Jeremayakovka

Déjà Lu - Dr. Phyllis Chesler On The Ottawa Honor Killing Trial

With Dr. Chesler's permission, posted below is a translation into French of her recently published remarks on the "honor killing" trial of Hasibullah Sadiqi now underway in Ottawa, Canada. For several years, she has applied her expertise in feminism and psychology to help explicate the intractable problems which Muslim immigration, and Islam generally, pose to liberal Western societies. More on Phyllis Chesler here. As a reference, some of her previous remarks on "Le Massacreur de Montréal" -- subject of the recent film Polytechnique -- are attached at the end (in English).

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Le Massacreur de Montréal et Hasibullah Sadiqi ont en commun un certain genre de père

(paru le 11 mai 2009 sous la rubrique "Chesler Chronicles" sur Pajamas Media) 

Écoutez, je m'entends bien avec un frère et une sœur afghans trentenaires qui me sont très chers. Ce frère préférerait  trancher sa propre main droite au lieu de faire de mal à sa soeur. Ils sont complétement occidentalisés, raffinés, charmants -- et pourtant, de plusieurs façons ils restent des Afghans. Ils sont dévoués à leurs parents, fréquentent souvent leur famille, les petits et les grands, mais aussi ils vont en boîte avec des non-musulmans de leur âge. D'habitude, ils font du souci chaque fois que les musulmans sont critiqués, blâmés, craints -- et pourtant ils sont avant tout citoyens du monde.

Ce frère et sœur très unis ont grandi dans l'Occident depuis qu'ils avaient cinq ans. Hasibullah Sadiqi, qui a assassiné sans pitié sa sœur Khatera et son fiancé, est venu au Canada quand il avait cinq mois. Pourquoi Hasibullah ne s'est-il pas intégré?

D'après une lecture de toutes les couvertages médiatiques, il existe un fait qui domine tous les autres. M. Sadiqi, a été tyrannique, un mari violent: il maltraitait des filles aussi. Cet homme (dont le nom et le sort j'ignore) a été tellement mauvais que sa femme, Nasima Fayez, a dû s'enfuir pour sauver sa peau.

Devant la cour, elle s'est décrite comme quelqu'un "à l'esprit plus ouvert" que son mari.

Mais le monstre à l'esprit-fermé s'acharnait à sa "propriété", à ses enfants. Il ne leur a pas permis de voir leur mère pendant six longues années. La maltraitance paternelle (non-spécifiée) "s'est aggravée". Dans le cas de la pauvre Khatera, son pére l'a poussée au moins une fois à tenter à sa vie et l'a causée finalement de s'enfuir chez sa mère à Vancouver. Fayez a envoyé des billets à ses trois enfants pour qu'ils la rejoignent. Ses deux filles sont venues. Hasibullah ne l'a pas fait. En fait, Hasibullah a essayé d'obliger Khatera de revenir auprès de leur père violent.

On ne peut que spéculer sur pourquoi Hasibullah n'a pas rompu avec son père. Peut-être il le traitait autrement, mieux, parce qu'il était un garçon, pas juste une fille. Peut-être M. Sadiqi l'humiliait et le battait également, l'a asservi. Mais en tout cas il est devenu le modèle masculin de Hasibullah.

Concernant les meurtres d'honneur à Dallas, Texas de Sarah et d'Amina Said, leur frère Islam restait fidèle à son père. Il était d'accord avec lui et persécuté ses deux soeurs au nom de son père et de l'"honneur" de la famille.

Aussi Hasibullah est devenu pour son père l'exécuteur et le vengeur. Il a démenti la version de la réalité de sa mère: "Ne me parle pas de mon papa ainsi." Sa mère a pleuré.

Souvenez-vous, s'il vous plaît, de Marc Lépine qui en 1989 a massacré quatorze étudiantes en ingénerie à l'École Polytechnique de Montréal. Lui aussi avait un pére (dans son cas Algérien) qui était un mari violent. Ce fait, que j'ai trouvé capital à l'époque, a été ignoré par la police et tous ceux qui ont écrit sur ce désastre. La police percevait cela comme un acte isolé d'un fou.

Lépine a été né "Gamile Rodrigue Gharbi" d'un père algérien et musulman et d'une mère franco-canadienne qui autrefois avait été bonne sœur. Le père de Lépine, Liess Gharbi, a brutalisé sa femme et son fils. Probablement il a appris à son fils que les femmes sont des esclaves qui méritent d'être battues même quand elles obéissent. Si elles n'obéissent pas, elles puissent être tuées. Peut-être Gharbi/Lépine a designé les femmes comme bouc émissaire pour les crimes graves de son père.

Si nous permettons aux hommes violents d'élever des enfants, nous récolteront ce même vieux tourbillon. Les filles de tyrans et de maris violents épouseront des hommes violents. Donc elles auront un sort semblable; elles sont "expérimentées", préparées à le faire. Les fils d'hommes violents - fils humiliés par leurs pères - deviendront des hommes violents eux aussi: mari violents et brutals avec les enfants, verbalement et physiquement et peut-être sexuellement.

C'est vrai pour n'importe quelle famille dans le monde. En Occident, nous avons certainement des pères violents. Et pourtant nous n'avons considéré les pères arabes, maghrébins et musulmans ni comme "malades" ni comme "criminels", s'ils battent regulièrement ou s'ils violent leurs femmes ou s'ils tyrannisent cruellement leurs enfants.

D'une certaine façon, ça doit changer. Sinon, rien ne changera.
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(traduit de l'américain par Jeremayakovka)

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From "Psychological Roots of Islamic Rage" (Nancy Kobrin, Ph.D., co-author), The Jewish Press, August 9, 2006; (see also "Open Season on Jewish Women", FrontPage Magazine):

What is important to note is that Gharbi/Lepine blamed women for the considerable crimes of his father, whose culture was Islamic and Algerian.

As Dr. Chesler recounts in her book, The Death of Feminism, in 2001 an angry mob of 300 Algerian men conducted a three-day pogrom against Algerian women in which they tortured, stabbed, mutilated, gang-raped, buried alive and murdered women in Hassi Messaoud.

In Dr. Chesler's 1978 book, About Men, she posited that the paternal abandonment of, and cruelty toward, sons may be a crucial component in mother- and woman-hating. Dr. Nancy Kobrin, in her forthcoming book The Sheik's New Clothers: The Naked Truth About Islamic Suicide Terrorism, suggests that the absolute degradation of Arab and Muslim women by a shame- and honor-society means that sons must perpetually rid themselves of the "contamination" that contact with women represents; and that sons must psychologically abandon their mothers even as they experience abandonment by their mothers. Many such sons are trained to mistrust, police, routinely batter, and sometimes even murder their female relatives.

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Paris Syndrome, Once Removed

Every new generation constitutes a wave of savages who must be civilized by their families, schools, and churches. 

-- "The Vertical Invasion of the Barbarians," from Robert Bork's
Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

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Earlier this month Gates of Vienna posted video footage of the vicious assault of an unsuspecting white man by a mixed-race group of teenage boys on a Paris public bus. Gates also blogged a Figaro interview with the victim [French only], venturing to title it “Paris Syndrome” [with translation]. The man's attempt to explain away the incident and to defuse its media attention recalled to Gates the “Stockholm Syndrome” whereby hostages identify with their keepers. Here are related remarks based on a disturbing experience I had recently on a Montreal public bus.

It was between 10:00 and 11:00 P.M. on a very dark, very cold, but otherwise calm mid-winter Saturday night on the French-speaking, east side of town. The bus was about three-fourths full. As a group, we were tranquil, a bit subdued even, owing to the hour and the cold and our proper manners. At one stop six to eight teenage boys, aged 14-17, boarded in a tight group. Based on their visible traits, I guessed that they (or their parents) had been born in North Africa, in Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia (also known as the Maghreb). My Algerian-born companion confirmed this based on her recognition of their accents.

From start to finish, these boys' presence was a complete nuisance, perhaps a criminal one. They clustered at the front, just behind the driver's seat, verbally one-upping each other with cackles, shouts, and taunts. At one point, they belted out quasi-military chants, to the tune ofI ain't sure, but I been told/Navy wings are made of gold...., in Maghrebi-Jouale (Jouale: Quebec French). I don't dispute that teenage boys the world over have a real need to “strut their stuff,” including in groups and, as appropriate, in public. When I was their age, I too did nearly the same thing with male friends, including light-hearted variations on the same refrain from An Officer and a Gentleman (albeit within a track team's workout discipline).

But it got worse. Some boys accosted each other with pokes and slaps on the head. Most aggravatingly, one pounded on the wheel casing as if it were a drum. Another opened a window to stick his arm and head out (uncovered and in deep-freeze temperature, with no regard whatsoever for nearby passengers). One even separated himself from the group to take a seat, surprisingly capable of embarrassment. Or maybe just fatigue. After the longest 15 minutes in my recent memory, they tumbled, as one, off the bus at some stop.

Had their conduct been criminal? Possibly. If so, they had disturbed the peace and, perhaps, interfered with the driver's safe operation of the bus. I have no problem with letting “boys be boys." What I have a problem with is boys being boys in a way that will never lead them to becoming responsible men. One of these ways is when boys are a nuisance, a disturbance, and an endangerment to public transport – to the vehicle, the operator, the passengers, and of course to themselves.

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May all of the above be a point of departure, not some hand-wringing, irresponsible “conclusion.”

The point of departure is that for a quarter of an hour this Maghrebi mini-mob entirely dominated the environment of the bus, and no one made a peep or lifted a finger to intervene. Remarkably, sadly, the one with the most authority to do so – the driver – did nothing. In Oakland, California I have seen (African-American) drivers of public buses – men and women who know better than to tolerate such behavior – pull over, halt the bus, and announce that they won't budge until disrupting (African-American) teens either stop or get off. Guess what? It works. Oh, and did I say that the Montreal bus driver was white? If you had guessed that, you were right (not necessarily white, and certainly not racist).

As far as I could tell, none of these North African teens were drunk or high. Their deliberate behavior was as self-conscious as it was anti-social. “Root causes” are a total failure of family, school, civic, peer (and, if applicable, mosque or church) pressure on the boys to conduct themselves decently in public. I have to wonder, however, whether there is a solution? Because from the driver and the passengers (myself included) none was forthcoming.

Sitting at arm's length, I kept my eyes on them the whole time, prepared to stand up and encourage others to do so, should they have picked on anyone outside their group. (Half the passengers were middle-aged or older.) Admittedly, I shrank from doing what I believed, still believe, was right: to push past them and demand that the driver assert his authority (as some of his Oakland colleagues do). The fact is, these boys were intimidating. As we saw recently in Paris, anything can happen in such a situation. Or rather, as we saw recently reported in Paris – because this stuff goes on every day in European and North American cities that host North African immigrant populations.

The issue is one of authority, in its abstract sense and its real manifestations. Specifically, it is the failure by everyone concerned to instill, to assert, to abide by authority. That the situation didn't further break down or escalate this time was due to the whimsy of those teens only, not to any demonstrated capacity or virtue on the part of the mostly native-born, mostly-ethnically-white Montrealers. It is a situation of neglect and impotence on many levels that – for lack of unshakable assertions of authority – invites aggravation and aggression with no end in sight.

It's Paris Syndrome, once removed. And it's ongoing in a city near you.

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Related: "Is Paris Praying?"

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(This post has been revised since its first appearance.)

Israel, Heart of the Middle East

Golda Meir's famous precis of what fuels the Arabs' war against Israel is vindicated in this current English-language Muslim news article. As Meir once said, Peace will come when Arabs love their children more than they hate Jews.

But until then....

There are eleven Iraqi children being treated in Israel, sponsored by Save a Child's Heart (SACH) [link provided by JMK, not Islam Online - but, of course], a humanitarian organization founded in Israel in 1996 and supported by Christian charity groups.Some parents still fear the stigma of being treated in Israel. Mustafa, 4, has undergone two heart operations in Israel in six months.

"My only fear, which spoils my joy at my son's escape from death, is the revenge my family can expect when we go back to Iraq," says his mother.

Other parents rule out any possibility of getting help from Israel.

"We've been foes of Israel since before we were born," Shatha, whose two-year-old baby Sara needs surgery for a defective heart valve, told The Times. She has turned down an offer to get her baby treated at the Edith Wolfson medical center in Israel.

"We firmly believe that they are our enemies. You can't change this overnight."

She is now planning to have the operation for little Sara performed in Algeria whose government has agreed to pay for 14 Iraqi children to be treated there rather than be sent to Israel.

Shatha's Kurdish friend has also rejected a similar offer of a free heart surgery for her son Ahmed in Israel.

"Now I can sleep with a clear conscience," she told The Times, requesting anonymity. "I'm able to hold my head up high and not be ashamed by having my son treated in Algeria."

Love In The Time Of Necrophilia

Even if a husband lives ... two hundred fucking years ... he's never going to be able to discover his wife's real nature.

Welcome to "an Atlas lovers art thread" (Thanks, Pamela):

Better in many ways than his iconic turn in Apocalypse Now, but to many Americans less relevant probably, is Brando's tour de force in The Last Tango in Paris. Here's even more Brando, by quality and quantity, than in The Godfather. "This is one of those performances that goes beyond acting into something more confrontational." It goes without saying that the above scene hits harder if you're watching the whole flick.

The Last Tango in Paris is not about sex per se, no matter how famous (or infamous), no matter how startling, how unprecedented those scenes. It's about the infiltrating onset of decay -- the decay of ideas and possibilities, of desires and affections, all sheltering but festering lustfully still in a mind housed agonizingly in the flesh. It's about the decay of that flesh -- flesh livid and vivid, alluring and onerous, porous and odorous, yielding and unyielding. Whether stumbling, agog with helpless wonder and hesitant trust, upon life's fullest vigor, or contemplating with bracing bewilderment and piercing bitterness its incrementally impending exit, The Last Tango in Paris is decay by degrees. It is decay on the installment plan.... Not coincidentally, the film also sifts the diminishing returns of the barbed shards of shattered historical expectations -- revolutionary, colonial, decolonial. (Note well, apart from this clip, a certain earlier monologue, plus two later dialogues.)

The vigor of The Last Tango in Paris is a vigor mortis, its love a love in the time of necrophilia.

The 1950 Nobel Prize Ceremonies - It Just Doesn't Get Any More Pompous Than These Circumstances

Had Ingmar Bergman never made it as a director, he might have ended up making rent through cheesy side work like what you see in the video (below). Solemn, self-important, and self-satisfied as only the face of Old Europe peeking out from behind its (soon to be post)modernist, excessively secular mask could ever be, here's a Swedish newsreel of the penguin-suited, stuffed-shirted ceremonies that bestowed the Nobel Prizes of 1950. Note the massive formal banquet in the 9th and final minute. I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but given the nearness in time of the Nazi era, I must confess a Riefenstahlesque frisson at the sight of those rows of uniformed diners. A lonely thought, perhaps, but one in which I trust I'm not alone....
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Our boy Bill accepts his prize at 6:45. Rumor has it the down home romancier got deep into his cups before making one of the most exhortatory Nobel acceptance speeches ever. Hell, I would too were I being recognized for a lifetime of tackling the great reducing topics of adultery, incest, and lynching ... of broken promises and prison breaks ... of living with the dead and of surviving living ... all enmeshed in a regional American context, glossed with tsunamic linguistic force gleaned from the Judeo-Christian tradition. O Bill, you were our man at the 1950 awards ceremonies: a Marshall Plan of the mind from Mississippi....
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It's hard to watch this short and not start to grasp what Ingmar Bergman had to get away from in order to get to in, say, his first feature, Ode to Joy (1950, left), about the drama behind a classical musician's struggle to rediscover meaning after enormous personal tragedy -- or somewhat later in Through a Glass Darkly (1961, right), with its play-within-a-play and novelist/father-daughter & novelist/father-son subplots. Like certain European writers of that  burgeoning decade (think Albert Camus and Kateb Yacine) Bergman may well have been shouldering, in cinema, the import of Faulkner on the European mind. Of necessity, this would have entailed sidestepping the phenomenon of Faulkner....
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I don't hate the Nobel Prize! I don't hate it! I don't hate it! I don't....
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"The Battle of Algiers" - A Black & White Blueprint For Full-Color Fauxtography

* Updated * (Naomi Ragen emails that Frida Ghitis confirms this post with "How the Media Partnered With Hezbollah: Harvard's Cautionary Report")
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Last night I screened The Battle of Algiers for the first time since last summer's (unfinished) war between Israel and Hezbollah. Gillo Pontecorvo's Academy Award-winning masterpiece is in some ways a great dramatic record of the tragically implacable, anti-colonial war that ravaged Algeria's people and countryside for nearly a decade while leading directly to the downfall of France's Fourth Republic. The definitive English-language history of this 1954-62 conflict, Alistaire Horne's worthwhile A Savage War of Peace, is so titled for good and terrible reason. (Horne, btw, is on record chiding America's forward strategy of toppling Saddam Hussein.)
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Similar to Picasso's Guernica which had become (after the damage was done) lionized as Europe's definitive objet d'art commemorating all victims of fascist aggression, La Battaglia di Algeri became in the succeeding generation something similar: Europe's definitive objet d'art, extolled in the service of (perceived) anti-colonial, (perceived) aspirations.  With still panel and flickering image attempting to refract war's gory horror through prisms of unblinking moral lucidity, it's no surprise that director Gillo Pontecorvo chose to depict his subjects in black & white. Within that, however, are also many shades of gray. Thus we see in The Battle of Algiers artistic expression of necessary aspirations for independence, self-determination, and peaceful coexistence among all peoples. At the same time, it directly inspires the cult of armed revolution which in turn has spawned endless apologias for the exceedingly and unfailingly cruel list of tin-pot genocidal masters -- from Ernesto Guevara to Idi Amin to Pol Pot to Yasser Arafat to Saddam Hussein to Robert Mugabe -- not to mention independent Algeria's road to its own, homegrown, and precarious socialism. Uncritical screenings of this objet d'art , then, screen damage that continues to be done by dictatorial movements, both the aspiring and the realized.
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In terms of the poster art, note how the above image seems handily handspun from otherwise disparate, but equally strident, visual styles of inter-war Social Democratic pacifist Käthe Kollwitz and post-war Marxist-Leninist Huey Newton. Are the politics of The Battle of Algiers marching forward to socialism? Retreating backward from barbarism? Going round and round in the night consumed by fire? Reflecting neoconservative concerns, are its politics somehow now, nearly two generations later, marching backward to barbarism -- which is to say, retreating forward to socialism? The latter-day result is that -- from street agitators to the academiklatura and minds in between -- the Left adores The Battle of Algiers, to the point where it has elevated (that is, reduced) it to cult status. One thing I'll propose is that the West's inability (or refusal) to arrive at clear determinations about its own history -- and the attendant, staggering spiritual uncertainties -- have created an intellectual vacuum which postmodernism now most ponderously, with a kind of diffuse determination, fills.

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In the meantime, a mental note I took during last night's screening. In one of several fauxtography scandals during last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, the New York Times published advertised a demonstrably staged photo-op of the devastation effected by Israel's aerial bombardment of southern (i.e., Hezbollah-headquartered) Beirut (below). By a kind of visual verbatim, the pose in the news image seems not just staged but copied from images of a sequence halfway through the The Battle of Algiers. It's right after colonial police, acting under an exacerbated but concentrated authority, have blown up a building in the Arab casbah, and its residents (to paraphrase Jim Morrison) bring out their dead (above). Real warfare, real damage, real suffering, and real reportage aside, the latter-day result is neither drama nor journalism, but melodrama -- and melojournalism!

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See Michelle Malkin's substantive post for in-depth treatment of this and other recent fauxtography scandals.

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The dead speak: Poor mountain folk, poor students, poor young people -- your enemies of tomorrow will be worse than those of today.
-- Mouloud Feraoun (1913-1962)

Bonus: Leonard Lopate's sensitive, informative interview of U. of Nebraska prof James Le Sueur re Mouloud Feraoun. (Prof. Le Sueur has written a methodical and highly readable introduction to the French-Algerian War, which appears within his introduction to Mouloud Feraoun's Journal 1954-1962.)

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Defining the enemy, at home and abroad, that's our first task.

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Previous: "Hezbollah, Mon Amour" "Lesbollah"

Souad Massi - "Bladi"; with Marc Lavoine - "Paris"

If you haven't yet heard of Souad Massi, you've been missing out. This Algerian- born folk-pop-rock singer, whose star has consistently risen in France, is one of our generation's most beloved francophone cross-cultural chanteuses. Here's an intro to her life and career; here's an interview; here's Souad's official site (in French).
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"Bladi" is her pop-protest antiwar standard. Unlike American "antiwar" singers, Souad comes from a land that throughout the 1990s suffered 200,000 dead (of a total population of merely 30,000,000) in an Islamic-fueled civil war. So I don't grudge her direct call for an end to war, period. Although since the recent 4/11 al-Qaeda bombing in Algiers, I say it's time to write a new and improved version.

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Since "Bladi" is in Arabic and French, Gentle Reader, if you don't understand either you'll just have to take your chances and trust me (who can get by in one of them). Her own introduction: I call for an end to war. It's a completely naive song, but for an artist that's the only way to say that you're against wars, that you're against all human stupidity, against all forms of oppression that can exist. There's definitely something to be said -- for an artist -- about the supreme importance of naivete. For a politician naivete is deadly, but for an artist it's how hope springs eternal.

The chorus:

Earth has become a hell
Fire has burned up the spring
Stop making war
You're making war on children

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That's Souad's style: naive, truly felt, softly delivered. It puts me in the same camp with Amardeep: I don't know Arabic, but after hearing what Souad Massi does with the lanaguage I wouldn't mind learning. From NPR (audio w/ sound clips): In her own small way, she's become a small feminist cult figure for Algerian women.
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A more alluring sample is the hit duet of "Paris" she recorded with French pop star Marc Lavoine. Two-parts sensual and one-part brainy, it's a hymn to rootless cosmopolitans everywhere. I sing with her every chance I get, Marc introduces her. I just might, too.

Marc LAVOINE & Souad MASSI-Paris(live)
Uploaded by hakim93200

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Now you can say you first heard of Souad Massi from Jeremayakovka.