Economic warfare:
The Israeli government took an additional step Wednesday and said the economic warfare is intended to achieve a political goal. A government spokesman, who couldn't be named as a matter of policy, told McClatchy that authorities will continue to ease the blockade but "could not lift the embargo altogether as long as Hamas remains in control" of Gaza.Read more...
How long can the craze last? MBC correspondent Nadia Bilbassy-Charters keeps it alive - and discusses a few new soaps taking Noor's place - on Foreign Policy's Middle East Channel.
Since Noor's inception in 2006, there have been a slew of other Turkish soaps on Arab screens, the latest of which, Asi, is an adaption of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. Its main leading characters were played by two rising stars, Murat Yildirim and Tuba Buyukustun. Both are becoming instant celebrities in the Arab world, with some reports even suggesting that one of them was requested for an audience with a member of the Saudi royalty. The soaps' success lay on several elements: the quality of production, the stories of ordinary people wrapped in glamorous lifestyles, and the easy-to-listen-to Syrian accent in which these soaps are dubbed. The Turkish actors in these shows have become known throughout the Arab world by their translated character names -- whether "Muhanned," "Amir," "Lamis," or "Noor" -- and many viewers don't even know their real Turkish names.
The broader impact of the story is that a simple television production can be utilized as a potent social tool to effect change and influence thinking -- and in the process win a few million hearts and minds. And Turkish soaps are not just about romance, glamour, and secular values wrapped under a Muslim banner. A new soap with more overt political overtones has recently gone on air on MBC (where I am a reporter). Sarkhet Hajar as it is known in Arabic (Cry of a Stone) is the latest Turkish soap causing a frenzy among the Arab viewers. It depicts the daily life of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation, and it looks like a dramatization of a daily news bulletin. In response, blogs and websites have been going wild debating its influence. It was filmed in Turkey, the West Bank, and even inside the al-Aqsa mosque. Although it mainly focuses on the suffering of Palestinian civilians, it also digs deep into the division among the Palestinian factions and talks about taboo issues such as honor killings. It even dares to raise the hitherto unthinkable: a love story between an Israeli Shin Bet officer and a beautiful young Palestinian activist.
God's gift, His violence; God loves violence. Why else would there be so much of it? It's in us. It comes out of us. It is what we do more naturally than we breathe. We wage war. We burn sacrifices. We pillage and tear at the flesh of our brothers. We fill great fields with our stinking dead. And why? To show Him that we've learned from His example. God gives us earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes. He gives us mountains that spew fire onto our heads. Oceans that swallow ships. He gives us nature, and nature is a smiling killer. He gives us disease so that in our death we believe He gave us orifices only so that we could feel our life bleed out of them. He gave us lust and fury and greed and our filthy hearts. So that we could wage violence in His honor. There is no moral order as pure as this storm we've just seen. There is no moral order at all. There is only this - can my violence conquer yours?
Sarah Palin talks foreign policy:I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don't think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.
Except this was news last summer. Since when is criticism of Israel the same thing as "anti-Jewish propaganda" and "Jew-bashing"? Sure, maybe the TV show and film employ antisemitic devices, but this article has highlighted not a one.
Read more...Zahi Khouri writing in Foreign Policy:
The idea of "economic peace" suggests an economic conflict, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is certainly not that. Although economic issues do figure into Palestinian concerns, they are not nearly as important as addressing the rights of Palestinian refugees, terminating Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, and establishing a viable, independent, and sovereign Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital. To suggest that economics are what this is about would be to sideline history and to willfully ignore the reality of Israel's occupation. This conflict is political and it calls for a solution that is political.Read more...
Yesterday, Al Jazeera English aired an extended version of the Made in Palestine documentary, including expanded segments about the effects of Chinese manufacturers and an added segment about Israeli kufiyehs.
Part 1
Part 2
Last week I was able to buy an authentic Palestinian kufiyeh made in the Hirbawi factory, the last remaining mill of its kind in the West Bank. The Jerusalem Fund / Palestine Center has them for sale for those in the DC area.
Made in Palestine, Hebron
Original Hirbawi Shamagh (kufiyeh)
In January, French journalist Benoit Faiveley visited Hebron (al-Khalil, الخليل) and interviewed Mr. Hirbawi, subsequently made into a short documentary about the factory, Keffiyeh - Made in Palestine. Also featured in the film is Mohammed As-Saafin, a student from Ramallah who is interning at the Palestine Center this summer and, ironically enough, sold me my kufiyeh.
If you can't get your hands on one directly, Hirbawi kufiyehs are available to order from The Kufiyeh Project. 
Organized in April by a group of activists concerned with the decline of the Palestinian kufiyeh industry, the Project imports and distributes the kufiyehs in order "to proactively promote the kufiyeh as a symbol of Palestinian identity, resistance, struggle for justice, and solidarity... [and to] support Palestinian industry and make sure that kufiyehs continue to be produced in Palestine." As the documentary and Kufiyeh Project website explains,
Even while the kufiyeh enjoys a surge of popularity around the globe, the family-run company that produces this symbol of the Palestinian national struggle has been slowly grinding to a halt. "It's the Chinese imports," explains Yasser Hirbawi, the 76 year-old factory owner. "In the 70’s we could barely keep up with demand, but by the mid-90’s cheap Chinese scarves started coming in, because of globalisation and Gatt. We were forced to lower our prices and today we are working to a fraction of our capacity because we cannot compete." The factory used to produce more than 1,000 scarves a day, but now makes less than 100 - and struggles to sell those.Al Jazeera English and the AFP file similar stories from Hebron.
The phenomenon lives! Noor coming to a box office near you!
MBC, the Arab world's leading free-to-air TV net, is preparing to make a film out of Turkish sudser "Nour," which became a pop-culture phenomenon when it aired across the Arab world last year.Read more...Project will reunite Turkish thesps Kivanc Tatlitug and Songul Oden, who captured the hearts of Arab auds in their husband-and-wife roles of Muhannad and Nour, respectively.
More on the PA's closing of the West Bank Al Jazeera office. From Marc Lynch:
The PA decision is more troubling than the run of the mill story of Arab regimes hating free media, though, because it comes at a time when the contours of an emerging Palestinian state are being shaped. Salam al-Fayyad's role in the crackdown is particularly disturbing, given the great hopes which the U.S. has placed on him personally. The reflexive hostility to a free media shows yet again why the Palestinian Authority in its current configuration is a poor foundation for building a viable Palestinian state and the need for major political and institutional reforms. What does it say for the hope of building a political system on the basis of the rule of law and political freedoms when its U.S.-backed leadership cavalierly closes down media outlets it doesn't like?And from Brian Whitaker writing in the Guardian:
The Palestinian information ministry adopted the usual line yesterday when it said the ban on al-Jazeera was intended to protect "Palestinian interests", ie those of the Fatah establishment.Read more...In the days when there was only print and terrestrial TV, this idea that the media should be harnessed in the service of "the nation" (as defined by those in power) was fairly easy to maintain. "Licensing" of non-government newspapers and the general culture of deference kept a lid on things within the country, while "undesirable" material from outside could be stopped at the borders.
That began to break down with the arrival of new media that recognised no national boundaries: first satellite television – al-Jazeera, the most popular Arabic channel, started up in 1996 – and then the internet. Old attitudes persist, though. In Jordan, for instance, the main front-page "news" every single day is what the king did yesterday.
On Thursday, Rebiya Kadeer, president of the WUC and essentially the Dalai Lama of the Uyghurs, was interviewed via live shot from Washington during the main newshour on Al Jazeera. The complicated translation process of Arabic-English-Uyghur and back posed a technical nightmare. We almost missed the shot -- if you watched it, Doha wasn't able to take her in Washington until the end of the program rather than at the top, as was scheduled -- and simultaneous translation (ducking out the source audio, in this case, Uyghur, and hearing Arabic instead) was just impossible. What this did mean was that she spoke uninterrupted, in her own tounge, allowing the forcefulness of her delivery to speak louder than the actual content. Mr. Seytoff interpretted, and thanked us kindly for allowing Ms. Kadeer the platform of addressing an audience largely unaware of the Uyghur cause.And in perfect poetic timing as a counterbalance to the last post, this story from the BBC: "Al-Jazeera closed in West Bank" (see reports also from the Guardian, AFP, and AP).
The self-rule body said al-Jazeera promoted a negative view of its work and that the coverage is biased.And from Bloomberg:
It comes a day after a guest on the station accused Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas of collaborating with Israel to have Yasser Arafat killed.
The channel - based in Doha - said it was "stunned" by the Palestinian Authority's decision. But the BBC's Arab Affairs Analyst, Magdi Abdlehadi, says the controversy surrounding al-Jazeera's broadcast reveals more about the crisis within Mr Abbas's group than about the satellite channel's often rocky relationship with Arab states.
The action was taken today because of a story the Qatar- based broadcaster aired that the authority considered false, it said in an e-mailed statement.
“Al-Jazeera is suspended since it dedicates a wide portion of its coverage to incitement against the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization,” the Palestinian administration said, calling the action temporary.
The shutdown followed an interview Al-Jazeera conducted with Farouk al-Qaddumi, in which the longtime PLO official accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas [and, I should note, Mahmoud Dahlan] of collaborating with Israel to kill Yasser Arafat, who died in a French hospital in 2004.
Will the Committee to Protect Some Journalists issue a condemnation of the Abu Mazen-Dahlan gang for closing down AlJazeera offices in the West Bank? I very much doubt that and doubt that this important development will get any Western coverage. If the offices in Gaza were closed down by Hamas, the American TV networks would have interrupted their regular programming to broadcast the news. And the AlJazeera bureau chief in the West Bank is somebody with very moderate political views who is often criticized for being chatty with Israeli officials. But no one can deny his abilities and knowledge.Read more...
"Tensions soar between Israeli UN delegation, Al-Jazeera," Haaretz.
The Arab network's chief UN correspondent, Khaled Dawoud, has accused the Israeli delegation of discriminatory policies and harassment. The Israeli diplomats, for their part, have accused Dawoud of disruptive behavior and of exploiting press conferences and events with Israeli officials as a podium to bash Israel.As'ad AbuKhalil finds Khaled a "fine journalist." While I haven't personally talked to the guy, I hear he presses pretty hard with his questions (that's the diplomatic version, right?), so much so that the French Foreign Minister once replied by insulting Dawoud's eyebrows. Read more...
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