Tag: nora connor

Hey, Most Powerful Military in the World

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In just 140 characters at a time the Taliban is talking back to the US Military:

The New York Daily News reported that the account @isafmedia wrote: “How much longer will terrorists put innocent Afghans in harm’s way?”

To which Abdulqahar Balkhi, a “mouthpiece” for the Taliban, rebutted: “I dnt knw. U hve bn pttng them n ‘harm’s way’ fr da pst 10 years. Razd whole vilgs n markts. n stil hv da nrve to tlk bout ‘harm’s way.’”

(h/t Nora Connor) Continue Reading →

After the Referendum:Sudan Negotiates National and Religious Identity in the North

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By Alex Thurston

The secession of South Sudan in July 2011 posed an existential question for (North) Sudan: what will be the political and cultural basis of the nation, which is in some ways a new country itself?

In December 2010, shortly before the referendum on Southern secession, President Omar al Bashir gave his answer:

“We’ll change the Constitution,” he said in a televised speech. “Shariah and Islam will be the main source for the Constitution, Islam the official religion and Arabic the official language.”

Bashir reiterated this promise in October, adding, “Ninety eight percent of the people are Muslims and the new constitution will reflect this.”

Bashir’s call for a consolidation of the state’s Arab-Islamic identity is calculated to appeal to the base of Islamists who brought him to power in 1989, many of whom continue to support the ruling National Congress Party (NCP). But it sits poorly with a number of groups in the new Sudan, including many Muslims. Efforts to use Islam as the basis of political power have a long history in Sudan, but past attempts to impose Bashir’s brand of political Islam have also hit major resistance. The many forces opposed to his regime have their own ideas about the country’s future. Continue Reading →

Painting a State of Suspension

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by Narges Bajoghli

“The Chronicle of Her Innocence” by Bahar Behbahani at NYU Abu Dhabi
19 Washington Square North, New York, NY 10003
September 29, 2011 – January 27, 2012

“I, and only I, am responsible for what I recall and see, not individuals in the past who could not have known what effect they might have on me.” (Edward Said)

Sitting in her airy studio in Brooklyn, hair pulled back in a loose bun, and in comfortable work clothes with paint on her sleeves, Bahar Behbahani excitedly points to this line from Edward Said’s memoir, Out of Place (2000). One of two books sitting on her spotless work desk, Out of Place becomes a natural part of our conversation as we talk about memories, home, childhood, immigration, the Middle East, war, and stereotypes. “The importance of words, symbols, and signifiers to Edward Said really resonates with me,” Behbahani says as she flips through her notebook where she’s copied her favorite passages of his text.  “The way he plays with words, his attention to their meanings, is what I try to do with my paintings.” For the Iranian-born artist, Said’s notions of immigration and memories resonate on a deeply personal level. Continue Reading →

What Are Religious Human Rights?

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Nora Connor:  Water cooler talk around The Revealer offices keeps circling back to human rights these days (yes, we are a rock-and-roll lot). As in, what are they? Who gets to say what they are, and when and where? Are they “real” in themselves, out there in reality somewhere, waiting their turn to step forward, or are they a bit more ephemeral?  And why does human rights language often leave us confused?

A November 15th press release from the New York- and D.C.-based NGO Human Rights First neatly illustrates some of these conundrums while flagging a concrete change in legal human rights discourse. A resolution on combating religious intolerance was adopted by a U.N. committee without previously-favored language emphasizing that states are obligated to adopt and enforce laws against the defamation of religions. Continue Reading →

Teaching FBI Agents Bias

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Nora Connor:  For a time after 9/11, the FBI seemed to stand out among the many government agencies with a hand in the intelligence/counterterrorism game. FBI agents were among the most knowledgeable on Islamic extremism worldwide; FBI agents made important discoveries and arrests in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; FBI agents spoke up forcefully against Bush administration/CIA-approved torture techniques.  Like any massive bureaucracy, though, the FBI is a many-headed hydra. It occupies a central space in the ever-expanding national security industry, and it’s this political and social terrain in which the agency competes for relevance and command over resources. That struggle has seemed to me the best way to make sense of, for example, the FBI’s apparent penchant for spending countless hours and dollars wheedling American Muslims into participating in fictional terrorist plots, in order to then arrest and prosecute them. It would seem a foolish, wasteful and counterproductive approach until one remembers that it supplies the FBI with success stories, headlines and a defense of its budget. Continue Reading →

Liberia’s Devils

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Nora Connor: We’ve been watching PBS’s “Women, War and Peace.” Less a series than a grouping of thematically linked films, it takes women’s experiences, roles and concerns as the starting point for an examination of contemporary war, from on-the-ground experiences of privation and violence to the legal remove of places like the Hague. The project aims to place women “at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security.” This narrative priority infuses the films with a sober tone, insulating them from the creeping adventurism that infects even some of the most politically anti-war visual journalism (although, ironically, the film probably would not have been possible without footage produced in service of exactly that type of adrenaline-fueled glamour enterprise, known in British circles as “bang-bang” journalism). Continue Reading →

Liberia's Devils

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Nora Connor: We’ve been watching PBS’s “Women, War and Peace.” Less a series than a grouping of thematically linked films, it takes women’s experiences, roles and concerns as the starting point for an examination of contemporary war, from on-the-ground experiences of privation and violence to the legal remove of places like the Hague. The project aims to place women “at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security.” This narrative priority infuses the films with a sober tone, insulating them from the creeping adventurism that infects even some of the most politically anti-war visual journalism (although, ironically, the film probably would not have been possible without footage produced in service of exactly that type of adrenaline-fueled glamour enterprise, known in British circles as “bang-bang” journalism). Continue Reading →

How to Make a Zombie

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by Nora Connor

In its October issue, Harper’s* revisits the zombie phenomenon–the Haitian kind, that is, not the George Romero kind.  Which, come to think of it, makes it a bit of a strange Halloween selection. Journalist Hamilton Morris did his reporting pre-earthquake; the social feature most representative of Haiti’s practical difficulties is an excess of burning plastic garbage, a result of dysfunctional or nonexistent collection. It’s as if Harper’s were running a time capsule piece, giving us a brief glimpse of pre-Year Zero Haiti.

Morris’s piece is also an exercise in the policing of genre boundaries within academic and journalistic endeavors. At least since the mid-1980s, when anthropologist/ethnobotanist Wade Davis published The Serpent and the Rainbow, where there are Haitian Zombies, there are drugs. Davis took the social fact of zombification as a given and attempted to identify the chemical element in the sorcerers’ powder that makes the process, understood as magical or supernatural, “scientifically” possible. He may or may not have found it—TTX, a toxin from the organs of puffer fish that causes temporary paralysis—and gained no small amount of notoriety in the meantime. Scientists jumped on his science, anthropologists shredded his anthropology, historians disputed his history.

Davis was accused of violating the ethical standards of a number of disciplines: he paid for his drug samples, did not report the results of tests unfavorable to his preferred conclusions, participated in (enabled by his presence?) the exhuming of a child’s body, and by some lights amplified a racist narrative of Haitians as primitive and superstitious. Continue Reading →

Scenes From an Occupation

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Nora Connor spent the wee hours of Friday morning in Zucotti Park, waiting for Bloomberg to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters.  Below she documents dawn in the park and the breaking news that the eviction had been called off.  Some of the images are dark or hard to see; they all convey the unfolding daily drama of occupation.

6:15 AM Zucotti Park is crowded, almost entirely hemmed in by mobile news trucks and lousy with photographers. The self-cleanup effort continues. It’s clear the pavement has been scrubbed, and the west end of the park is semi-cleared, but there are still a lot of blankets, tarps, sleeping bags and backpacks and more than a few occupiers sleeping. I’m told the consensus plan has been to shift the gear in stages to the areas of the park that are not being cleaned in order to ensure a continuous presence. It doesn’t look like that will happen in time. I’m also hearing of a plan to have a small group of people remain in the park with the rest forming a human circle around it, so I’m expecting arrests and pepper spray as of 7AM. Continue Reading →