Issandr El Amrani
is a writer living
in Cairo [...]

Contact him here

Archives

Recent articles

Egypt has unexpectedly rescinded its support for a lawsuit filed by the US against the European Union...

For Mamdouh, the music that comes out of his creaky radio is one of the few respites from the dense, noisy Cairo traffic...

Demonstrators riot and try to close the U.S. Embassy in a country where protest has been mostly banned for 20 years...

The word "ebullient" seems barely adequate to describe the atmosphere in the austere Cairo courtroom...

Officials at the Arab League's Cairo HQ - an unassuming building in the city's central square that blends modernist and Islamic architecture - wear long faces these days.

News

Regional News

Western News

Global News

Technology

Iraq

US and general

Reading

Shelved

Speaking of hate speech…

The loony Zionist hate brigade over at the New York Daily News has come up with this towering work of bile, bullshit and anti-Arabism to say about Edward Said. It’s perhaps the most disgusting piece of writing I’ve ever read — I’m sure they laughed all the way to the printing press safe in the knowledge that dead men can’t sue. But it’s a good reminder of the kind of sick people in Israel and the US will do anything to fight the work of people like Said who believe in a fair peace between Jews and Arabs.

00:31 | / palestine | link

Edward Said, 1935-2003

Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic and campaigner for Palestinian rights, died this morning in New York after a long fight with pancreatic cancer. He was 67.

I had only seen Said in person a few times and although I frequently didn’t agree with him I admired the resolve he had in defense of a one-state solution for Israel and Palestine. I remember him giving a lecture at Oxford where a women got up and said that by advocating peace with Israelis he was giving up their historical homeland. He was furious and raged against warmongers, saying that the two people had no alternative but to learn how to live together, because the alternative was unthinkable.

It’s an enormous loss for the Palestinian cause, which has few defenders of Said’s stature, as well to the academic world. People who want to read his prolific writing or listen to one of his lectures should turn to The Edward Said Archive.

20:32 | / palestine | link

Unjust war, but…

Michael Walzer, who is probably the greatest living philosopher of war, is interviewed in this fascinating piece. It’s interesting reading just to see how he saw the recent war in light of his book Just and Unjust Wars, but also remains critical of the reluctance of Europeans, and France and Germany in particular, to embrace their responsibilities and adequately fund their militaries. Over the past decade, whenever these countries have complained about US actions, they have been unable to provide credible alternatives (just see the former Yugoslavia.) It’s about time they bite the bullet and, if they want to be equal to the US, be able to act on their own.

Also interesting in this piece is how Walzer (who describes himself as having a “long involvement in Zionist politics in the Jewish diaspora and in Israeli politics too”) sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

There is a Palestinian war to destroy and replace the state of Israel, which is unjust, and a Palestinian war to establish a state alongside Israel, which is just. And there is an Israeli war to defend the state, which is just, and an Israeli war for Greater Israel, which is unjust. When making particular judgements, you always have to ask who is fighting which war, and what means they have adopted, and whether those means are legitimate for these ends, or for any ends. Most of the people attacking Israel or defending it, and most of the people attacking the Palestinians or defending them, don’t even begin to do the necessary work. I can’t do that work here, but I will suggest some of the judgements that I think it leads to Ð most crucially these two: Palestinian terrorism, that is, the deliberate targeting of civilians, should always and everywhere be condemned. And Israeli settlement policy in the occupied territories has been wrong from the very beginning of the occupation. But this second wrongness doesn’t mitigate the first: Palestinian attacks on the occupying army or on paramilitary settler groups are justified Ð at least they are justified whenever there is an Israeli government unwilling to negotiate; but attacks on settler families or schools are terrorist acts, murder exactly. (I want to insist that this is not special pleading: I am old enough to have made similar arguments at the time of the Algerian war: FLN attacks on French soldiers or on OAS militants were justified; putting a bomb in a cafe or a supermarket in the French section of Algiers was murder.) And similarly, Israeli attacks on Hamas or Islamic Jihad fighters are justified; dropping a bomb on an apartment house in Gaza was a criminal act.

Although it’s nice to see a Zionist imply that Palestinian resistance fighters targeting occupation forces or paramilitary settlers are fighting a just war, the way he argues against attacking settlers seems dishonest. Why are attacks on (non-paramilitary) settlers “terrorist acts, murder exactly” whereas Israel dropping a bomb on Gaza is a mere “criminal act”?

I also wonder what Walzer would think about this incredible and relatively little-reported news that the US has “abandoned” the idea of giving the UN a bigger role in the occupation of Iraq.

Instead, the officials said, the United States would widen its effort to enlist other countries to assist the occupation forces in Iraq, which are dominated by the 139,000 United States troops there.

03:19 | / palestine | link