ANTI-BLACKNESS IN THE ARAB WORLD AND THE VIOLENCE THAT DOESN'T GET A HASHTAG

How can we retweet #BlackLivesMatter with one hand while, in many countries in the region, we hold on to Kafala contracts with the other? Or, as British-Sudanese artist Rayan El Nayal phrases it, have the courage to post on Instagram, but not talk to our families about their continued use of the word 3abeed (Arabic for ‘slave,’ used colloquially to refer to black people)?

There’s a valid argument for the irony of our situation, how young Arabs could be ‘virtue signaling’—a far from perfect term itself—to appear woke and progressive on social media, while refusing to face what’s right at home. But there is also a more insidious voice that’s made itself heard, of Arabs trying to claim distance from the whole thing: in the vein of ‘let the US deal with its own problems.’ As if this does not directly affect us, as if Arab anti-blackness, both in the region and its diasporas, are not directly culpable.

“Dear amo, let it be known that the majority of white-Arabs are racist! I know it’s uncomfortable to read this amo. You might not be one of them. But listen! It’s in your homes, your movies, comedy, and your language, even in how your people would refer and regard us as 3abeed or aswad. It was never funny—and now we’re gonna talk about this.” – Remaz Khalaleyal.

From Morocco to Bahrain and every country in between, there’s no shortage of racist epithets normalised into everyday language. Yasmine Ghazzali, 23, a Moroccan graduate student, uses the example of la3b drawa, “which roughly translates to ‘black play’. It’s used when people playing around starts getting rough or hurting each other.”


And prototypically, one line of verse from legendary 10th-century Abbasid poet Al-Mutannabi has made its way into Arab (sub)consciousness as a veritable proverb, used at the drop of a hat. Originally written as part of an attack on Abu al-Misk Kafur, a black Egyptian vizier who did not award Al-Mutannabi the office he desired, the line reads: la tashtary al-3abd illa wal 3asa ma3aho—inn al 3abeed anjas manakeed, which translates into “Never purchase a slave without his stick…slaves are impure from birth.”

Over a millennium later, the use of the literal word for ‘slave’ in reference to blackness is still a part of our vocabulary. And yes, words matter. Language matters. Consider it the Political Correctness Police who ‘can’t take a joke’ or dare to take offence at people being called literal slaves. Because for one, ‘political correctness’ is really not the big bad Western-import wolf that we sometimes like to think it is.

More importantly, however, as should be clear by now, these words don’t exist in a vacuum. And even when they’re not immediately violent, when wielded against black people in the way they so often are, they carry very real threats.

Dani*, an African national in Saudi Arabia (who would rather not specify nationality), tells me the story of standing in line with their mother at a clothing store, when the boy in front of them left the line. “Once we reached the counter, this Saudi woman (the boy’s mother) started yelling at us, saying how disrespectful we are to have cut in line. She kept saying things like ‘wallah ara7alkom anto aslan ma taswoo shyy’ (‘I swear I’ll deport you, you are worth nothing.’)”

“None of the people standing even had the nerve to say something, because deep down, this is what they believe,” Dani continues. “That they are superior. They treat foreigners like they’re parasites. It is off the backs of foreigners that the Gulf has grown so fast, and yet we are still referred as 3abeed like we’re in the middle ages. I’m honestly so tired of the ignorance.”

Dani also tells me how they wish black people they grew up around would have taught anything other than: “don’t reply, you’ll get yourself in trouble,” a more than familiar sentiment in Gulf countries.

Charles*, 20, an African undergraduate student in Qatar who also wanted his nationality unspecified, says he was warned by older black students to watch what he says, and avoid getting on the wrong side of anyone. In his first week in the country, he tells me, two Qatari women called the police on him and two other African friends for walking behind them in a packed mall.

“I guess Karens exist everywhere when you’re black,” he quips. “There’s all the ‘I’ll get you deported’ jokes that people throw around. But you can never be sure as to whether these ‘jokes’ are banter or not, because their words carry power. For real, they know that they can get you deported. Because once it reaches the higher levels, you’re assumed to be guilty from the get-go.”






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India woman speak out on “sex marriages” with wealthy Arabs

Geeta is 19-years-old. She is attending a local university in Varanasi, but she is unmarried and her family is not well off. As a result, she became the victim of what has been described in the country as “sex marriages” with wealthy Arab men, who come to the country on business trips and purchase Indian women to be their wives for a certain period of time.

She recently sat down with Bikyanews.com to discuss her ordeal with who she described as a “Saudi Arabian man” who had paid her family some $2,000 for one month of “services.”

“I couldn’t go through with it after the first week. It was horrible,” she said, asking that her surname remain anonymous.

For her, it began in February, when a man appeared at her house, offered money to her family and then had a “Qazi” – or Muslim cleric in charge of marriages – come to the house to marry the couple. In the contract, she said, there would be an automatic divorce after the man left the country.

“I was taken away to a hotel where he forced me to have sex with him repeatedly for days. It was rape and I didn’t know what to do,” she revealed.

After only a week with the man, forced to remain in the hotel as he went to business meetings, she packed her few belongings and fled, finding refuge at a friend’s house. There, she has remained, refusing to speak to her family and seeing a psychiatrist on a regular basis to help overcome the anguish and struggle she was forced to endure.

“I will never speak to my family after what they did. I was a sex worker and forced to do things against my will. I am shocked and so sad that this happened. I know other girls who are forced into similar things and it is wrong that our police and government do nothing,” she argued.

Women’s rights activists in the country have pointed out that these short term “contract marriages” are illegal in India and supposed to be illegal in Islamic law, but they are increasing across the country. In a recent Telegraph report, Hyderabad is becoming the central location for the marriages, as wealthy Arab businessmen come to the city in search of girls and young women to “service” them for their stay in India.

In a similar case, Inspector Vijay Kumar reported that one man “had paid 100,000 Rupees (around £1,200) to the girl’s aunt Mumtaz Begum, who in turn paid 70,000 Rupees to her parents, 5,000 Rupees to the Qazi, 5,000 Rupees to an Urdu translator and kept 20,000 Rupees herself. The wedding certificate came with a ‘Talaknama’ which fixed the terms of the divorce at the end of the groom’s holiday.

“The next day he came to the house of the victim girl and asked her to participate in sex but she refused. She is a young girl and the groom is older than her father,” Inspector Kumar told The Telegraph.

It is part of an ongoing debate over women’s issues in the country and one that is seeing young girls and women being used by families suffering from poverty. For social workers in the country, from Varanasi to Hyderabad to Mumbai and Delhi, they are seeing a rise in these marriages.

“We are having to deal with women and girls coming to our offices on a regular basis seeking help and we have to keep it silent for fear their families will force them again to go into these situations,” one social worker told Bikyanews.com in Delhi. “We just want the government and police to arrest these men and family members who are forcing their daughters into sex work.” Source

Egyptians protest against sexual violence

STUFF MIDDLE EASTERN GUYS SAY

Just for a laugh!

Real Change

I am the orphan of Gaza. I am the deformed of Iraq. I am the violated of Afghanistan. I am the bombarded of Pakistan. I am the martyr of Uzbekistan. I am the oppressed of Bahrain. I am the catalyst of Tunisia. I am the hope of Egypt. I am the courage of Syria. I am the determination of Yemen. I am the martyr of Libya. I am the solidarity of the Muslim world. I am the Ummah of Muhammad(pbuh). I am the real change.

The brutal truth about Tunisia

By Robert Fisk


The end of the age of dictators in the Arab world? Certainly they are shaking in their boots across the Middle East, the well-heeled sheiks and emirs, and the kings, including one very old one in Saudi Arabia and a young one in Jordan, and presidents – another very old one in Egypt and a young one in Syria – because Tunisia wasn't meant to happen. Food price riots in Algeria, too, and demonstrations against price increases in Amman. Not to mention scores more dead in Tunisia, whose own despot sought refuge in Riyadh – exactly the same city to which a man called Idi Amin once fled.

If it can happen in the holiday destination Tunisia, it can happen anywhere, can't it? It was feted by the West for its "stability" when Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was in charge. The French and the Germans and the Brits, dare we mention this, always praised the dictator for being a "friend" of civilised Europe, keeping a firm hand on all those Islamists.

Tunisians won't forget this little history, even if we would like them to. The Arabs used to say that two-thirds of the entire Tunisian population – seven million out of 10 million, virtually the whole adult population – worked in one way or another for Mr Ben Ali's secret police. They must have been on the streets too, then, protesting at the man we loved until last week. But don't get too excited. Yes, Tunisian youths have used the internet to rally each other – in Algeria, too – and the demographic explosion of youth (born in the Eighties and Nineties with no jobs to go to after university) is on the streets. But the "unity" government is to be formed by Mohamed Ghannouchi, a satrap of Mr Ben Ali's for almost 20 years, a safe pair of hands who will have our interests – rather than his people's interests – at heart.

For I fear this is going to be the same old story. Yes, we would like a democracy in Tunisia – but not too much democracy. Remember how we wanted Algeria to have a democracy back in the early Nineties?

Then when it looked like the Islamists might win the second round of voting, we supported its military-backed government in suspending elections and crushing the Islamists and initiating a civil war in which 150,000 died.

No, in the Arab world, we want law and order and stability. Even in Hosni Mubarak's corrupt and corrupted Egypt, that's what we want. And we will get it.

The truth, of course, is that the Arab world is so dysfunctional, sclerotic, corrupt, humiliated and ruthless – and remember that Mr Ben Ali was calling Tunisian protesters "terrorists" only last week – and so totally incapable of any social or political progress, that the chances of a series of working democracies emerging from the chaos of the Middle East stand at around zero per cent.

The job of the Arab potentates will be what it has always been – to "manage" their people, to control them, to keep the lid on, to love the West and to hate Iran.

Indeed, what was Hillary Clinton doing last week as Tunisia burned? She was telling the corrupted princes of the Gulf that their job was to support sanctions against Iran, to confront the Islamic republic, to prepare for another strike against a Muslim state after the two catastrophes the United States and the UK have already inflicted in the region.

The Muslim world – at least, that bit of it between India and the Mediterranean – is a more than sorry mess. Iraq has a sort-of-government that is now a satrap of Iran, Hamid Karzai is no more than the mayor of Kabul, Pakistan stands on the edge of endless disaster, Egypt has just emerged from another fake election.

And Lebanon... Well, poor old Lebanon hasn't even got a government. Southern Sudan – if the elections are fair – might be a tiny candle, but don't bet on it.

It's the same old problem for us in the West. We mouth the word "democracy" and we are all for fair elections – providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to vote for.

In Algeria 20 years ago, they didn't. In "Palestine" they didn't. And in Lebanon, because of the so-called Doha accord, they didn't. So we sanction them, threaten them and warn them about Iran and expect them to keep their mouths shut when Israel steals more Palestinian land for its colonies on the West Bank.

There was a fearful irony that the police theft of an ex-student's fruit produce – and his suicide in Tunis – should have started all this off, not least because Mr Ben Ali made a failed attempt to gather public support by visiting the dying youth in hospital.

For years, this wretched man had been talking about a "slow liberalising" of his country. But all dictators know they are in greatest danger when they start freeing their entrapped countrymen from their chains.

And the Arabs behaved accordingly. No sooner had Ben Ali flown off into exile than Arab newspapers which have been stroking his fur and polishing his shoes and receiving his money for so many years were vilifying the man. "Misrule", "corruption", "authoritarian reign", "a total lack of human rights", their journalists are saying now. Rarely have the words of the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran sounded so painfully accurate: "Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again." Mohamed Ghannouchi, perhaps?

Of course, everyone is lowering their prices now – or promising to. Cooking oil and bread are the staple of the masses. So prices will come down in Tunisia and Algeria and Egypt. But why should they be so high in the first place?

Algeria should be as rich as Saudi Arabia – it has the oil and gas – but it has one of the worst unemployment rates in the Middle East, no social security, no pensions, nothing for its people because its generals have salted their country's wealth away in Switzerland.

And police brutality. The torture chambers will keep going. We will maintain our good relations with the dictators. We will continue to arm their armies and tell them to seek peace with Israel.

And they will do what we want. Ben Ali has fled. The search is now on for a more pliable dictator in Tunisia – a "benevolent strongman" as the news agencies like to call these ghastly men.

And the shooting will go on – as it did yesterday in Tunisia – until "stability" has been restored.

No, on balance, I don't think the age of the Arab dictators is over. We will see to that.

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Intermarriage worries Gulf states

Marriage between relatives is seen as distasteful within some cultures, but it has been a common feature in many others for thousands of years.

However, growing evidence has shown that children born to parents from the same extended family face a higher risk of developing a range of health problems.

Research from 2008 shows that marriage between cousins in the US, Europe, Russia and Australia is less than one per cent.

In countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, more than half of the population marry a spouse who is considered a relative.

Some of these countries and a number of African and Asian countries have the world's highest rates of birth defects - up to 69 cases in every thousand people.

Some experts say the real figure is much higher. Like its Gulf neighbours, Qatar has now made pre-marital medical tests mandatory.

Khalid bin Jabor al-Thani, the chairman of Qatar's cancer society and former deputy director of its national health authority, told Al Jazeera that inter-family marriages are tolerated because they are the product of "tribal traditions".

"The tolerance comes from people who used to live in very remote areas and tribes would always want to keep their blood within the family and not go outside," he said.

"In Islamic religion it is always advisable to go outside the family. But since this has [been happening] for such a long time ago, and has been carried forward, it [is] one of the issues that people overlook."

Al Jazeera's Charles Stratford reports from Doha.

Israeli Arabs victims of legal double standards

In 1948, Israel's founding fathers issued a manifesto declaring among other things that the new state would uphold the equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race or creed.

Six decades later that is not a principal that many of Israel's Arab citizens - who make up about 20 per cent of the population - believe applies to them, especially in matters involving law and order.

In his film, One Law for All?, filmmaker Tony Stark investigates whether Israeli Arabs are regularly the victims of legal double standards.

On August 4, 2005, a Jewish soldier in the Israeli army boarded a bus on its way to the northern Arab town of Shafr'Amr.

It was just two weeks before Israel withdrew from Gaza and 19-year-old Eden Natan-Zada strongly opposed the plan.

As the bus entered the town, he began shooting passengers with his M16 rifle.

"I was looking through a window when I suddenly heard shooting. I looked and saw someone shoot the driver. I hid under the seats. As I lay flat, the firing continued, and I saw someone's finger fall to the floor. That's when I realised he was on a mission to kill everyone," says Ha'El al-Janhawe, a passenger on the bus.

"I didn't move a millimetre. I put my hands over my eyes and prayed and just waited for the bullets to hit my back."

During a pause in the shooting, al-Janhawe decided to try to prevent further bloodshed.

"I stood up and he had a chance to kill me. But, thank God, it seems that his magazine was empty. I pushed him near to the back of the bus. I got him onto his back and was on top of him - trying to hold the gun and stop him pulling the trigger. It was very hot and I burnt my hand."

Al-Janhawe pulled the gun away from the soldier and got off the bus. By then four people, including the bus driver, had been killed and 12 others were wounded.

As news of the shootings spread, an angry crowd gathered. Natan-Zada was still on the bus - now being held by several police officers.

"The bus was in chaos. People were falling over each other. Outside, people were screaming, climbing up trying to get on the bus. They didn't know if the killer was still alive. No one knew what was going on," says Amir Sabbah who witnessed it all.

People stormed onto the bus and Natan-Zada was attacked and killed.

"It wasn't a normal reaction. Someone had come to kill people in their hometown and they wanted to protect themselves and their town. We felt a kind of anger that can't be described," Sabbah explains.

Seven local men are now being tried for his attempted murder and a further five for lesser offences.

The decision to charge anyone caught up in the events of that day has hit a very raw nerve among Arab Israelis. Sadness at the waste of life is now mingled with anger at the prosecutions.

"This has been a racial decision at the highest level. It's obvious that the Israeli judiciary, security forces and police have two approaches: one for Arabs, another for Jews," says Morad Haddad who is part of a support committee for the 12 accused.

The court case has brought into the open a simmering distrust of the forces of law and order among Israel's 1.5 million Arab citizens.

Protests have been held outside the court in Haifa where the trial is taking place. The claim is that Jews who kill Arabs in Israel are treated in a very different way to the Arabs now being prosecuted for killing Natan-Zada.

It is a view held by some of the most senior members of the Arab community.

"Definitely there is a double standard and discrimination in applying the law towards Jews and Arabs," says Ahmad Tibi, the deputy speaker of the Knesset.

Jafar Farah, a lawyer who runs a human rights group in Haifa, has been investigating incidents in which Jews kill Arabs and says that there have been 44 such killings since 2000 that raise very worrying questions.

"The case of Imad Hamdoun, for example. He was killed in 2002. He was on his bicycle, a Jewish civilian was shooting at the bicycle. He died. The family was compensated by the police but no conviction against the Jewish civilian that shot the bicycle.

"In the 44 cases we know for sure that the victims have not been involved in violence against state authorities or against Jewish civilians," says Farah.

Israeli law is meant to apply to everyone equally. But Farah is particularly critical of the way police investigate cases where Jews kill Arab citizens in Israel.

Some Israeli Jews working inside the legal system echo these concerns.

Michael Sfard is a lawyer who acts for a number of Israeli and Palestinian human rights organisations.

"I think institutional racism is evolving in my country and I am embarrassed and very sad to say that," he says.

"The Israeli police, Israeli police investigators, they all are extremely professional and extremely motivated when it comes to catching Palestinians. They are much less motivated, much less rigorous when it has to do with Jews that operate on ideological grounds and their victims are Palestinians.

"The danger is that the more discrimination will infiltrate our system, the less our system will be legitimate in the eyes of the people. That's where we are heading."

Just how far away Israel's Arab citizens are from receiving equal treatment is shown, some Arabs believe, by the police examination of Natan-Zada's attack.

The police say he was a lone gunman, who acted without help, but that is not the view of Maher Talami, a lawyer representing one of those charged with taking part in his killing.

Talami is conducting his own investigation into Natan-Zada with the help of a former Israeli secret service agent.

The investigation has taken two years and has convinced him that the police overlooked evidence indicating that the attack was a pre-planned conspiracy.

"The police investigation was reckless. They didn't investigate this case seriously. They just wanted to close this file immediately because it kind of embarrasses the state of Israel because having a soldier who is a terrorist is really embarrassing for the country," Talami says.

He says the evidence of police failings begin at the bus station in Haifa where Natan-Zada boarded the bus to Shafr'Amr.

Just two weeks before the attack, Natan-Zada was spotted acting suspiciously at the same bus station.

"He was seen by security guards in the central bus station and he was in his army uniform; he had his gun with him and he was looking around in the area where Arabs get the buses to go to the villages and towns. So that made the security guard really suspicious because he had no reason to be there," Talami explains.

The bus station guard says he spoke with Natan-Zada and later recognised him when his picture was published in the press.

Talami says he also discovered that Natan-Zada had travelled to Shafr'Amr on the same bus the day before the attack and that this is further evidence that the attack was pre-planned.

When the bus reached the end of its journey, the bus driver found Natan-Zada asleep.

"The bus driver asked him what are you doing here and he said 'oh I fell asleep'. So he gave him some water. The next day he got on the same bus, the same line at the same time and he shot first the bus driver in the head and then he started shooting at all the passengers," Talami says.

Talami also says that there is evidence that Natan-Zada had help in planning his attack.

"Three eye witnesses at least saw a suspicious car during the time of the attack in Shafr'Amr. It had three people in it. They describe them as religious Jewish people and they had the orange ribbon in the car.

"Now this ribbon used to represent the struggle of the settlers against disengagement in Gaza. The car was waiting and when they saw a police car coming they just swiftly raced out of the town."

According to Talami, the strongest evidence that Natan-Zada did not act alone was found in his mobile phone records. The lawyer tracked down who he had been speaking to on the day before the attack.

"We found out we're talking about really dangerous criminals. They are all Jews from settlements, some of them got indicted before for doing terrorist acts. So what was said in these conversations we don't know. But he didn't call for example his family or friends. He called people from Tapuah - which is a really Jewish extreme settlement in the West Bank."

Talami is now calling for the police to re-open their investigation into Natan-Zada.

One in five Israeli citizens is Arab and if a growing number of them continue to feel alienated from the forces of law and order, the legitimacy of the country's democracy will eventually be undermined.

"We think that the Jewish community have to share responsibility. We need to see the president of the state of Israel and the leaders of the police forces, all of them standing as one voice and say that we will not allow ongoing violence against the Arab citizens," says human rights lawyer Jafar Farah.

"You have to know that everybody will be equal in front of the law and if people will be criminals and they are Jews or Arabs, they will face the same treatment in front of the law."

Israel's Arabs right to call for a strike

The announcement that the Israeli Arab leadership is calling for a general strike next month demonstrates the further deterioration of relations between the authorities and the beleaguered Arab citizens of the state. The 1.3 million Arabs living within Israel's borders have never had the most cordial of relationships with the country's rulers, and in the wake of the hard-right coalition's election victory the gulf has grown even wider – culminating in the symbolic protest set for 1 October.

The date chosen is no accident: it marks nine years to the day since 13 Israeli Arab demonstrators were shot dead by Israeli police during a previous general strike – a set of killings that left societal scars that remain unhealed almost a decade later. The government's latest set of proposals – such as the plan to ban the word "nakba" from school textbooks, and to link schools' funding to their success rate in sending students to enlist in the army – have rubbed salt into wounds that continue to fester throughout the Arab community, culminating in the decision to down tools and speak out against their treatment.

The sense of disenfranchisement felt by the Israeli Arab minority is, according to academic Bernard Avishai, a problem too serious to be swept under the carpet by Israel's leaders. Action must be taken, he urged, "to prevent a terrible intifada", fearing a mass explosion of tension that will dwarf anything that's gone on "in Gaza and the West Bank".

"Israeli Arabs live in townships on the edge of Israeli cities; their intellectual elite go to Israeli universities and assimilate, while those not in those circles join drug gangs and jihadist cults." He said that the Israeli Arab community expects to be treated as "full citizens of this country, nothing less" and unless this happens, tensions will spill over onto the streets.

The anti-Arab bias of senior Israeli politicians and military figures is well documented, and causes far more concern to the Israeli Arab community than the equally insidious behaviour of radical settler leaders and their cohorts. Unsavoury as the likes of Baruch Marzel and his merry men may be, their actions can in part be dismissed as the rantings and ravings of extremists living on the fringes of society. However, when similarly racist and discriminatory calls to arms emanate within mainstream Israeli society – from the upper echelons of power all the way down to street level – it is little wonder the Israeli Arab leadership take the situation so seriously.

Last month, foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman took aim at Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset and leader of the Arab nationalist party in Israel. "Our central problem is not the Palestinians," declared Lieberman, "but Ahmed Tibi and his ilk: they are more dangerous than Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad combined." Such incendiary talk is nothing new for Lieberman; in November 2006 he ratcheted up tension by comparing Israeli Arab nationalists with Hitler and his henchmen: "The heads of the Nazi regime, along with their collaborators, were executed. I hope this will be the fate of the collaborators in the Knesset."

His proclamations are, quite rightly, denounced by those who recognise the menace latent in his words. "When the foreign minister says that, ordinary Israelis understand that he is calling for me to be killed as a terrorist," said Tibi in relation to Lieberman's recent outburst. "It is the most dangerous incitement." Politicians lead by example, and Lieberman knows full well the impact the statements he makes can have on the man on the Israeli street.

Israeli Arabs have good reason to believe that they will never be fully accepted by Israeli society, despite assertions to the contrary on the part of more conciliatory and diplomatic members of Israeli officialdom. The proof is not simply the unabashed racism of the likes of Lieberman and Aharonovitch, nor the paucity of state provision of basic services in Arab towns and cities compared with the funding given to their Jewish counterparts.

Complete article and discussion here.