Get out the Jingo!

McCain’s comparison of Obama knowing Rashid Khalidi to a “neo-Nazi” meeting is disgusting, and I’m sure it’s now getting more attention in the American press than the fallout of the American Special Forces raid on Syria. Save for the New York Times blinkered story, filed from New York, cribbing off the AP’s reporter here in Damascus, about yesterday orchestrated, peaceful but vocal and undeniably angry protest against the raid. For much better reporting, try the BBC’s Paul Wood. 

Juan Cole has a long comment with many useful links on the bigotry of the attacks on Khalidi. As he writes:

McCain’s and Palin’s attacks on Khalidi are frankly racist. He is a distinguished scholar, and the only objectionable thing about him from a rightwing point of view is that he is a Palestinian. There are about 9 million Palestinians in the world (a million or so are Israeli citizens; 3.7 million are stateless and without rights under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza; and 4 million are refugees or exiled in the diaspora; there are about 200,000 Palestinian-Americans, and several million Arab-Americans, many living in swing vote states). Khalidi was not, as the schlock rightwing press charges, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was an adviser at the Madrid peace talks, but would that not have been, like, a good thing?

Scott Horton at Harper’s writes pointedly about the demise of the conservatives at the National Review and their madhouse, Red Scare take on Obama “knowing” Khalidi. 

Of course, Khalidi has been involved in Palestinian causes. McCarthy ought to ask John McCain about that, because McCain and Khalidi appear to have some joint interests, and that fact speaks very well of both of them. Indeed, the McCain–Khalidi connections are more substantial than the phony Obama–Khalidi connections McCarthy gussies up for his article. The Republican party’s congressionally funded international-networking organization, the International Republican Institute–long and ably chaired by John McCain and headed by McCain’s close friend, the capable Lorne Craner–has taken an interest in West Bank matters. IRI funded an ambitious project, called the Palestine Center, that Khalidi helped to support. Khalidi served on the Center’s board of directors. The goal of that project, shared by Khalidi and McCain, was the promotion of civic consciousness and engagement and the development of democratic values in the West Bank. Of course, McCarthy is not interested in looking too closely into the facts, because they would not serve his shrill partisan objectives.

I have a suggestion for Andy McCarthy and his Hyde Park project. If he really digs down deep enough, he will come up with a Hyde Park figure who stood in constant close contact with Barack Obama and who, unlike Ayers and Khalidi, really did influence Obama’s thinking about law, government, and policy. He is to my way of thinking a genuine radical. His name is Richard Posner, and he appears to be the most frequently and positively cited judge and legal academic in… National Review.

And the nutjobs are about to combust.

I remember seeing Khalidi last spring at a protest at Columbia, marking the 5 year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. Like the assembled faculty, he shouted into a megaphone and looked pretty satisfied with himself; he was even wearing aviator sunglasses. It was a bright day in April. The most ridiculous thing about these attacks on Khalidi is how “moderate” (a really unfortunate word) his views on Israel and Palestine really are. What if Norman Finkelstein had been at Chicago and chatted up Obama?

Filed under: America, Media , Israel, McCain, Obama, Palestinians, racism, Rashi Khalidi, US elections

What will shut down

We were standing outside in the increasing cold tonight, the regular break in colloquial class. The sundown adhan, the evening call to prayer, had just gone off, coinciding with seven o’clock and the halfway point in our two hour class. We were standing there, on the roof of the American Cultural Center, where we take our class, when we heard the news that SANA was reporting the government’s decision to shut down the “American School” and the American Cultural Center.

Below and across the street, beyond the high walls and Jurassic Park fencing around the building, there was a party on at the Chinese Embassy. Chinese guest workers have been busy on the building for weeks and this was the new grand opening, it seemed. They’d installed a pool that lit up the embassy’s yard, even though it’s too cold for swimming now. Tables were being served by a team of waiters; everyone looked dressed-up.

When we went downstairs, an hour later, after class to collect any mail that we might not be able to get tomorrow, or the next day, if indeed the cultural center is closed, the shrill voice of a Chinese opera singer rang outside the window. This building might be cleared out tomorrow, or the next day, or maybe the government will just block the street and prevent people from going inside, and meanwhile next door the Chinese were having a party; a woman in a high voice was singing opera that echoed through the diplomatic neighborhood.

We were shooed out of the office by the cultural center’s staff readying for a long night. As we left I heard down the hall, from one office to another: “Where’s the pizza we ordered?”

It’s hard to gauge all of this, the stream of news stories and television coverage. Last night Syria One produced a dramatic montage of a camera panning over a farm house in the dark, the camera’s lamp illuminating scattered possessions, before cutting to close-ups of dead bodies and medical examiners pointing out bullet wounds. The dead bodies at the farm, according to the news here, are a father and his three children, the farm’s guard and his wife, and a fisherman. These were glossed over in today’s New York Times article, in favor of salacious CIA reports of tracking a terrorist smuggler.

The White House’s shrew spokeswoman revealed what some of us are thinking here: that they have done it, they have struck Syria finally before they expire and retire, and now they will sit back and smile, and offer “no comment.”

Question: What is the likelihood of more raids into Syria like the one we saw this weekend?

Perino:  The United States government has not commented on reports about that and I’m not able to here, either.

Q: So we’ve talked about Pakistan, the raids into Pakistan, whether by ground or by air. And there’s been some acknowledgment by U.S. officials that those are happening. We’re now seeing this sort of thing spread to other countries. Can you not — you can’t shed any light on why, when, where, how, whether we’re going to…

Perino: I can’t comment on it at all, no.

Q: Have you heard anything about whether the target was successful, that it hit the target?

Perino: I’m not going to comment in any way on this; I’m not able to comment on that.

Q: You’re not even able to say that there has been some decision taken by the administration that ‘If you guys can’t clean up your act, we will clean it up for you’?

Perino: I’m not going to comment on the reports about this, no, I’m not. Anybody else?

Q: Can you comment on Syria’s protest?

Perino: I’m not going to comment on it at all. This could be a really short briefing.

Q: Has anybody from the White House spoken to anybody from Syria?

Perino: I don’t know. I don’t know.

Q: Let me ask you this one: You have another government making claims. At some point, you either have to confirm or deny the claims they’re making, no?

Perino: Jim, all I can tell you is that I am not able to comment on reports about this reported incident, and I’m not going to do so. You can come up here and try to beat it out of me, but I will not be commenting on this in any way, shape or form today.  Or tomorrow.

Q: What about another agency, nobody — if it comes, it’s going to come from here, and so it’s not going to — nothing is going to come out of this?

Perino: I don’t believe anybody is commenting on this at all.

Q: Dana, why can’t you comment? Is it a reason for national security, or is it political?  I mean, why –

Perino: To give you an answer to that would be commenting in some way on it, and I’m not going to do it.

Q: But, I mean, Dana, you can’t give us anything? I mean, this is a major issue –

Perino: Nothing.

Q: This is a major issue –

Perino: I understand the reports are serious, but it’s not something I’m going to comment on in any way. [VIA]

Meanwhile here in Damascus we read the news and wait. A cab driver yesterday, after two of us told him when asked that yes, we were American, was not confrontational. He cackled a bit, tinging his critiques of toppling Saddam and stealing oil with sarcasm and dark humor.  Like so many people here, he asked us what was wrong with our government. What was Bush doing? Why don’t the American people stop him?

“With Reagan, with Clinton, things happened, okay. But never like this. In Iraq, in Palestine, now here in Abu Kamel… this American government will do anything. It will attack everything.”

Filed under: Syria, Writing , Abu Kamel, American Cultural Center, Damascus, raid, Syria, White House

Zizek on the meltdown

“One of the most striking things about the reaction to the current financial meltdown is that, as one of the participants put it: ‘No one really knows what to do.’ The reason is that expectations are part of the game: how the market reacts to a particular intervention depends not only on how much bankers and traders trust the interventions, but even more on how much they think others will trust them. Keynes compared the stock market to a competition in which the participants have to pick several pretty girls from a hundred photographs: ‘It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.’ We are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’”

If only it was accompanied by a podcast of Zizek reading aloud. From the London Review of Books.

Filed under: Literature, Media , Slavoj Zizek, economic meltdown, recession, depression, global financial crisis, london review of books

Bug spray

This was common practice in Cairo too. Just another evening walk to class.

Filed under: Syria , bug spray, Damascus, sun set, Syria

Steam Machine

The train reversed down the tracks, the engine facing backwards, and passed the collected Swiss tourists, cameras ready. It returned five minutes later, the engine, circa 1896, facing forward this time as it pulled four aged, wooden passenger cars. Here was our ride, a relic of the Hijaz railway, the Zabadani Flyer.

“Why do you ride steam machine on weekend holiday?”

We had been picked up at the Hijaz train station in central Damascus by a bus, which took us to the “steam machine” station someway up the hills toward the Barada River Gorge. The man in the bus told us that he lived at the railway musuem, the steam machine museum, near the station and would utter that description — calling the train the steam machine — maybe forty times during our 2 and half hour ride north up the Gorge — through the remnants of the Barada River — to Ain El Figeh, the source of Damascus’ vaunted water supply.

The tap water is good to drink in the city — it shuts off around midday, since water is scarce and the desert is eating Syria — and Damascenes are proud of their potable public water. It’s nothing like Cairo, where a carton of bottled water was among the weekly purchases at the market down the street.

The Zabadani Flyer is the last running narrow-gauge steam train in Syria, on the famed Hijaz railway tracks that steamed out of Damascus to Medina, the target of so many bombs by Lawrence and his Arabs in revolt.

The Flyer used to push all the way to Zabadani, a mountain resort down 50 kilometers north of Damascus, but stops at Ain El Figeh now, where spring water is visibly scare. A service taxi can get you there in less than half an hour; the relic train takes more than two hours as it chugs along slow enough for families to stand and wave, say hello, and even ask how you are, as they line the tracks which run through suburban Damascus and along a main road that runs up into Wadi Barada.

The stops for tea, and to pump more water in the old steam tank, slow the trip even more, but this is the point: every Friday, departing officially at 7 or 8am — we left around 9:30 — and returning to Damascus by 4pm. Families and tourists are the target audience, and between the Swiss tour group, the Syrian television crew, and the clapping and singing consortium of teenage Syrians, the ride was as advertised.

I ate peanuts and battled a few hours of sleep for the first hour, sitting on a wooden seat, my arm out the window, and occasionally my head, into the morning light and the exhaust of the steam machine.

Filed under: Syria, Writing , Ain el Figeh, Bararda, Damascus, Flyer, Hijaz Railway, Syria, train, Wadi, Zabadani

On a day spent reading “The Damascus Chronicle”

            In the first decade of the twelfth century, less than ten years after the first Crusaders had arrived at the northern border of Syria, the new governor of Damascus set out to destroy a Frankish castle under construction near the Upper Jordan. Zahar al-Din Atabek had been appointed governor two years before by Shams al-Muluk Duqaq, king of Damascus, who was on his death bed, “seized by a prolonged illness, accompanied by digestive disorders.” It was the king’s mother who pleaded with him, as he lost all the water in his body, to name a successor. Zahar al-Din got dangerously sick immediately after assuming power, but recovered and was in good health in the fall of 1105, when he received news that the Franks were building “one of those castles which are described as impregnable.” He quickly set out with his army and surprised the Crusaders at their half-built base, slaying them “to the last man.” His army pillaged the Frankish stores, making away with weapons, animals, supplies, and something else. As Ibn al-Qalanisi wrote from Damascus in his Chronicle, Zahar al-Din “returned to Damascus with their heads,” accompanied by the few Franks taken as prisoners, plus “an immense quantity of booty.” It was Sunday, the 24^th of December. The road to Damascus from the Jordan Valley must have been cold, with long desert nights the further north they rode. The heads would have stayed cold, then, but what of the prisoners? They likely didn’t have blankets. How much did they shiver at night?

            That same month – although it’s unclear if it preceded or followed the victorious march with booty and heads back to Damascus – a comet shot across the sky. Ibn al-Qalanisi thought enough of it to follow his account of the successful siege and slaughter in the Upper Jordan with a bit of star-gazing:

“There appeared in the sky a comet with a tail resembling a rainbow, extending from the east to the centre of the heavens. It had also been seen near the sun in the daytime before it began to appear at night, and it continued for a number of nights and disappeared.”

            The moon is visible in the Old City at night like it was for Ibn al-Qalanisi 900 years ago, but I haven’ seen a shooting star. School kids scream in the street before eight in the morning, they’re on their way to school, and they pick it up again in the early afternoon when they’re back. Miniature garbage trucks that run on some foul diesel or oil creep around the little street corner, barely fitting through, their engines sputtering, sounding worse than a lawnmower. Earlier this week my landlord’s son came over to look at the leaky toilet. He lingered afterwards with a few of us. Someone asked, “Where are you from in Syria, if not Damascus?”

“Well, where do you think?

“Aleppo?”

“No.”

“Homs?”

 “No.”

“Latakia? Hama? Suwayda? Deir az-Zur?”

“No.”

“Mar Musa?”

“No one lives in Mar Musa, only monks. It’s a relic place, also for tourists.”

“Then where are you from?”

“Quneitra.”

            His family left the city, the capital of the Golan Heights, after it fell to the Israelis in 1967.

“Our house was between the hospital and the church.”

            On a visit to Quneitra, possible with an easily obtained government permit that allows a kind of disaster tourism, the hospital and the church are two of the few standing landmarks in a city otherwise leveled by shells and bombs. The family moved to Damascus and into the Old City where they lived for five years in the mid-70s in the small corner house that I now rent with a roommate. Some of the family returns to Quneitra when they can, although it all looks as it did after the war, in ruins. The site of the Crusader castle that Zahar al-Din sacked in 1106 can’t be far away.

 

The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades: Extracted and translated from the chronicle of Ibn Al-Qalanisi, by H.A.R. Gibb, pp. 62 and pp. 71-72, A.H. 497 (5^th October, 1103, to 22^nd September, 1105) and A.H. 499, (13^th September, 1105, to 1^st September, 1106).

Filed under: Literature, Syria, Writing , Crusades, Damascus Chronicle, Ibn al-Qalanisi, old city, Quneitra, Zahar al-Din

Stuck in Latakia, or starting to agree with the line from “In Xanadu”

A pot-bellied Syrian in a brown shirt is calling out tickets for Damascus, but we’ve already lost ours with the company.

“Sham! Ash-Sham! Ash-Sham!”

He has a teenager’s wisp for a moustache, slicked hair and fake leather shoes that curve so much at the toe, ending in a square tip, that they look like witch boots.

We had bought four tickets for a bus scheduled to leave at two-thirty, then proceeded on a servees to Qardaha to see the former president’s tomb with two hours to kill. The lion’s mausoleum beckoned.

By the time we got back to town at two, the bus was filling up. Our tickets were presented and promptly refused. They were for the one-thirty bus, another pot-bellied but stubble-bearded man told us. The transvestite behind the ticket counter had told us two-thirty but sold us one-thirty tickets. We hadn’t taken the time to notice, to decipher that hand-written ticket.

The ensuing hour of arguing, in which we tried and failed to get our money back.

Mustafa, our host in Latakia, was darting purposefully from the untended police station across the cement lot – the bus station – which smelled powerfully of urine, in the hallway outside the office where two men smoked under a portrait of the president, checking foreigners passports, saying hello, and smoking more cigarettes, in rhythm with glasses of tea.

New tickets were finally secured and we sat on a metal bench under a brick roof which was the bus station.  Mustafa told raunchy jokes and some one else chimed with his own, obscene Balkan jokes. Nothing nice about Montenegro.

Peddlers at the rival bus companies barked destinations.

“Homs! Homs! Homs!’

“Haleb! Haleb! Haleb!”

“Ash-Sham! Ash-Sham! Ash-Shaaam!”

Hours earlier, as we tried to buy our bogus tickets, we had tried every single of these companies, standing in little offices that lined the brick overhang, creating the closed space of the station, mostly a parking lot. All tickets to Damascus were sold out, we were told one by one, until buying the doomed set from the office abutting a decaying bust.

Now, hours later, tickets were for sale.

We were treated to a Steven Segal movie on the night ride back to Sham, and stopped at a rest stop long enough to meet a sole French tourist, Arab, who was couch-surfing around Syria. We wished him luck as we returned to our bus and Segal, who was looking badly out of shape in his old and B-movie age.

Filed under: Syria, Writing , bus, Damascus, Latakia, Sham, station, Steven Segal, Syria

First iftar and the start of eid (which has since ended)

The father who had smoked for forty-five years scoffed at this sons for lighting “cigarra” after “cigarra” in rhythm with the after-dinner stream of tea and fruit and coffee and tea and more fruit.

The calls to prayer from the two downtown mosques flanking the balcony north and south interrupted conversation from time to time, but usually we all just spoke over it. The cannons were more disruptive. A few particularly massive blasts shook us from out seats on plastic chairs. Twenty-one times, were were told, would the cannons blast to announce the start of Eid al-Fitr the next morning.

We were in Lattakia.

A family was floating in the sea below the balcony of our holiday apartment the next morning — a “chalet” on the rocky and trash-strewn coast outside the city center. The shoreline led north and west to a large mountain that was Turkey. Alexandretta was tucked into a bay before the mountain but around a point, blcoked from our view and some distance anyway. The family was a fat father clutching his covered wife, her black dress and headscarf soaked in the Mediterranean, and two kids splashing in bathing suits and swimming out to sea.

We were welcomed into the apartment the night before, near the mosques and downtown cannons — our first in town. We were gorged on an iftar feast of salads, kibbeh, grape leaves, fiteer, various rice dishes and plates of meat. A small bowl of lentil and fish soup started it all off. It was ended with all the fruits and stimulants — thick coffee and tea, mixed with plenty of sugar — plus a raw cucumber, which the father insisted each take hearty bites of. It was good for digestion, he said, like the tea. The cucumbers he grew in a village in the hills near Turkey north of the city, where he had retired to a short story-style life of growing apples and vegetables for weeks at a time, returning to the city a few days a month. His wife joined him up in the hills a few days a month.

All the sons live at home and maintained a piety that their brother from Damascus seemed to shun, likely a product of a journalism degree from university and a job with a marketing firm in the capital. All the greetings and kind words persisted all night, our first night in town, through all the helpings of food — the three Americans ate the most, as guests are wont to do, or are at least prodded to do — followed by the tea and coffee and fruit and tea and fruit. And cucumber. And cigarettes.

The father bemoaned the smoke, scolding his sons but not seriously, and embracing as a son the one guest who refused to take a cigarette whenever it was offered, which was often. The father and sons talked to the guests about the economy, using a word — “infitah” — that Sadat used in the Egypt in the 70s; his “open-door” economic policy that preceded peace with Israel and entering America’s orbit. Foreign capital poured into Egypt then as wealth gaps grew, then ballooned.

The father said how you could study in university and have all your credentials, but there would be no work to follow. He pointed directly at one of his sons, the one who had been brining in the stream of coffee and tea for the past hour or so. He had a blood-shot right eye and looked sheepish at his father’s directness.

“Many, many men are in the same position. Here, in the capital, in Aleppo.”

When coffee and fruits and cucumbers finally ended, we were driven to our rented apartment in a taxi on the sea by one of the other sons, who said that the car belonged to his father. We sped through the streets in the small Hyundai well after midnight, neon blue lights glowing inside and five of us crammed in. Anticipating that we wanted to hear some American music, the brother at the wheel opened the glove compartment, revealing a mix CD full of hits. First Ricky Martin, then Enrique Iglesias.

We were stuffed, but not yet on our way to bed. We sat out late our first night above the talking about the family’s hospitality and especially the father, before the early hours moved the conversation to the war and how Dubai might be an “evil paradise.” Eventually we went swimming as the sun was creeping up. The next morning more friends arrived and we were hosted for dinner again, this time the tea and fruit and coffee preceding a much later and lighter feast of mezzes. Afterwards we came back to the apartment on the sea and talked and talked — our rhythm — until eventually we went swimming again, this time even later. When we finally pulled ourselves out of the warm water to a lightening sky, we said hello to a Saudi couple about to take their early morning dip.

Filed under: Syria, Writing , iftar, Latakia

Zenobia

Zenobia (Arabic: زنوبيا‎, 240-after 274) was a Syrian queen who lived in the 3rd century. She was a queen of the Palmyrene Empire and the second wife of King Septimius Odaenathus. Upon his death she became the ruler of the empire. In 269, she conquered Egypt, expelling the Roman prefect, Tenagino Probus, whom she beheaded when he led an attempt to recapture the territory. She then proclaimed herself queen of Egypt. She ruled Egypt until 274, when she was defeated and taken as a hostage to Rome by Aurelian. Zenobia appeared in golden chains in Aurelian’s military triumph parade. Impressed by Zenobia, Aurelian freed her and granted her an elegant villa in Tibur (modern Tivoli, Italy). She became a prominent philosopher, socialite and Roman matron. Prominent Romans are counted as her descendants. (Wiki)

Filed under: Syria , cat, kitten, zenobia

in Lattakia

I’ve started reading William Darymple’s “In Xanadu,” which is a pleasure so far although his travels in the Levant, Bilad ash-Sham, end by the third chapter. Kublai Khan’s summer palace in China is a long way from all this. After leaving Jerusalem where he discovers that the oil burning in the eternal lamps in the Holy Sepulchre has been modernized (it’s no longer olive oil from the Mount of Olives, but sunflower oil from a box, siphoned into spare plastic bottle from the Body Shop in Covent Garden), he travels from Cyprus to Syria. He lands in Lattakia, the primary coastal city here, and opens his chapter with a most unfortunate line, that “Lattakia is a filthy hole… the town smells of dead fish: you can smell it three miles into the Mediterranean.”

Now perhaps much has changed here since the Eighties, but Lattakia does not smell like fish. In fact I think we’ll go each some nice catch for dinner tonight. His description doesn’t fit the current place: a rocky beach in a rented apartment (“chalet”) outside the city center, with Turkey wide in view up the coast, marked by a mountain, Jebel Akra, across the water and behind the remaining points of north Syrian coastline. It’s beautiful here, the water is warm like a tub, and after getting here on Tuesday, the night before the start of eid, we sat with a gracious family on their veranda, breaking fast with piles of salads, rice dishes, and meats, while twenty-one cannons went off between the muezzins’ wails of two neighboring mosques stationed at each end of the street. The cannons signaled the start of the holiday that ends Ramadan.

Filed under: Literature, Syria, Writing , Eid, Lattakia, Syria, William Dalrymple