The Truth About Terrorism – Features

MRN News Service – A division of Media Review Network

Written by Yazeed Kamaldien for MRN (2008)
 
 “Living in a country that just came out of a 21-year civil war and that still battles with Darfur gets to you, but the people are amazing.” That’s the standard response to anyone who asks the inevitable: “What was it like?”
 
You know, nobody asks for the hard-knocked life. And that’s not what I expected during a seven-month stint in Sudan to acquire the Arabic tongue, work with aid agencies and bleed words from my fingertips as a freelance journalist.
 
I landed in a boiling Khartoum – this North African country’s capital city – on July 1 2007. I had enrolled for an Arabic language course at the International University of Africa, but should have guessed that facilities would be way less than grand.
 
This so-called university seemed worse off than a poverty-stricken primary school in rural South Africa.
 
I was also introduced to the world of aid agencies; those organisations that aim to Make Things Better in conflict hotspots like Darfur. This took me to various parts of Sudan and offered insight into the strength and resilience of the warm Sudanese citizens. It also brought me face-to-face with the military regime that governs this land with little mercy.
 
These trips took me back to the first time I visited Darfur, in October 2004, to accompany a South African aid agency to deliver aid to displaced persons. During that trip, children’s smiles reached out to me, somewhat in defiance of their miserable fate in a refugee camp near Al Fashir town in Darfur.
 
By the time I returned, my responsibility with one particular aid agency was to photograph and write about relief activities, which exposed me to the depth of need in Sudan.
 
This country has been plagued with conflict for almost as long as I have been alive. Its post-colonial history started in 1956, when England and Egypt handed back the reigns of leadership to the local population.
 

Read More »Mrn exclusive seven month stint in sudan

Viva Palestina – A Lifeline from the USA to Gaza Neturei Karta We were all moved to tears of grief… Read More »A lifeline from the usa to Gaza

Scottish human rights activists announced their intention to organize two trips soon by land and sea to break the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip with the participation of a number of Scottish lawmakers.

At a joint press conference with human rights activist Janet Legget, Dr. Khalil Al-Neiss, the deputy head of the Scottish national party and the coordinator of the anti-siege campaign, said that the campaign organizers intend to organize a land trip from Scotland to Rafah in mid-November, pointing out that six Scottish lawmakers and 34 human rights activists will participate in this journey.

Dr. Neiss added that the organizers of the land trip, which started 50 days ago from outside the Scottish parliament building, will organize another trip by sea to Gaza within two weeks.

The head of the campaign also noted that he and the organizers of this anti-siege campaign will take a tour of the Arab Gulf states to promote the campaign dubbed "Gaza in mind" and convey the suffering of the Gaza people especially at the Rafah crossing.

For her part, Legget stressed the need for continuing to support the Palestinian people and provide a decent life for their children who are deprived from the minimum of their rights.

She also expressed its dismay at the magnitude of the suffering of the Palestinian people at the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza.

Meanwhile, the stranded Free Gaza activists who participated in the sea trip to break the siege appealed Monday to Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to allow them to get back to their countries through the Rafah crossing, pointing out that the restrictions on their freedom of movement make them feel the real suffering of one and a half million Palestinians living the Strip.

In a press conference, the activists stated that the Israeli occupation reluctantly allowed them to sail to Gaza in order to tell the world that it is democratic, confirming that Israel does not know about democracy and its policy is full of lies.

For her part, British activist Lauren Booth asserted that the Egyptian authorities barred them from passing through the Rafah crossing and the Israeli occupation prevented them to travel through the Beit Hanoun crossing, adding that this is a political decision and has nothing to do with legal proceedings or identity papers.

Booth called on the US, the UK, Australia and Netherlands to pressure Egypt to open the Rafah crossing not only for the sake of the activists but also for the Gaza people, reminding the international community of article no. 13 of the human rights universal declaration regarding the freedom of movement.
 
* (Source: Palestine-Information Centre)

Read More »Scottish activists intend to stage two trips to break Isaraels siege on Gaza

"Embers and Ashes:" An intellectual’s exile, struggle and success

 Atef Alshaer, The Electronic Intifada, 30 June 2009

"My homeland, you have spurned me … I shall never return to you … I shall never ever return to you …"

So ends Hisham Sharabi’s compelling autobiography, Embers and Ashes: Memoirs of an Arab Intellectual. Sharabi, a leading Palestinian intellectual who died in 2005, uttered these words to himself on board a plane from Amman, Jordan to the United States in 1949. He studied and taught in the US for the rest of his life, retiring as a professor of history at Georgetown University in 1998. Ably translated from Arabic by Issa J. Boullata, Embers and Ashes is a poignant story of an intellectual’s exile and struggle.

Sharabi transports the reader seamlessly from his early life in Palestine, where he was born in 1927, to his studies at the American University of Beirut, and finally his own American experience and life as a university professor at Georgetown. While it occasionally lacks cohesion, the book is unmistakably personal and insightful.

Sharabi’s departure from Amman was preceded by tumultuous36in Lebanon where he was a prominent activist in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), led by Antun Saadeh. Perhaps more than anyone else, it was Saadeh who influenced Sharabi’s intellectual trajectory. Saadeh’s political line and that of the SSNP was premised on unity between Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. Sharabi depicts Saadeh sympathetically as a man of deep human values: courageous, inspirational and subtly intellectual. But he also shows other aspects of Saadeh’s personality:

"He used to speak of the party as if it were an actual government on the verge of taking power. In his personal behavior and public stance, he acted like a man of state. The party in his view was the only political force that stood up to colonialism and could achieve independence. It was the only force that could liberate Palestine. I think that Saadeh underestimated the depth of sectarian, tribal, and feudal feelings in [Lebanon]" (150-151).

There are two issues regarding Saadeh’s approach to which Sharabi submitted uncritically, and on which he later seems to renege. Firstly, he did not oppose Saadah’s grandiose vision of the Syrian homeland, which shifted from being confined to Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Transjordan, to include Iraq, Kuwait and Cyprus. Secondly, Sharabi embraced Saadah’s view that "the individual was a mere means that society used to achieve its aims; and that society represented a firm and abiding ‘truth,’ whereas individuals fell away like autumn leaves," thereby "ascribing a universality to society and considering society an ultimate ideal in itself" (59-60). However, Sharabi developed a more nuanced and critical view of these matters, particularly in his attribution of a more central and visible role to the individual in society.

Sharabi was also influenced by German philosopher Nicolai Hartmaan, who "considered moral values as justice, courage, love, and friendship to be objective and timeless. For him, those values enjoyed an eternal existence, like Plato’s ideals" (129).

Read More »Embers and ashes an intellectuals exile struggle and success