediate removal of the tyrant.
The message is clear from all over the Western world: Egypt’s protesters are true democrats. They are romantic; they are Americans without knowing it and to support them we need to have the government of Egypt vanish overnight and have some sort of chaotic transition. There is no greater sign of democracy than chaos. The Islamists all want democracy; we shouldn’t fear them, but embrace them because they represent the genuine feelings of the people. We are racists because we see large numbers of people marching, shouting and burning, and we fear their rage.
Democracy isn’t about burning down the headquarters of the other party. It isn’t about paralyzing the state so that no business can be conducted and nothing can happen. Oddly, democracy isn’t about mass protests and riots. Democracy is primarily about voting and peaceful transitions of power. The other freedoms that follow from that, like the press, assembly, religion, equality and free speech, are products, hopefully, of democracy.
Democracy has, since its inception in ancient Greece, always been plagued by its evil twins, fascism and tyranny. It is strange to hear, but democracy’s opposite is not tyranny; it is monarchy.
Tyranny is the antecedent or result of democracy.
“Tyranny” comes from the Greek word tyrannos, defined by Plato as “one who rules without law, looks to his own advantage rather than that of his subjects and uses extreme and cruel tactics – against his own people as well as others.”
Tyranny came about through the rise of popular cults associated with war heroes and wealthy men who seized power through coups. Syracuse, an ancient city state, was a democracy from 467 BCE but in 407 a man named Dionysius I seized power and became a military dictator. The philosopher Plato, a product of Athenian democracy and a democrat himself, became a friend and supporter of this tyrant.
Rome, a republic for many years before it became an empire, suffered from tyranny as well. Sulla, a military leader, was made “dictator” by the Roman Senate for the purpose of “making of laws and for the settling of the constitution.” Like the tyrant of Syracuse, Sulla murdered those he suspected to be enemies of the state.
TO UNDERSTAND tyranny’s relationship with popular democracy, we must fast forward to the period 1917 to 1950. In that period almost all of the liberal democracies in Europe were brushed aside by popular fascist or communist movements. It began with Russia where a brief period of democratic government in 1917 was followed by the communist seizure of power.
The fascists and their enemies used mass protests and chaos, including rioting, to secure power against weak democratically elected patricians who proved incapable of dealing with the street. Yet those who look to Egypt and admire the protesters don’t see that these types of mass protests, while they demand democracy, also walk hand in hand with dictatorship.
It isn’t about the Egyptians being Arabs. It isn’t about Israel “integrating” into its region. It’s about the fact that no one notices that what is going on in Egypt is not a sign of democracy, it is just a sign of chaos and mass protest. Mass protest may cause a government to implement democratic reforms.
But as we have seen in Tunisia, when the government simply collapses and runs away, that doesn’t represent a “democratic transition.”
Chaos, as there is in Egypt, has a much better track record of producing more tyranny and fascism, than it does at producing democracy.
Those who journeyed to Iran in 1979, like the popular French philosopher Michel Foucault, believed they were witnessing “democracy.”
But they were witnessing the rise of Islamic fascism.
No one remembers that. No one who teaches Plato and Foucault recalls that despite all their ideals, they flirted with tyranny; it was sexy, it was strong, it was popular and muscular and in the streets. Our philosophers were wrong. And we are wrong today when the very existence of a mob, rather than orderly lines at the ballot box, makes us feel that “democracy is happening.”
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Terra Incognita 130 The Western Academy and Middle East Tyranny
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=206279
Terra Incognita: Deathly silence
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/01/2011 23:11
The Western academy and tyranny in the Middle East.
In coming years we will all be treated to the “expert” opinion of Western academics that the Egyptian dictatorship was propped up by the West, and that any rise of the Muslim Brotherhood was the “fault” of the US and Israel. Before that happens, it should be recalled that whatever support the West provided Egypt’s government, that collaboration was matched by the Western academy, which has consistently turned a blind eye to tyranny in the Middle East. If the academy and its democracy-loving humanists truly supported democracy, they would have long ago stopped shipping legions of students to these countries, and stopped propping up institutions in the Middle East.
Over the decade I’ve spent at university, there doesn’t seem to have been a dictatorship where students didn’t want to study. Colleagues ventured to Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Morocco to learn Arabic and Middle Eastern studies. They joined the Peace Corps to work in Jordan. They rarely questioned the regimes in which they had chosen to study.
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In Jordan, my friend hid her Star of David necklace so as not to “offend” the local people she was “aiding.” In Yemen, another friend donned the burka to “blend” in to that culture. In one weird incident, American students at the American University in Cairo played dress up; one girl was the “Zionist entity” and the other students dressed as Hamas.
COLLABORATION WITH the regimes’ dictators was par for the course. One champion of study abroad is the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), which maintains relations with 36 universities and colleges in the US. In 2009-2010 the program received 162 applicants, of which 39 received tuition-sponsored fellowships. Under the website’s “Frequently Asked Questions,” there are no questions alluding to the fact that study-abroad destinations are brutal dictatorships. The fact that local women are killed for ‘honor,’ or that recent studies showed 83 percent of Egyptian women report being sexually harassed in public was not part of the information provided to prospective candidates.
According to CASA’s annual report on Syria, its “cultural program... introduce[ s] students to the host culture and help[s] them interact with Syrians.” As part of the Syrian program there were field trips, visits to the cinema and meetings with actors. There was even a “student-led debate,” although it didn’t touch on politics but rather modern Arabic literary texts.
The list of participants in the program include highly qualified students from elite institutions; Georgetown, Yale and Harvard. So why is it that the best students in Middle Eastern studies are happy to drink dictatorial Kool- Aid in Damascus and Cairo? The answer the universities will provide is that it is best to study Arabic and the Middle East in the Middle East. There is no doubt about that. But the troubling aspect is whether the students who go to these countries ever question the abuses that are the daily fare there.
In her book The Bread of Angels, Stephanie Saldana described study in Damascus. She was taken aback, as I am, by the odd popularity of these dictatorships with American Jewish students. No matter that Syria suppresses its Jewish community, Saldana recalled, “there are so many [American] Jewish foreigners studying in Damascus that they may as well open their own yeshiva.”
They all hide their Jewishness, of course.
Rachel Levine, another Jewish woman who studied in Syria, recalled that “speaking with Syrian nationals about visits to Israel, tuning in to radio stations from the other side of the border or speaking Hebrew are all ill-advised.”
Saldana mentions in her book: “I’m tired of wondering which shopkeeper is watching me for the secret police. I just want something resembling a carefree day.”
IN OCTOBER, Morocco expelled Al Jazeera (Egypt has now followed suit) from the country. Morocco didn’t ban it for collaborating with terrorists, but rather for “irresponsible” reporting. It turns out the Qatar-based station had “tarnished Morocco’s image, downplaying its achievements in development, infrastructure projects, democracy and human rights.” It had “reported critically on poverty in Morocco and on its policies in the Western Sahara [occupied by Morocco in 1975].”
Western media, like the BBC and New York Times, know better than to go off the beaten track; they report that Morocco is a beacon of progress. Western- educated university students do the same as they are funneled in by programs at the universities of Montana, Kentucky and Georgia.
The SIT Study Abroad, which Brandeis offers its students, is “based in the cosmopolitan city of Rabat, [where] students study Arabic and acquire an indepth appreciation of a rich and rapidly changing society in Morocco.”
And to make sure the students don’t experience the fate of the Qatari journalists, they learn about “contemporary development challenges.”
Suffice it to say, the students aren’t going to the Western Sahara to ask about Morocco’s colonization of that country.
Likewise, the overthrow of the Tunisian dictator should remind us all of the blinders that our academic society has long worn regarding dictatorships in the Middle East. In August 2008 the International Geographical Union held its international conference in Tunis. Amid the festivities there was no inkling that the thousands of academics from around the world were being duped by a thuggish regime. You wouldn’t have known it either from the panel discussions at the conference, the field trips or back at the hotels. There wasn’t one discussion among the leading academics about the fact that this was a dictatorship.
But this isn’t surprising. Academics who preach about democracy at home in Europe, the US or Israel tend to have no hesitation about travelling to countries whose rulers do not share their political outlook. Consider the widespread Western academic collaboration with the United Arab Emirates. George Mason University, Michigan State, Harvard Medical School and Boston University all maintain satellite campuses there.
The UAE is a vile dictatorship, an apartheid country where only the 19% who are of Arab-Emirati descent have citizenship, and where millions of foreign workers are forced to slave in substandard conditions building a playground for wealthy Europeans and Saudis. These workers are housed in “work camps” outside the major cities, their passports confiscated, and kept conveniently out of the way so that no one must be bothered by their presence.
My friends who visited the Gulf related that local Emiratis brag about running over Indian and Pakistani foreign workers for fun, or beating their maids. In one of the more heinous reports related by the BBC, a Sri Lankan maid was tortured for months by her employer, who hammered nails into her body. A survey by Colombo University found that a quarter of the 600,000 Sri Lankan women who work as maids abroad had been beaten and raped and/or not received payment. At one employment agency, “the maids are advised not to run away from their employer if they encounter problems, but to maintain a positive attitude.”
Western universities have maintained that same brainwashed positive attitude.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Terra Incognita: Deathly silence
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/01/2011 23:11
The Western academy and tyranny in the Middle East.
In coming years we will all be treated to the “expert” opinion of Western academics that the Egyptian dictatorship was propped up by the West, and that any rise of the Muslim Brotherhood was the “fault” of the US and Israel. Before that happens, it should be recalled that whatever support the West provided Egypt’s government, that collaboration was matched by the Western academy, which has consistently turned a blind eye to tyranny in the Middle East. If the academy and its democracy-loving humanists truly supported democracy, they would have long ago stopped shipping legions of students to these countries, and stopped propping up institutions in the Middle East.
Over the decade I’ve spent at university, there doesn’t seem to have been a dictatorship where students didn’t want to study. Colleagues ventured to Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Morocco to learn Arabic and Middle Eastern studies. They joined the Peace Corps to work in Jordan. They rarely questioned the regimes in which they had chosen to study.
RELATED:
Terra Incognita: Hebronites at the gate
Terra Incognita: Corporate world's new marketing strategy
Terra Incognita: Pre-Islamic but retained by Islam
In Jordan, my friend hid her Star of David necklace so as not to “offend” the local people she was “aiding.” In Yemen, another friend donned the burka to “blend” in to that culture. In one weird incident, American students at the American University in Cairo played dress up; one girl was the “Zionist entity” and the other students dressed as Hamas.
COLLABORATION WITH the regimes’ dictators was par for the course. One champion of study abroad is the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), which maintains relations with 36 universities and colleges in the US. In 2009-2010 the program received 162 applicants, of which 39 received tuition-sponsored fellowships. Under the website’s “Frequently Asked Questions,” there are no questions alluding to the fact that study-abroad destinations are brutal dictatorships. The fact that local women are killed for ‘honor,’ or that recent studies showed 83 percent of Egyptian women report being sexually harassed in public was not part of the information provided to prospective candidates.
According to CASA’s annual report on Syria, its “cultural program... introduce[ s] students to the host culture and help[s] them interact with Syrians.” As part of the Syrian program there were field trips, visits to the cinema and meetings with actors. There was even a “student-led debate,” although it didn’t touch on politics but rather modern Arabic literary texts.
The list of participants in the program include highly qualified students from elite institutions; Georgetown, Yale and Harvard. So why is it that the best students in Middle Eastern studies are happy to drink dictatorial Kool- Aid in Damascus and Cairo? The answer the universities will provide is that it is best to study Arabic and the Middle East in the Middle East. There is no doubt about that. But the troubling aspect is whether the students who go to these countries ever question the abuses that are the daily fare there.
In her book The Bread of Angels, Stephanie Saldana described study in Damascus. She was taken aback, as I am, by the odd popularity of these dictatorships with American Jewish students. No matter that Syria suppresses its Jewish community, Saldana recalled, “there are so many [American] Jewish foreigners studying in Damascus that they may as well open their own yeshiva.”
They all hide their Jewishness, of course.
Rachel Levine, another Jewish woman who studied in Syria, recalled that “speaking with Syrian nationals about visits to Israel, tuning in to radio stations from the other side of the border or speaking Hebrew are all ill-advised.”
Saldana mentions in her book: “I’m tired of wondering which shopkeeper is watching me for the secret police. I just want something resembling a carefree day.”
IN OCTOBER, Morocco expelled Al Jazeera (Egypt has now followed suit) from the country. Morocco didn’t ban it for collaborating with terrorists, but rather for “irresponsible” reporting. It turns out the Qatar-based station had “tarnished Morocco’s image, downplaying its achievements in development, infrastructure projects, democracy and human rights.” It had “reported critically on poverty in Morocco and on its policies in the Western Sahara [occupied by Morocco in 1975].”
Western media, like the BBC and New York Times, know better than to go off the beaten track; they report that Morocco is a beacon of progress. Western- educated university students do the same as they are funneled in by programs at the universities of Montana, Kentucky and Georgia.
The SIT Study Abroad, which Brandeis offers its students, is “based in the cosmopolitan city of Rabat, [where] students study Arabic and acquire an indepth appreciation of a rich and rapidly changing society in Morocco.”
And to make sure the students don’t experience the fate of the Qatari journalists, they learn about “contemporary development challenges.”
Suffice it to say, the students aren’t going to the Western Sahara to ask about Morocco’s colonization of that country.
Likewise, the overthrow of the Tunisian dictator should remind us all of the blinders that our academic society has long worn regarding dictatorships in the Middle East. In August 2008 the International Geographical Union held its international conference in Tunis. Amid the festivities there was no inkling that the thousands of academics from around the world were being duped by a thuggish regime. You wouldn’t have known it either from the panel discussions at the conference, the field trips or back at the hotels. There wasn’t one discussion among the leading academics about the fact that this was a dictatorship.
But this isn’t surprising. Academics who preach about democracy at home in Europe, the US or Israel tend to have no hesitation about travelling to countries whose rulers do not share their political outlook. Consider the widespread Western academic collaboration with the United Arab Emirates. George Mason University, Michigan State, Harvard Medical School and Boston University all maintain satellite campuses there.
The UAE is a vile dictatorship, an apartheid country where only the 19% who are of Arab-Emirati descent have citizenship, and where millions of foreign workers are forced to slave in substandard conditions building a playground for wealthy Europeans and Saudis. These workers are housed in “work camps” outside the major cities, their passports confiscated, and kept conveniently out of the way so that no one must be bothered by their presence.
My friends who visited the Gulf related that local Emiratis brag about running over Indian and Pakistani foreign workers for fun, or beating their maids. In one of the more heinous reports related by the BBC, a Sri Lankan maid was tortured for months by her employer, who hammered nails into her body. A survey by Colombo University found that a quarter of the 600,000 Sri Lankan women who work as maids abroad had been beaten and raped and/or not received payment. At one employment agency, “the maids are advised not to run away from their employer if they encounter problems, but to maintain a positive attitude.”
Western universities have maintained that same brainwashed positive attitude.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Terra Incognita in Korea Times Middle East chaos in historical perspective
Middle East chaos in historical perspective
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2011/01/161_80661.html
By Seth J. Frantzman
The chaos that has seemingly engulfed one Arab country after another in the last five years, and now appears to be swamping Egypt and Yemen, is part of a broader pattern that a clear reading of history reveals.
The U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003 seemingly began a process of democratization and hope that has unraveled several Arab countries. The resulting insurgency in Iraq didn’t peak until 2005-2007.
At around the same time Prime Minister of Lebanon Rafic Hariri was murdered in a massive car bombing unleashing protests, which forced Syria to withdraw from that country. Then in January of 2006 Hamas won the Palestinian elections ushering in a year-and-a-half of low level violence that resulted in Hamas’ conquest of the Gaza Strip. That was followed by the sudden collapse of Tunisia’s government.
The internal pattern played out in these four countries has been roughly similar. Each was previously ruled by secular-nationalist governments led by strongmen. In Iraq it was Saddam Hussein who ruled for roughly 24 years. In Lebanon it was Syria which occupied the country for almost 30 years.
The fall of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia ended a 24-year reign and has seemingly sealed the fate of the ruling party which has been in power since 1957.
In the Palestinian territories the rise of Hamas didn’t overthrow the ruling Fatah party but it seriously challenged its power. Fatah, the main political element in the Palestinian Authority, has been the leading power behind the Palestinian movement for 30 years.
What becomes clear is that the process of collapse has taken place after years of political stagnation and one party rule. But the internal logic behind the descent into chaos has been brought on by a number of factors and has affected, so far, only a certain type of regime.
Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon are all legacies of the 1950s Arab nationalist awakening. It must be remembered that until 1918 many of these countries were under Ottoman Turkish imperial rule. In the case of Tunisia and Egypt the two countries fell under colonial rule, by the French and British respectively, in 1881-1882. Prior the 1880s both Egypt and Tunis were ruled by hereditary monarchies.
After the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, the Middle East entered an interesting period. An Arab revolt led by a leading family from Mecca and supported by the British and various Bedouin tribes helped to drive the Turks out of the region. The leaders of this revolt, the Hussein family, attempted to install themselves in power.
Eventually they were able to retain only the kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq. In Palestine the British mandate resulted in division of the country between Jews and Arabs. In Lebanon the French mandate ensured the creation of a unique sectarian political system that ensured power sharing between its various groups.
The major movement in the Arab world from the 1920s was a type of Arab nationalism that borrowed heavily from imported European ideas and blended modernity, democracy, secularism and socialism. The Arab revolutionary regimes that came to power in the 1950s in Egypt (1952), Tunisia (1957) and Iraq (1958) proclaimed their countries to be republics.
While the regimes were different and often at odds with one another they shared hostility to the traditional monarchies found in Jordan and Saudi Arabia and viewed themselves as secular and socialist. They tended to side with the non-aligned nations during the Cold War but received weaponry and advisors from the U.S.S.R.
After 1973 Egypt increasingly found itself a key ally of the U.S. Saddam, a U.S ally in the 1980s, fell out of favor after the momentous invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat also moved from a Soviet oriented orbit to moderation and understanding with the U.S. in the 1990s. Lebanon has been a key Western ally since its independence in 1943, an alliance that saw American soldiers arriving in the country in 1958 and the 1980s to prevent civil strife.
Now however these secular-national regimes appear to be on their last legs. Fifty-eight years of rule by the Nasserist political party of Egypt have stagnated the country. The opposition is made up of secular liberals and Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood.
The same types of opposition, in different forms, are found in Lebanon, Iraq, Tunisia and Palestine. In Lebanon Hezbullah, a Shia Islamist party, has now played a key role in bringing down the government and appointing the most recent Prime Minister Najib Mikati. Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al Malaki began his career as an Islamist Shia dissident of the Dawa party.
As noted above, Palestine’s political landscape is divided between the secular-nationalist government in Ramallah run by Mahmud Abbas and the Islamist Hamas in Gaza. Tunisia’s Islamist movement is quite small compared to the other countries surveyed.
The fall, like dominos, of the secular-national governments in the Middle East mirrors a process that stretches back to the 19th century. It is part of a larger cycle. Whether the current wave of chaotic political change will also affect the Gulf monarchies, Jordan, Libya or Morocco awaits to be seen.
The author is a post-doctoral researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute of Market Studies. He can be reached at sfrantzman@hotmail.com.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2011/01/161_80661.html
By Seth J. Frantzman
The chaos that has seemingly engulfed one Arab country after another in the last five years, and now appears to be swamping Egypt and Yemen, is part of a broader pattern that a clear reading of history reveals.
The U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003 seemingly began a process of democratization and hope that has unraveled several Arab countries. The resulting insurgency in Iraq didn’t peak until 2005-2007.
At around the same time Prime Minister of Lebanon Rafic Hariri was murdered in a massive car bombing unleashing protests, which forced Syria to withdraw from that country. Then in January of 2006 Hamas won the Palestinian elections ushering in a year-and-a-half of low level violence that resulted in Hamas’ conquest of the Gaza Strip. That was followed by the sudden collapse of Tunisia’s government.
The internal pattern played out in these four countries has been roughly similar. Each was previously ruled by secular-nationalist governments led by strongmen. In Iraq it was Saddam Hussein who ruled for roughly 24 years. In Lebanon it was Syria which occupied the country for almost 30 years.
The fall of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia ended a 24-year reign and has seemingly sealed the fate of the ruling party which has been in power since 1957.
In the Palestinian territories the rise of Hamas didn’t overthrow the ruling Fatah party but it seriously challenged its power. Fatah, the main political element in the Palestinian Authority, has been the leading power behind the Palestinian movement for 30 years.
What becomes clear is that the process of collapse has taken place after years of political stagnation and one party rule. But the internal logic behind the descent into chaos has been brought on by a number of factors and has affected, so far, only a certain type of regime.
Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon are all legacies of the 1950s Arab nationalist awakening. It must be remembered that until 1918 many of these countries were under Ottoman Turkish imperial rule. In the case of Tunisia and Egypt the two countries fell under colonial rule, by the French and British respectively, in 1881-1882. Prior the 1880s both Egypt and Tunis were ruled by hereditary monarchies.
After the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, the Middle East entered an interesting period. An Arab revolt led by a leading family from Mecca and supported by the British and various Bedouin tribes helped to drive the Turks out of the region. The leaders of this revolt, the Hussein family, attempted to install themselves in power.
Eventually they were able to retain only the kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq. In Palestine the British mandate resulted in division of the country between Jews and Arabs. In Lebanon the French mandate ensured the creation of a unique sectarian political system that ensured power sharing between its various groups.
The major movement in the Arab world from the 1920s was a type of Arab nationalism that borrowed heavily from imported European ideas and blended modernity, democracy, secularism and socialism. The Arab revolutionary regimes that came to power in the 1950s in Egypt (1952), Tunisia (1957) and Iraq (1958) proclaimed their countries to be republics.
While the regimes were different and often at odds with one another they shared hostility to the traditional monarchies found in Jordan and Saudi Arabia and viewed themselves as secular and socialist. They tended to side with the non-aligned nations during the Cold War but received weaponry and advisors from the U.S.S.R.
After 1973 Egypt increasingly found itself a key ally of the U.S. Saddam, a U.S ally in the 1980s, fell out of favor after the momentous invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat also moved from a Soviet oriented orbit to moderation and understanding with the U.S. in the 1990s. Lebanon has been a key Western ally since its independence in 1943, an alliance that saw American soldiers arriving in the country in 1958 and the 1980s to prevent civil strife.
Now however these secular-national regimes appear to be on their last legs. Fifty-eight years of rule by the Nasserist political party of Egypt have stagnated the country. The opposition is made up of secular liberals and Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood.
The same types of opposition, in different forms, are found in Lebanon, Iraq, Tunisia and Palestine. In Lebanon Hezbullah, a Shia Islamist party, has now played a key role in bringing down the government and appointing the most recent Prime Minister Najib Mikati. Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al Malaki began his career as an Islamist Shia dissident of the Dawa party.
As noted above, Palestine’s political landscape is divided between the secular-nationalist government in Ramallah run by Mahmud Abbas and the Islamist Hamas in Gaza. Tunisia’s Islamist movement is quite small compared to the other countries surveyed.
The fall, like dominos, of the secular-national governments in the Middle East mirrors a process that stretches back to the 19th century. It is part of a larger cycle. Whether the current wave of chaotic political change will also affect the Gulf monarchies, Jordan, Libya or Morocco awaits to be seen.
The author is a post-doctoral researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute of Market Studies. He can be reached at sfrantzman@hotmail.com.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Terra Incognita Pre-Islamic or Cemented by Islam
Terra Incognita: Pre-Islamic but retained by Islam
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
01/11/2011 23:32
From face veiling to female circumcision, many practices are said to have nothing to do with religion, but why, after 1,300 years, are they still practiced?
Talkbacks (7)
From face veiling to female circumcision, one hears that many practices perceived as negative in the West have nothing to do with Islam, the religion, the culture or the famed civilization.
Babak Darvish argued on his blog in June that “Islamic law teaches that the face and hands should be uncovered. Meaning that if somebody follows the traditional Sunni school of thought in Islam, they should not practice the pre- Islamic tradition of face veiling or Niqab.”
Another blogger notes “the wearing of a veil predates all the Abrahamic religions.” A website called Hilalplaze.com informs believers that “cultural dress is referred to in the ancient pre-Islamic era (Jahiliyah). Yet it is the veil from the ‘pre-Islamic’ era that is considered ‘traditional,’ and which stops women from contributing in society.”
The writer argues that the activities of the Taliban were typical of this un-Islamic society.
Greek writers about Persia described many upper-class women as veiled. There is no mention in the Koran of a new institution regarding female dress. But if the veil and all its permutations – niqab, hijab, chador, abbaya, burka, purdah – are pre- Islamic, then why has Islamic society been so good at cementing their appearance? In fact, despite the spread of Islamic piety from Bosnia to Cambodia, one finds a startling similarity in the veil.
Where once some Central Asian Muslim women were garbed in horrid long horsehair burkas that made movement all but impossible (they were banned by the Soviets), now one finds those same women wearing the same head scarf so common throughout the Middle East and Europe.
Another controversial concept widespread in the Muslim world is “honor killing.”
On the website islamonline.
net, Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a senior lecturer at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, is quoted as saying; “There is no such concept in Islam.”
An esteemed writer on the website reiterates “so-called honor killing is based on ignorance and disregard of morals and laws, which cannot be abolished except by disciplinary punishments.”
John Esposito and Sheila Lalwani, the former a well known American writer and defender of Islam, note that “these [honor] murders occur in the Islamic world, but they also take place in other countries such as India, and victims can be Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Sikh.”
Yotam Feldner, writing in Middle East Forum, notes that “the religious establishment in Jordan views honor killing as a remnant of pre-Islamic Arab tribalism.”
MK Ahmed Tibi has even proposed passing a law that would ban the use of the term by officials or the media. So here again a crime prevalent among modern Muslims becomes a “pre-Islamic” crime, or even one whose name should be abolished, lest it stigmatize Muslims. In fact, it turns out other communities are probably just as guilty as Muslims. When non-Muslims are victims of honor killings in the Middle East it receives widespread coverage. This was the case with Mariam Atef Khilla, a Coptic Christian girl who converted to Islam and was subsequently murdered.
BUT THE numbers and stories betray a deeper truth.
Robert Fisk, the usually anti- Israel writer at the Independent, wrote in September that 20,000 women are murdered a year, and that while it is a crime which Hindus and Christians also commit, it is all too common throughout the Muslim Middle East.
Honor killings have now come to shock the Western world when Muslim immigrant communities are implicated.
As with the veil, the question is the same – if it’s not part of Islam, why is it so common among Muslims? Fisk, Esposito and others like them might be right; women are murdered throughout the world. But are they drowned, strangled, shot, beaten, raped and sprayed with acid by their own relatives? Do the men express pride when confronted by police? It seems the answer is generally no.
Take Arab Christians, for example. Sometimes Arab Christian women who convert to Islam or run off with Muslim men are murdered by relatives. Until recently some families took out death notices in papers rather than actually murdering them. But Arab Christian women, to my knowledge, are never murdered for being “immodest” or because of “rumors.”
Arab Christian women often never wore a veil in the first place, not in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria or Jordan.
The last subject labelled a “pre-Islamic” tradition is female circumcision. Suffice it to say that this practice indeed predated Islam in Egypt, Africa and parts of Arabia.
According to one hadith (Islamic tradition), “circumcision is obligated for men, and an honorable thing for women.”
All four Islamic schools of jurisprudence agree that the practice is honorable for women. Dr. Adb’ al-Rahman ibn Hasan al-Nafisah, an editor of an Islamic jurisprudence journal in Saudi Arabia, notes, “We conclude that female circumcision is merely a cultural practice.”
But here again we have traditions that are pre-Islamic and yet which Islam helped cement.
The same is true of other unsavory practices, from wife-beating to slavery – all pre-Islamic –which were not eradicated by Islam. The same is not generally true of the Christian relationship with pre-Christian practices.
Christianity helped suppress slavery, after many centuries of tolerating it.
Drunkenness – surely a pre- Christian practice – has been semi-enshrined on St.
Patrick’s Day, but temperance movements were largely Christian in origin. The Mafia revenge culture of Sicily is intertwined with the Catholic faith, but priests have condemned it.
Without being a shill for Christianity, it seems obvious that “traditional” practices that receive little purchase in modern Western society thrive under Islam.
Excusing them as “pre- Islamic” is a misnomer; after 1,300 years, they are “Islamic,” and only Islamic jurisprudence can change them.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Terra Incognita: Corporate world's new marketing strategy
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
01/19/2011 00:11
There is something suspicious about how the new socially conscious ad campaigns play on our society’s stereotypical charitable views
Talkbacks (3)
In the Seinfeld episode “The Airport,” Jerry meets a model and she shows him a recent photo of her that appeared in Esquire where she is mostly nude, having just stepped out of a shower. It turns out the ad is for jeans. No surprise. We all know the mantra that “sex sells.”
Advertising companies have long realized that the main subject of an ad need not be the product. Watch companies show images of Mount Everest and sailing. Other firms pitch you a lifestyle that goes along with a product. From time to time, oddly, some products are actually marketed through ads that declare them to be the best; Oracle claims it has “the fastest ever database performance.”
But there is a new trend in advertising that, while it may not be sweeping the world, is becoming more pronounced. It is the “socially conscious” ad campaign. In a fold-out ad by Du Pont on the inside cover of the recent issue of National Geographic, the reader is shown an Indian train packed to the gills. The ad was specially designed for the January issue, whose main article was about “Population 7 billion: How your world will change.”
Lo and behold, we learn that Du Pont “has a rich history of scientific discovery that has enabled countless innovations and made life better for people everywhere.”
The company, it turns out, is not only making “higher quality food available,” it also plays a role in the body armor that has saved “more than 3,000 law-enforcement lives.”
It is not clear what connects any of this to the people on the train, but somehow the idea is that Du Pont is helping them.
IN THE latest issues of The Atlantic and the Economist are ads featuring a middle-aged African woman. It turns out that Chevron “helped thousands of entrepreneurs get ahead with microloans.”
This woman, whose emphatic stare takes up half the page, must be one of the beneficiaries, although we aren’t told how. The Chevron’s slogan is “Big Oil should support small business.”
But this isn’t the most egregious play on the social consciousness of the reader. That award must go to British Airways, which claims “the best part of giving soccer balls to kids in Africa is seeing the look on their faces.”
What is British Airways’ connection to this? It isn’t clear. The ad claims that “last year at British Airways, we put hundreds of small business owners in front of the people they needed to see – for free.”
And somehow this is connected to Tommy Clark, Grassroots Soccer founder, who “uses soccer balls to teach kids in Africa about AIDS.” It doesn’t really matter what exactly British Airways’ involvement is, because the ad alone draws you in.
Every well-meaning person wants to portray him or herself as saving Africans. Let’s be honest, we all know the photos of NGO projects, volunteer abroad programs and anything connected to “save children” has a smiling African kid, usually posing with a white person who has “saved” him.
So these new socially conscious ad campaigns play on our society’s stereotypical charitable views. There is definitely something suspicious about them. Who decided that disguising an oil company or an airline as a promoter of aid to Africa, and putting smiling African kids or women prominently on display would be good for business? The companies don’t really seem to be giving aid; they are claiming that somehow, by helping “small business” or inventing new products, their revenues are trickling down to benefit people.
And this brings us to the last problem with all this socially conscious advertising. It’s ridiculous. I should want to fly British Airways, not because it makes me feel that I, in some tortured roundabout way, am putting smiles on African AIDS victims’ faces, but because it is a better airline. I should go to a Chevron station because it offers cheaper and better gas, not because it supposedly supports a small business in Kenya.
There is something to be said for not buying from companies that are particularly heinous in their treatment of people or the environment. But the latest craze is all part of an elaborate scam. BP rebranded itself as “green” in 2000, when it replaced it’s stodgy shield with a green “helios” or sun logo. In 2008, Greenpeace UK awarded BP the Emerald Paintbrush award for “greenwashing” its image. Greenpeace spokesman James Turned noted: “You wouldn’t know it from their adverts, but BP bosses are pumping billions into their oil and gas business and investing peanuts in renewable [energy].”
The logo became even more embarrassing with the huge BP spill in 2010. A website called Climagegreenwash.org is now devoted to tracking companies that fake their environmentalism.
What concerns me isn’t the lack of corporate social responsibility; a company’s duty is to its shareholders, customers and employees. What is most annoying is that this is just part of a larger picture of misleading sloganeering. Whether it is President Barack Obama’s platitudes and lack of policy (he won the Nobel Peace Prize just for giving us “hope”), or all the lying NGOs who pretended to be helping Haiti but merely served as outlets for unemployed Europeans to do well-paid charity work, the new motto is “put an African child in the photo and feel good about yourself.”
NGOs don’t help Africa, and neither does British Airways, and yet we feel better about ourselves for choosing to fly BA and throwing a few cents at the Red Cross, buying a book that is printed on “green” paper and then eating some nonsense “organic” meal.
From one lie to the next we go through each day. Socially conscious advertising is just the tip of the iceberg.
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
01/11/2011 23:32
From face veiling to female circumcision, many practices are said to have nothing to do with religion, but why, after 1,300 years, are they still practiced?
Talkbacks (7)
From face veiling to female circumcision, one hears that many practices perceived as negative in the West have nothing to do with Islam, the religion, the culture or the famed civilization.
Babak Darvish argued on his blog in June that “Islamic law teaches that the face and hands should be uncovered. Meaning that if somebody follows the traditional Sunni school of thought in Islam, they should not practice the pre- Islamic tradition of face veiling or Niqab.”
Another blogger notes “the wearing of a veil predates all the Abrahamic religions.” A website called Hilalplaze.com informs believers that “cultural dress is referred to in the ancient pre-Islamic era (Jahiliyah). Yet it is the veil from the ‘pre-Islamic’ era that is considered ‘traditional,’ and which stops women from contributing in society.”
The writer argues that the activities of the Taliban were typical of this un-Islamic society.
Greek writers about Persia described many upper-class women as veiled. There is no mention in the Koran of a new institution regarding female dress. But if the veil and all its permutations – niqab, hijab, chador, abbaya, burka, purdah – are pre- Islamic, then why has Islamic society been so good at cementing their appearance? In fact, despite the spread of Islamic piety from Bosnia to Cambodia, one finds a startling similarity in the veil.
Where once some Central Asian Muslim women were garbed in horrid long horsehair burkas that made movement all but impossible (they were banned by the Soviets), now one finds those same women wearing the same head scarf so common throughout the Middle East and Europe.
Another controversial concept widespread in the Muslim world is “honor killing.”
On the website islamonline.
net, Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a senior lecturer at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, is quoted as saying; “There is no such concept in Islam.”
An esteemed writer on the website reiterates “so-called honor killing is based on ignorance and disregard of morals and laws, which cannot be abolished except by disciplinary punishments.”
John Esposito and Sheila Lalwani, the former a well known American writer and defender of Islam, note that “these [honor] murders occur in the Islamic world, but they also take place in other countries such as India, and victims can be Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Sikh.”
Yotam Feldner, writing in Middle East Forum, notes that “the religious establishment in Jordan views honor killing as a remnant of pre-Islamic Arab tribalism.”
MK Ahmed Tibi has even proposed passing a law that would ban the use of the term by officials or the media. So here again a crime prevalent among modern Muslims becomes a “pre-Islamic” crime, or even one whose name should be abolished, lest it stigmatize Muslims. In fact, it turns out other communities are probably just as guilty as Muslims. When non-Muslims are victims of honor killings in the Middle East it receives widespread coverage. This was the case with Mariam Atef Khilla, a Coptic Christian girl who converted to Islam and was subsequently murdered.
BUT THE numbers and stories betray a deeper truth.
Robert Fisk, the usually anti- Israel writer at the Independent, wrote in September that 20,000 women are murdered a year, and that while it is a crime which Hindus and Christians also commit, it is all too common throughout the Muslim Middle East.
Honor killings have now come to shock the Western world when Muslim immigrant communities are implicated.
As with the veil, the question is the same – if it’s not part of Islam, why is it so common among Muslims? Fisk, Esposito and others like them might be right; women are murdered throughout the world. But are they drowned, strangled, shot, beaten, raped and sprayed with acid by their own relatives? Do the men express pride when confronted by police? It seems the answer is generally no.
Take Arab Christians, for example. Sometimes Arab Christian women who convert to Islam or run off with Muslim men are murdered by relatives. Until recently some families took out death notices in papers rather than actually murdering them. But Arab Christian women, to my knowledge, are never murdered for being “immodest” or because of “rumors.”
Arab Christian women often never wore a veil in the first place, not in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria or Jordan.
The last subject labelled a “pre-Islamic” tradition is female circumcision. Suffice it to say that this practice indeed predated Islam in Egypt, Africa and parts of Arabia.
According to one hadith (Islamic tradition), “circumcision is obligated for men, and an honorable thing for women.”
All four Islamic schools of jurisprudence agree that the practice is honorable for women. Dr. Adb’ al-Rahman ibn Hasan al-Nafisah, an editor of an Islamic jurisprudence journal in Saudi Arabia, notes, “We conclude that female circumcision is merely a cultural practice.”
But here again we have traditions that are pre-Islamic and yet which Islam helped cement.
The same is true of other unsavory practices, from wife-beating to slavery – all pre-Islamic –which were not eradicated by Islam. The same is not generally true of the Christian relationship with pre-Christian practices.
Christianity helped suppress slavery, after many centuries of tolerating it.
Drunkenness – surely a pre- Christian practice – has been semi-enshrined on St.
Patrick’s Day, but temperance movements were largely Christian in origin. The Mafia revenge culture of Sicily is intertwined with the Catholic faith, but priests have condemned it.
Without being a shill for Christianity, it seems obvious that “traditional” practices that receive little purchase in modern Western society thrive under Islam.
Excusing them as “pre- Islamic” is a misnomer; after 1,300 years, they are “Islamic,” and only Islamic jurisprudence can change them.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Terra Incognita: Corporate world's new marketing strategy
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
01/19/2011 00:11
There is something suspicious about how the new socially conscious ad campaigns play on our society’s stereotypical charitable views
Talkbacks (3)
In the Seinfeld episode “The Airport,” Jerry meets a model and she shows him a recent photo of her that appeared in Esquire where she is mostly nude, having just stepped out of a shower. It turns out the ad is for jeans. No surprise. We all know the mantra that “sex sells.”
Advertising companies have long realized that the main subject of an ad need not be the product. Watch companies show images of Mount Everest and sailing. Other firms pitch you a lifestyle that goes along with a product. From time to time, oddly, some products are actually marketed through ads that declare them to be the best; Oracle claims it has “the fastest ever database performance.”
But there is a new trend in advertising that, while it may not be sweeping the world, is becoming more pronounced. It is the “socially conscious” ad campaign. In a fold-out ad by Du Pont on the inside cover of the recent issue of National Geographic, the reader is shown an Indian train packed to the gills. The ad was specially designed for the January issue, whose main article was about “Population 7 billion: How your world will change.”
Lo and behold, we learn that Du Pont “has a rich history of scientific discovery that has enabled countless innovations and made life better for people everywhere.”
The company, it turns out, is not only making “higher quality food available,” it also plays a role in the body armor that has saved “more than 3,000 law-enforcement lives.”
It is not clear what connects any of this to the people on the train, but somehow the idea is that Du Pont is helping them.
IN THE latest issues of The Atlantic and the Economist are ads featuring a middle-aged African woman. It turns out that Chevron “helped thousands of entrepreneurs get ahead with microloans.”
This woman, whose emphatic stare takes up half the page, must be one of the beneficiaries, although we aren’t told how. The Chevron’s slogan is “Big Oil should support small business.”
But this isn’t the most egregious play on the social consciousness of the reader. That award must go to British Airways, which claims “the best part of giving soccer balls to kids in Africa is seeing the look on their faces.”
What is British Airways’ connection to this? It isn’t clear. The ad claims that “last year at British Airways, we put hundreds of small business owners in front of the people they needed to see – for free.”
And somehow this is connected to Tommy Clark, Grassroots Soccer founder, who “uses soccer balls to teach kids in Africa about AIDS.” It doesn’t really matter what exactly British Airways’ involvement is, because the ad alone draws you in.
Every well-meaning person wants to portray him or herself as saving Africans. Let’s be honest, we all know the photos of NGO projects, volunteer abroad programs and anything connected to “save children” has a smiling African kid, usually posing with a white person who has “saved” him.
So these new socially conscious ad campaigns play on our society’s stereotypical charitable views. There is definitely something suspicious about them. Who decided that disguising an oil company or an airline as a promoter of aid to Africa, and putting smiling African kids or women prominently on display would be good for business? The companies don’t really seem to be giving aid; they are claiming that somehow, by helping “small business” or inventing new products, their revenues are trickling down to benefit people.
And this brings us to the last problem with all this socially conscious advertising. It’s ridiculous. I should want to fly British Airways, not because it makes me feel that I, in some tortured roundabout way, am putting smiles on African AIDS victims’ faces, but because it is a better airline. I should go to a Chevron station because it offers cheaper and better gas, not because it supposedly supports a small business in Kenya.
There is something to be said for not buying from companies that are particularly heinous in their treatment of people or the environment. But the latest craze is all part of an elaborate scam. BP rebranded itself as “green” in 2000, when it replaced it’s stodgy shield with a green “helios” or sun logo. In 2008, Greenpeace UK awarded BP the Emerald Paintbrush award for “greenwashing” its image. Greenpeace spokesman James Turned noted: “You wouldn’t know it from their adverts, but BP bosses are pumping billions into their oil and gas business and investing peanuts in renewable [energy].”
The logo became even more embarrassing with the huge BP spill in 2010. A website called Climagegreenwash.org is now devoted to tracking companies that fake their environmentalism.
What concerns me isn’t the lack of corporate social responsibility; a company’s duty is to its shareholders, customers and employees. What is most annoying is that this is just part of a larger picture of misleading sloganeering. Whether it is President Barack Obama’s platitudes and lack of policy (he won the Nobel Peace Prize just for giving us “hope”), or all the lying NGOs who pretended to be helping Haiti but merely served as outlets for unemployed Europeans to do well-paid charity work, the new motto is “put an African child in the photo and feel good about yourself.”
NGOs don’t help Africa, and neither does British Airways, and yet we feel better about ourselves for choosing to fly BA and throwing a few cents at the Red Cross, buying a book that is printed on “green” paper and then eating some nonsense “organic” meal.
From one lie to the next we go through each day. Socially conscious advertising is just the tip of the iceberg.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Terra Incognita 125 Bashir Gemayel's prediction
Terra Incognita: Bashir Gemayel’s long prediction
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
01/04/2011 22:26
We blame extremists, but the truth is that the murder of minorities in the Mideast is integral to the fabric of the region.
Talkbacks (2)
In 1980 Bashir Gemayel, the leader of Lebanon’s Maronite Christian militia, the Lebanese Forces, provided an explanation for his militancy: “With all due respect to the people concerned, we refuse to be put on a par with the Copts of Egypt, or the Christians of certain Arab countries.”
Today Gemayel is remembered by many Christian Lebanese, especially those who live abroad, as a patriot and romantic icon of his people. Others recall his name only because his assassination in 1982, after having been elected president of Lebanon, provoked the Sabra and Shatilla massacres.
The Gemayels are an important Lebanese political family. Bashir’s father Sheikh Pierre Gemayel was the founder of the Phalange party, and his brother Amin served as president of Lebanon from 1982 to 1988. Amin’s son, also Pierre, was assassinated in 2006. Amin was in the news again on January 3, when he reacted angrily to the murder of Christians on New Year’s Eve in Alexandria, Egypt: “Massacres are taking place for no reason and without any justification against Christians. It is only because they are Christians.”
He was referring not only the attacks in Egypt that left 21 dead, but also recent attacks in Iraq. In October, 2010 Islamic terrorists burst into the Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad. A subsequent rescue operation left 53 Christians dead. The Christian community suffered more attacks just after Christmas when bombs were detonated in a Baghdad Christian neighborhood. Three days later a Christian woman was shot in her sleep during another attack.
In Egypt the Copts have become increasingly enraged by the terror directed at them. The New Year’s massacre outside the al-Qiddissin church has resulted in days of rioting. Egyptian Copts know that it is Islamists who are to blame. One declared, “A lot of us think that this is a plan to make Christians go away from Egypt. The planner is al-Qaida.”
They also blame the government for a lack of security. The riots come after tensions flared in November in Cairo’s Giza district over the building of a church. Egypt throws up numerous obstacles to the construction of new churches and when a recent construction project was banned by the government, riots resulted.
In other places, attacks on Christians were reported over the holidays. In Nigeria, a number of bombs were set off, one near a church in the city of Jos. It was reported by the Times of India that “the state police commissioner Abdulrahman Akano blamed the bombing and clashes on the political elite and maintained that they were not religious or ethnic in nature.”
This story, of attacks on Christians, particularly on their holidays, and excuses about their nature is typical throughout the Middle East and Africa. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has claimed the bombing was made by “foreign hands.”
What is interesting is that little has changed over time. When Bat Ye’or penned Islam and Dhimmitude in 2002, she included a quote from Fehmi Hilal, who described “a peaceful war of extermination, which aims to kill one member after another of the body of Christians, so that the suffering be not severe and the cries not heard.”
Even in 2002 it was the same story of Muslims and Christians uniting after the attacks to confront the mysterious nebulous extremism. We see the same calls today for uniting in the face of extremism in Nigeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt.
ONE PLACE that there is less uniting and more marked extermination is in southern Sudan, set to go to the polls on Sunday to vote on secession. South Sudan, which is dominated by Christians and pagans, fought two civil wars to obtain the right to leave Sudan, whose central government has generally been controlled by Muslim Arabs since independence in 1956. Millions died in these savage conflicts but with the poll on January 9 this hitherto minority group may obtain the independence that Gemayel once desired for his Maronites in Lebanon.
It is an autonomy that other Christian groups in the region have suffered heinously for desiring.
Armenians demanded rights from Ottoman Turkey and in 1915 that resulted in a genocide and the their complete ethnic-cleansing from Turkey. The same thing befell the Assyrian Christians in Iraq and Turkey between 1915 and 1932 and the Greeks of Turkey in 1920. Greek Cypriots were cleansed from northern Cyprus in 1974. Recent revelations have brought to light the terrible crimes inflicted on the Serbian Orthodox community in Croatia’s Krajina and in Kosovo at the hands Croatian Catholic and Kosovar Muslim militias.
In our own backyard, attacks on Christians are less common but equally heinous. In Gaza it has become unbearable. One recent article in Haaretz relates the story of one Christian: “When his wife and daughter go out on the street, they are subject to stares and sometimes even verbal abuse; Muslim men yell at them to cover their hair.”
In 2008 a bomb was set off outside the Rosary Sisters school and last year Rami Ayad, a Christian, was kidnapped and murdered.
We tend to take the attacks in stride. A murder here, a bombing there, soon forgotten. We blame extremists because we don’t want to label whole countries intolerant. But all that obscures the reality. The murder of minorities, carried out by the extremists, is integral to the fabric of the region.
It is the region’s tragedy.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
01/04/2011 22:26
We blame extremists, but the truth is that the murder of minorities in the Mideast is integral to the fabric of the region.
Talkbacks (2)
In 1980 Bashir Gemayel, the leader of Lebanon’s Maronite Christian militia, the Lebanese Forces, provided an explanation for his militancy: “With all due respect to the people concerned, we refuse to be put on a par with the Copts of Egypt, or the Christians of certain Arab countries.”
Today Gemayel is remembered by many Christian Lebanese, especially those who live abroad, as a patriot and romantic icon of his people. Others recall his name only because his assassination in 1982, after having been elected president of Lebanon, provoked the Sabra and Shatilla massacres.
The Gemayels are an important Lebanese political family. Bashir’s father Sheikh Pierre Gemayel was the founder of the Phalange party, and his brother Amin served as president of Lebanon from 1982 to 1988. Amin’s son, also Pierre, was assassinated in 2006. Amin was in the news again on January 3, when he reacted angrily to the murder of Christians on New Year’s Eve in Alexandria, Egypt: “Massacres are taking place for no reason and without any justification against Christians. It is only because they are Christians.”
He was referring not only the attacks in Egypt that left 21 dead, but also recent attacks in Iraq. In October, 2010 Islamic terrorists burst into the Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad. A subsequent rescue operation left 53 Christians dead. The Christian community suffered more attacks just after Christmas when bombs were detonated in a Baghdad Christian neighborhood. Three days later a Christian woman was shot in her sleep during another attack.
In Egypt the Copts have become increasingly enraged by the terror directed at them. The New Year’s massacre outside the al-Qiddissin church has resulted in days of rioting. Egyptian Copts know that it is Islamists who are to blame. One declared, “A lot of us think that this is a plan to make Christians go away from Egypt. The planner is al-Qaida.”
They also blame the government for a lack of security. The riots come after tensions flared in November in Cairo’s Giza district over the building of a church. Egypt throws up numerous obstacles to the construction of new churches and when a recent construction project was banned by the government, riots resulted.
In other places, attacks on Christians were reported over the holidays. In Nigeria, a number of bombs were set off, one near a church in the city of Jos. It was reported by the Times of India that “the state police commissioner Abdulrahman Akano blamed the bombing and clashes on the political elite and maintained that they were not religious or ethnic in nature.”
This story, of attacks on Christians, particularly on their holidays, and excuses about their nature is typical throughout the Middle East and Africa. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has claimed the bombing was made by “foreign hands.”
What is interesting is that little has changed over time. When Bat Ye’or penned Islam and Dhimmitude in 2002, she included a quote from Fehmi Hilal, who described “a peaceful war of extermination, which aims to kill one member after another of the body of Christians, so that the suffering be not severe and the cries not heard.”
Even in 2002 it was the same story of Muslims and Christians uniting after the attacks to confront the mysterious nebulous extremism. We see the same calls today for uniting in the face of extremism in Nigeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt.
ONE PLACE that there is less uniting and more marked extermination is in southern Sudan, set to go to the polls on Sunday to vote on secession. South Sudan, which is dominated by Christians and pagans, fought two civil wars to obtain the right to leave Sudan, whose central government has generally been controlled by Muslim Arabs since independence in 1956. Millions died in these savage conflicts but with the poll on January 9 this hitherto minority group may obtain the independence that Gemayel once desired for his Maronites in Lebanon.
It is an autonomy that other Christian groups in the region have suffered heinously for desiring.
Armenians demanded rights from Ottoman Turkey and in 1915 that resulted in a genocide and the their complete ethnic-cleansing from Turkey. The same thing befell the Assyrian Christians in Iraq and Turkey between 1915 and 1932 and the Greeks of Turkey in 1920. Greek Cypriots were cleansed from northern Cyprus in 1974. Recent revelations have brought to light the terrible crimes inflicted on the Serbian Orthodox community in Croatia’s Krajina and in Kosovo at the hands Croatian Catholic and Kosovar Muslim militias.
In our own backyard, attacks on Christians are less common but equally heinous. In Gaza it has become unbearable. One recent article in Haaretz relates the story of one Christian: “When his wife and daughter go out on the street, they are subject to stares and sometimes even verbal abuse; Muslim men yell at them to cover their hair.”
In 2008 a bomb was set off outside the Rosary Sisters school and last year Rami Ayad, a Christian, was kidnapped and murdered.
We tend to take the attacks in stride. A murder here, a bombing there, soon forgotten. We blame extremists because we don’t want to label whole countries intolerant. But all that obscures the reality. The murder of minorities, carried out by the extremists, is integral to the fabric of the region.
It is the region’s tragedy.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Terra Incognita: From beauty to brutalism The rise and decline of architecture in Israel
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=200477
Terra Incognita: From beauty to brutalism
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
12/21/2010 22:39
The rise and decline of architecture in Israel.
Conrad Schick arrived in Jaffa in 1846. Born in the village of Bitz in the old German kingdom of Wurttemberg, his sharp mind brought him to the attention of Christian Fredrich Spittler, a clergyman who had a plan to revive the Holy Land, to bring the gospel to the East, and he needed missionaries. So he settled on the Schick to create a German Protestant foothold under the auspices of St. Chrischona Pilgrims Mission.
It doesn’t seem it was ever Schick’s destiny to convert the East. However his arrival in Jerusalem was to revolutionize the city in another way, through his architectural creations. It is not clear what professional training Schick had in architecture, but he had a keen eye for detail. He taught himself locksmithing, mechanics and watchmaking, and became a qualified amateur archeologist, scholar on the Holy Land and model maker.
Initially he worked out of a bruderhaus, a fraternity, that he rented with other missionaries. Lonely and quiet he tinkered on his clocks while the other brothers worked at soap making and other crafts.
He apparently wrestled with fears that he was becoming too worldly. It seems the death of his patron, Spittler, in 1867 may have freed him from his obligations. Or perhaps his finances ran low. In that year he took on a commission to excavate an area around a tomb that was to become the famed Garden Tomb in east Jerusalem, which some Protestants believe to be the true holy sepulchre.
Schick planned several Jerusalem neighborhoods, among them Mea She’arim, which was constructed in 1874, and the Bukharan Quarter. He designed the Bukharan Quarter to look like a European neighborhood, with wider streets than was then common in Jerusalem. His plans for Mea She’arim called for open spaces and courtyards and the use of the most modern technologies, such as street lights. Not all of his ideas were incorporated, but he left an indelible mark on both neighborhoods.
SCHICK DESIGNED beautiful buildings as well. In 1882 he built a house for himself on Rehov Hanevi’im, an unforgettable gem, which he called Tabor House. He designed Jesushilfe in 1867, a leper hospital in Talbiyeh that was run by a German organization. In the same year he began supervision of the construction of Talitha Kumi, a Christian girl’s school that once stood next to Hamashbir on King George Avenue. The building was considered of such architectural value that when it had to be torn down to make way for modern works, its façade was preserved.
His work on St. Paul’s Anglican Chapel on Rehov Hanevi’im is considered a gem of Victorian “gingerbread” style. He also designed part of the German Deaconess Hospital, which is now the eastern wing of Bikur Cholim. Schick dedicated his life to Jerusalem and died there in 1901.
His architectural gingerbread was followed by Antonio Barluzzi’s often neo-renaissance style pilgrimage churches. It seems that, like Schick’s overall influence in 19th century Jerusalem, no great Catholic building was built in the land of Israel without Barluzzi’s hands having been dipped into the mold. Born in 1884 in Rome, his life did not seem destined for architecture. He obtained a degree in engineering and spent time in the army overseeing archeological excavations. For a while he worked as a builder, rising to director of construction before enlisting once again during World War I. He became a chaplain and somehow got himself torpedoed off the coast of Gaza and ended up in Jerusalem in 1918.
For the next 42 years until his death, he designed and restored some 24 major churches and Christian institutions, from the Church of the Visitation in Ein Kerem to the Church of Beatitudes that overlooks the Sea of Galilee.
Later he wrote: “Whenever possible – as now – it is the duty of all Christians to save these relics and to give them the honor that is due. And in this I do not believe that too much can be done, since no materials or work could be precious enough to be worthy custodians of such holy treasures.”
IF SCHICK devoted his energies to designing original structures and neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and Barluzzi devoted his religious faith to the Church’s attempt to reclaim the holy sites, then Ram Karmi’s achievement has been to translate the socialist pragmatism of Zionist planners into reality. Karmi was born in Jerusalem in 1931, served in the army and studied at the Technion and in London. The son of an important architect, the discipline ran in his veins and it was his expertise.
Like Schick and Barluzzi, his hands reached wide and he grasped many of the great projects of his day, from playing a role in the design of the Knesset, to building that great beast known as the new Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. He was the chief architect of the Construction and Housing Ministry until 1979, built the Supreme Court and has been hired to restore the famed Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv.
In contrast to Barluzzi’s neo-renaissance style that sprang directly from his faith and Schick’s tinkering, Karmi has been devoted to the Brutalist style. There is nothing more brutal than to behold a Karmi building. Endless reams of concrete flow across the landscape coming together in imposing fortress like structures. The Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, one of the most horrid large buildings in the world, is a monument to the fact that the person who designed it probably never envisioned using it himself.
And this is the tragedy of the country’s Brutalist architecture. It escaped the roots from whence it springs, the people, and devotes itself to the stringent socialist belief in the way people “should” live. This is the essence of the planned neighborhoods. Consider the difference between the buildings that Schick hoped to bequeath to his Jewish clients, the courtyards and open spaces, and the ugly decaying tenements the Brutalists have designed for millions of new immigrants. As Paul Barker and Philippa Louis argued in The Freedoms of Suburbia: “It is about the way people wish to live. Why should their wishes be trampled on, in the name of the plan?”
Zionism has put down roots in the Holy Land in the shadow of three great architects, one who loved Jerusalem, one who loved the Church in Rome and one who loved the concrete plan. We would do well to return to a Schick building and ponder what the next 100 years should bring us in terms of freedom, as best symbolized by what we build.
The writer is a PhD researcher at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Terra Incognita: From beauty to brutalism
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
12/21/2010 22:39
The rise and decline of architecture in Israel.
Conrad Schick arrived in Jaffa in 1846. Born in the village of Bitz in the old German kingdom of Wurttemberg, his sharp mind brought him to the attention of Christian Fredrich Spittler, a clergyman who had a plan to revive the Holy Land, to bring the gospel to the East, and he needed missionaries. So he settled on the Schick to create a German Protestant foothold under the auspices of St. Chrischona Pilgrims Mission.
It doesn’t seem it was ever Schick’s destiny to convert the East. However his arrival in Jerusalem was to revolutionize the city in another way, through his architectural creations. It is not clear what professional training Schick had in architecture, but he had a keen eye for detail. He taught himself locksmithing, mechanics and watchmaking, and became a qualified amateur archeologist, scholar on the Holy Land and model maker.
Initially he worked out of a bruderhaus, a fraternity, that he rented with other missionaries. Lonely and quiet he tinkered on his clocks while the other brothers worked at soap making and other crafts.
He apparently wrestled with fears that he was becoming too worldly. It seems the death of his patron, Spittler, in 1867 may have freed him from his obligations. Or perhaps his finances ran low. In that year he took on a commission to excavate an area around a tomb that was to become the famed Garden Tomb in east Jerusalem, which some Protestants believe to be the true holy sepulchre.
Schick planned several Jerusalem neighborhoods, among them Mea She’arim, which was constructed in 1874, and the Bukharan Quarter. He designed the Bukharan Quarter to look like a European neighborhood, with wider streets than was then common in Jerusalem. His plans for Mea She’arim called for open spaces and courtyards and the use of the most modern technologies, such as street lights. Not all of his ideas were incorporated, but he left an indelible mark on both neighborhoods.
SCHICK DESIGNED beautiful buildings as well. In 1882 he built a house for himself on Rehov Hanevi’im, an unforgettable gem, which he called Tabor House. He designed Jesushilfe in 1867, a leper hospital in Talbiyeh that was run by a German organization. In the same year he began supervision of the construction of Talitha Kumi, a Christian girl’s school that once stood next to Hamashbir on King George Avenue. The building was considered of such architectural value that when it had to be torn down to make way for modern works, its façade was preserved.
His work on St. Paul’s Anglican Chapel on Rehov Hanevi’im is considered a gem of Victorian “gingerbread” style. He also designed part of the German Deaconess Hospital, which is now the eastern wing of Bikur Cholim. Schick dedicated his life to Jerusalem and died there in 1901.
His architectural gingerbread was followed by Antonio Barluzzi’s often neo-renaissance style pilgrimage churches. It seems that, like Schick’s overall influence in 19th century Jerusalem, no great Catholic building was built in the land of Israel without Barluzzi’s hands having been dipped into the mold. Born in 1884 in Rome, his life did not seem destined for architecture. He obtained a degree in engineering and spent time in the army overseeing archeological excavations. For a while he worked as a builder, rising to director of construction before enlisting once again during World War I. He became a chaplain and somehow got himself torpedoed off the coast of Gaza and ended up in Jerusalem in 1918.
For the next 42 years until his death, he designed and restored some 24 major churches and Christian institutions, from the Church of the Visitation in Ein Kerem to the Church of Beatitudes that overlooks the Sea of Galilee.
Later he wrote: “Whenever possible – as now – it is the duty of all Christians to save these relics and to give them the honor that is due. And in this I do not believe that too much can be done, since no materials or work could be precious enough to be worthy custodians of such holy treasures.”
IF SCHICK devoted his energies to designing original structures and neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and Barluzzi devoted his religious faith to the Church’s attempt to reclaim the holy sites, then Ram Karmi’s achievement has been to translate the socialist pragmatism of Zionist planners into reality. Karmi was born in Jerusalem in 1931, served in the army and studied at the Technion and in London. The son of an important architect, the discipline ran in his veins and it was his expertise.
Like Schick and Barluzzi, his hands reached wide and he grasped many of the great projects of his day, from playing a role in the design of the Knesset, to building that great beast known as the new Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. He was the chief architect of the Construction and Housing Ministry until 1979, built the Supreme Court and has been hired to restore the famed Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv.
In contrast to Barluzzi’s neo-renaissance style that sprang directly from his faith and Schick’s tinkering, Karmi has been devoted to the Brutalist style. There is nothing more brutal than to behold a Karmi building. Endless reams of concrete flow across the landscape coming together in imposing fortress like structures. The Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, one of the most horrid large buildings in the world, is a monument to the fact that the person who designed it probably never envisioned using it himself.
And this is the tragedy of the country’s Brutalist architecture. It escaped the roots from whence it springs, the people, and devotes itself to the stringent socialist belief in the way people “should” live. This is the essence of the planned neighborhoods. Consider the difference between the buildings that Schick hoped to bequeath to his Jewish clients, the courtyards and open spaces, and the ugly decaying tenements the Brutalists have designed for millions of new immigrants. As Paul Barker and Philippa Louis argued in The Freedoms of Suburbia: “It is about the way people wish to live. Why should their wishes be trampled on, in the name of the plan?”
Zionism has put down roots in the Holy Land in the shadow of three great architects, one who loved Jerusalem, one who loved the Church in Rome and one who loved the concrete plan. We would do well to return to a Schick building and ponder what the next 100 years should bring us in terms of freedom, as best symbolized by what we build.
The writer is a PhD researcher at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
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