Xenophilia

I will not reproduce the photos uploaded to a social networking site by Eden Aberjil, a former Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldier depicting her with blind-folded Palestinian prisoners under the title “IDF – the best time of my life.”

The obvious comparison, of course, is with the notorious photos of American soldiers with prisoners held at Abu Ghraib, particularly the ones taken of Lynndie England with Iraqi men in various states of duress and nakedness.

Now, it might be argued that Aberjil’s photos are not of the same degree of egregious acting out  as the ones taken of England and her fellow American soldiers. The  Abu Ghraib photos depict physical and psychological torture. The IDF photos in this case “only” depict detention and blind-folding (though there are plenty of images and video floating around on the net depicting Israeli torture of Palestinians). Read the rest of this entry »

Open Letter to President Obama

Originally Posted: January 7, 2010, Reconstructed from a work of art by Angie Reed Garner, Siren, 2010, mixed media on paper, 10 x 7.5″.

Dear Mr. President,

I am American. My wife and I live in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, where I teach anthropology at Zayed University. There is a large population of Pakistani expatriates living here. They work as laborers on construction projects, as tailors, running laundromats and mom and pop stores, and famously as taxi drivers. Of this last group many are of Pashtun ethnicity, coming from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the North-West Frontier Province [now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ]. As many of these Pashtun taxi drivers are eager to talk to anyone who will listen about the plight of their country, I end up in many en route conversations.

Today my wife and I got into an Arabian Taxi just outside my university and immediately I could tell that the driver was distraught, on the verge of exhaustion or perhaps tears. As I got in he looked at me with wide eyes. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you who have been reading my Xenophilia blog, this is its new home. You will note that nearly all of the older content is missing. This is because the database–the place where the posts and comments are stored–became corrupted and I had neglected to make a back-up. (I had backed up all of the “content” forgetting that this would only archive images and other attachments, not my posts and comments.) This is a loss of course, but also an opportunity to start again and to keep things in perspective. Some of my most recent posts have been about the war in Afghanistan, remote-controlled weapons and the U.S. security state. The loss of a few dozen blog articles doesn’t rate as a matter of concern in this context. I will, however, reconstruct some of the content–well, at least my Open Letter to President Obama–since I consider it to be of continuing relevance. I will also take this as a lesson learned and make sure to back-up the database after every new post and consider moving to an off-line blogging tool. I’ve used these in the past but have not yet found the right one for Windows 7.

Update – 19 August 2010: I have managed to recover about 70% of my content from Google cache, though in some cases the recovered posts are only place holders.

If you fancy yourself a writer, and you are of a certain age, there are a few figures for whom, if you are anything like me, you reserve a certain grudging envy—authors who have achieved too much in the way of recognition and recompense with (apparently!) too little effort. One of these is surely Dave Eggers. First he has the audacity to title his break-out book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)–both title and content of which were too clever by half. Then he goes on to write Zeitoun, a book so good that I not only wish that I had written it, I wish that I could have written it. (Spoiler Alert) Read the rest of this entry »

Terrance Lakin is part of the “Birther” movement which doubts President’s Obama’s constitutional right to be President.

I wrote my dissertation on issues of conscience and refusal in the German military (Masculinity, War, and Refusal: Vicissitudes of German Manhood before and after the Cold War [Cornell University, 2004]. I am also myself a veteran of the United States Army–I served as a nuclear missile operator in Germany in the early 1980s–and was not a conscientious objector. My military experiences, however, had a profound affect on my life, leading me, like many before me, to question much of what I had taken for granted. I became a peace and justice activist shortly after leaving the army, worked seven years for the Coalition for Human Dignity (a civil and human rights group based in Portland and Seattle), and have subsequently done scholarly work on the military, veterans, and militarism. I have the greatest respect for anyone, who as a matter of conscience, defies the war machine and refuses to fight in illegal or immoral wars.

(Photo courtesy of http://secondrain.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html) Read the rest of this entry »

From my balcony in Abu Dhabi I can see the green-lit minarets of seven mosques on a clear evening. When I lived in Lahore, the mosques were less visible, but the unsynchronized calls to prayer made for a haunting and wildly over-lapping cacophony of sound five times each day.

In the photo to the left, taken from our living room, Christmas day, 2008, you can see minarets and the golden dome. The building we live in is mostly occupied by expatriates, many of them American, and as they arrive, new to the country, they have two fairly predictable comments.

First they say, “Oh, you have a dog. Isn’t that uncomfortable living right across the street from a mosque?” Read the rest of this entry »

It is, of course, ancient history that iconic figures of mid-century movements for independence and revolutionary change–Mao, Fidel, Frantz, Camilo, Ho and particularly Che–have long since lost their anchor not only in revolution, but even a broader sense of social justice and become, if anything, images of popular culture roughly equivalent to Elvis, Marilyn and John Lennon. And that’s the best interpretation. I’ve seen young folks both in the U.S. and here in Abu Dhabi adorn their laptops with images of Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx and Che Guevara, all at the same time, as if they were equivalent figures–those despised by “Western liberals” or something of the sort. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday’s National–the English-language daily in Abu Dhabi–carried a fascinating article by Maajid Nawaz, an ex-Islamist and co-founder of Khudi, a Pakistani advocacy group dedicated to promoting democracy and combating extremism in their country.

In Nawaz’s words, the Khudi was founded because “History has shown that bombs and regressive legislation are ineffectual in dealing with extremism. It is accepted that meeting violence with violence is in many occasions counter-productive. Meeting ideas with ideas is the only way forward.” Read the rest of this entry »

A new film by Participant Media, the same folks who produced An Inconvenient Truth, takes on the consequences of a world with 20,000 plus nuclear weapons. The film, Countdown to Zero, is a political documentary that urges popular opposition to nuclear weapons, asking the viewer to imagine a world without them. The website Global Zero (http://www.globalzero.org/) provides an outlet for people to get involved. Read the rest of this entry »

The author’s document Khan’s theft of centrifuge technology (essential in enriching uranium to a concentration which can be weaponized) from the Dutch branch of Urenco–a British, German, Dutch consortium set up to enrich uranium for civilian use and make Europe independent of American suppliers. Read the rest of this entry »