Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight

The Taqwacores is a novel about a strange community, to put it mildly. To even try and come up with a single word or a sentence that could capture even the gist of the crew of Muslim punk artists is mindwrecking.

The title, “Taqwacores”, combines taqwa, the Arabic word for “piety,” with “hardcore,” used to describe many genres of angry Western music (and also adult movies). So the protagonist Yusuf Ali experiences “taqwacores” as deep Muslim piety mixed with angry hardcore music (played in praise of God), and mixed with a dose of sex (both soft and hardcore). When I say mixed, I mean piety/music/sex often coincide. The story begins when Yusuf, who comes from an average Muslim family of Pakistani origin, lodges in with a group of Muslim youth in Buffalo.  There stops mundaneity. Every trace of the average, the regular, the orderly vanishes. There is not a moment Yusuf’s mind is not twisted and bent. What fascinates him the most is perhaps the burqa-wearing feminist guitar player who leads men in prayer and delivers sermons. A lot of stuff for some Muslims to be angry over. But Muhammad Knight, speaking through his characters, arguing back and forth through their own dialogues, seems to suggest, there are many things Muslims should be angry about such as Osama bin Laden and the likes of him, and their picture of Islam that they try to palm off on other people. The punk crew can rage against things such as the treatment of Muslims in the post 9-11 America as well as the moral-police in a Muslim country who let dozens of women burn inside a building because they would not let streetwalkers see women without traditional hejab (head-cover etc). 

Muhammad Knight was born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York and converted to Islam as a teenager. He studied at a mosque in Pakistan but became disillusioned with Islam after learning about the sectarian battles after the death of Muhammad. He said he wrote The Taqwacores to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only God. In the novel, Muhammad Knight often makes references to various Sufi poets who were rebels of their times. One of the characters even claims boldly that the Islamic messenger Muhammad was the hard core punk artist of his time. The small community sing in praise of his anti-establishment actions, his smashing of false idols etc. The book paints the Muslim punk scene with such flavor I am not at all surprised some readers contacted the author and asked where and when were the forthcoming concerts. (Note: Mark Levine wrote a book about the current rock and punk scene in the Middle East, entitled Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam.)

One can say a lot about why and how disturbing and innovative, and yet how old-fashioned the book can appear in its focus on identity crises, a juvenile ending in which the narrator leaves the practice of Islam while “remaining a human being.” At the surface, the novel seems to be about diversity of Islamic practice in the US and a dramatization of some conceptual struggles within the faith, the novel is dully one-sided in its preference of juvenile (rather than real hardcore) rebellion and dismissal of all other types of Muslims.  

One thing that strikes me is the way a community is described. We conceive of community as a gathering of people who have a common ground, a common essence perhaps. Community is often based on myth, be it of religious or secular nature. The motley crew of The Taqwacores indeed have something in common, their love of God. Yet, they are both religious and absolutely against religion. There is nothing they more respect and disrespect as Islam. They absolutely love it, and yet any “ordinary” Muslim would say they disrespect every single aspect of Islam, except perhaps devotion to God himself. To them, to maintain a dose of disrespect to religion is the best way to avoid what Islam is against, the worship of anything but God. They try to demythologize the myth of Islamic community and at the same time uphold it. Their community is not a single thing connected to for instance body, fatherland, nation, leader, language. Any such community, to them, loses the essence of what J-L. Nancy called being-in-common, and the with-together. Even though they believe in God, their “in-common”, their being-in-common does not amount to a substance that absorbs everything. Rather what they share is a strong sense of finitude and a lack of substantial identity, ideal or empirical such. They are inifinitely aware of their finitude, of their lack of infinite identity in the face of the God they worship through they punk rituals (which are not even real rituals because they change from day to day). The interesting thing is that they are not really kids with shattered identities, simply alienated, and all that jazz. They are quite certain in their persuasions and do not hold back in their extreme need to express their positions, spiritual or political. They expose themselves totally, in the true sense of the word: they pose themselves as open to others in the deepest intimacy of their own being. This seems to me what makes their peculiar community, a community that is not society they react against. Community but not society.

In addition, I will add some words from an American convert, Dawud Khuluq, who has more insight into the “taqwacore” phenomenon:

There wasn’t really a genre of “Muslim punk/hardcore” before The Taqwacores came out, which is one of the problems with this particular phenomenon. That book has a lot of elements that are lauded within the story that I find reprehensible that I found reprehensible about the punk and hardcore scenes even before I converted to Islam. Which is why I was vegan straight edge and held an affinity for the Hardline Movement (which was a militant vegan deep ecology ideology). Many members of Hardline converted to Islam and it was through their writings and their music that I came to be interested in Islam.

So in a sense, you could trace the true origins of Muslim punk/hardcore not to the fictional story The Taqwacores that all these newjacks with little actual allegiance and regard for Islam, but to bands like Vegan Reich and Racetraitor. Vegan Reich, in fact, originated the Hardline Movement and was pretty much responsible for the vegan straight edge scene in the hardcore/punk world spawning many bands and vegan and straight edge people in their wake. Hardline was basically a movement with an ideology that adhered to what they called the “one ethic” that all life is sacred and has the inalienable right to its existence. The last Vegan Reich EP was titled “Jihad” and had Surah al-Zilzalah in Arabic and English on the back cover. Racetraitor had Muslim and Bahai members in the band, two of the guys were Iranian-Americans. They actually have some ayat of the Qur’an being recited in Arabic in the background of one of their songs… which is a very grindcore-ish metal sound. They were also vegan straight edge and some members were in the Hardline Movement. You could even trace things back to a side band of the Vegan Reich guys called Captive Nation Rising that was more of a reggae/punk band that includes references to Islam and other religions in its art, liner note essay, and lyrics. The Hardline Movement eventually morphed out of being an exclusively hardcore/punk phenomenon and became an Islamic organization with a definite Sufi/Irfani and Shi’i flavor.

That’s where I’m coming from, and to me the whole book and phenomenon is an insult to all of my friends who come from that background and actually precede by a number of years. I say this primarily because anyone that takes the tenants of the faith seriously and practices it according to what the Qur’an says regarding a number of issues (such as abstaining alcohol, extra-marital sex, and drugs, and actually keeping the prayers regularly) are depicted in a decidedly bad light in The Taqwacores. Proto-facist shaved bald Muslim punk bands that are supposed to be at once reminiscent of Wahhabis and Nazi skinheads; and the straight edge guys like Umar, who is a total a-hole until the last chapter of the book. The people who take Islam seriously and practice the religion earnestly are made the villians; while the characters that regularly break with the tenants of Islam are made out to be the heroes. I also find it ridiculous that they guy has his characters wear Israeli flag stars of David as some sort of vacuous rebellion akin to what some early punks in the 70s did with the swastika… which was a stupid attempt at rebellion, and one that would be met with violence in almost any punk/hardcore scene in this day and age because Nazis are not tolerated in those scenes. They’ve been driven out and have had to create their own Nazi scenes. A band like Screwdriver (a Nazi skinhead band) could never get on the same bill as Agnostic Front or Madball.

Note:  The Taqwacores is coming out as a film. Read more at Zabiha News. The picture below taken from this site.

 

“Sarajevo Rose / War Rhymes” by Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi

Background: On 1 March, Bosnians celebrated something of an Independence Day. I say something because it still does not feel like there is an independent Bosnia, rather a creature with a couple of heads knocking each other unconscious from time to time. I am speaking of course of the head called the Federation in which all constitutive peoples are legitimate citizens. The other head is so-called Serbian republic stretching from the North and deep down almost to Sarajevo. It is very much ethnically cleansed. I should know because I come from its largest city, Banja Luka. The other day, the American representatives came visiting Bosnia,but instead of respecting the international view that Bosnia is sovereign within its historical borders, the delegation found it necessary to meet over coffee and baklava with the leadership of the Bosnian Federation, and then separately with the illegitimate leadership of Republika Srpska, over I don’t know what, maybe brandy. Such a move gives further political power to those who have done everything to used every ounce of their creativity to kill and steal.

I say creativity because I’m thinking of the art of war, art of deception, art of politics, which Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi so brilliantly, and subtly dramatizes in her book Sarajevo Rose/War Rhymes. This is a perennial book, prose-poetry of high aesthetic and intellectual quality.

Particularly striking is the poem about Lady Hate and her Happening. Lady hate, to Melika is an artist, a trend-setter, someone who does not look back in shame or to learn something from history, but always looks forward using her creative powers to invent new ways to humiliate with brilliance, maim with a sting, shed blood with passion, introduce some extra twisted twists into the story of everyday lives of city/village people.

Art, imagination, creativity – which are normally considered positive human faculties, that is what makes us human in the first place – are in Bosnawi’s dirge weapons of mass destruction, much like in Kubric’s 2001 Space Odyssey, where creativity is first employed in the production of a weapon. There are loads of creativity in these works of art, complex aesthetics used to criticize and draw our attention to the art of war, which in the end amounts to one and the same, quite uncreative thing, murder. I’m thinking of the Twin Towers and the way we were stunned because it was innovative, we’d never seen that before, very modern, very trendy, and yet essentially the same as murder of Srebrenica population, Ruwanda, Gaza, you name it. I wonder how much creativity went into the production of smart bombs. I’m thinking of kids painting drawings on bombs, sending artistic messages to those who will never see them, never get a chance of using their creative imagination to interpret that art.

Bosnawi does not stop there. She explores creative imagination and the aesthetics of everyday living, of mundane choices in contrast to the creativity or rather clichés of war. take a look at these lines:

I was among the rare ones who never sped,

or shuddered,

or never went underground

when sirens were warning…

[...]

It was simply my aesthetic choice,

rather to be slaughtered under daylight,

while making a human pace,

or under the light of the moon, while sleeping in,

as clean as possible,

bed linen

(240)

Bosnawi chooses to interpret her war-days decisions in terms of aesthetics, arty creativity. How you die seems just as important as how you live. Are you shot while waiting in a line for bread and water, or in a school yard, or in a dump, in a gas chamber, or by a bullet in a presidential motorcade? Mostly there is no choice. Death is a surprise. But to Bosnawi, in her anti-war artistic imagination, the art of dying, the choice of one’s aesthetic appearance, the aesthetics of existence in the face of death is as important as it is ironic.

Bosnawi’s books can be ordered directly from the author. This is her web site.

In addition, this is what the critic Zoran Mutic wrote:

TESTIMONIES TO THE GENOCIDE

The War Rhymes were neither. They stand alone, unique and separate, and that is perhaps their foremost quality. As with most writers, life can rarely be detached from their work. And with The War Rhymes it has been proved again: Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi has made a remarkable contribution to poetry as such and, consequently, her work defies classification into genres. In an astonishing amalgam of erudition, technique and talent, with mastery of images and occasional inventive plays on words, this fragile witness from the slaughterhouse has produced a volume of about 8.500 lines that tell the saga about a city, about its both heroic and tragic, forlorn populace, but above all about a woman: a lonely “zoon politikon”, whose faith helps her not only survive but also discover tender characters in the “House Of Urchins”, the children abandoned within total abandonment, as well as miserable political games of professional patriots. “Sarajevo Kids War-Chorus” is a horrifying reading experience, lived over and over again every time we read it – and in fact it is a simple rendering of everyday reality, therefore even more horrid. Names, statistic data, facts and figures given in an off-hand manner only reinforce the horror, while the paradox of twisted delicate imagery, so normal for ordinary lyrical poetry, makes us shudder with awe.

A poet once commented on the futility of arguments about the form and contents in poetry. “They are the same”, he claimed. “By changing the subject-matter we necessarily change the form.” And this is not to poet’s disadvantage. The contents in which regular events (be they episodes from personal recollections or information from the city mortuary) get entwined with historical data, characters and quotations from the Holy Book, could only be rendered in the present form. And with this we come to the question of the language.

“Woman Inside Out” by Kathryn Magendie

The new literary magazine Sotto Voce, which is available online and soon in print as well, features in its second issue a short story by Kathryn Magendie, a North Carolina author and editor of The Rose & Thorn E-Zine.

Magendie’s story is one of those rare pieces that use smooth and graceful style to strip characters, and I’d say humanity itself, to the bones. Unlike many intellectual writers, Magendie carves her well-thought, deep, and witty prose with exquisite poetics that balance out her brooding mind.

The story is about Beth, a Vicodin munching, fifty-year-old woman who keeps her husband ignorant of his failures, which are at the same time her own failures.

“Beth hates the smell of sex in the morning. Her panties hug her thighs as she lets loose the water she’s held since the sun first broke over the mountaintops. She feels chilled, but her stream is hot and that heat makes her feel alive, in a way the sperm squiggling inside to her useless womb does not. She imagines the little spermlets’ struggles to find the eggs that no longer drop like beautiful ripe fruit. Not that those ripe fruit ever bore anything more than an ache.”

Struggling to reconcile her young bones with what she sees as older face, Beth attracts a younger man, which both flatters her and pushes her deeper into the strange state that is neither that of sadness, nor repressed desire, neither lack nor the fed-up-ness. Beth is flattered by the young lover, but the meaninglessness of it comes up when she reacts to his name: “‘By the way, my name’s Gary.’ She thinks what a normal name this is. Not like Zeus, or Hamlet, or Thor, or Hercules.” Then again after they’ve had sex.

Magendie’s earlier stories and brilliant essays indeed all create the same kind of strength-fragility, and wit-sensibility syntheses. Read “Woman Inside Out” online, and visit Magendie’s blog where she speaks about her forthcoming book Tender Graces.

“Lars von Trier’s Gift” By Adnan Mahmutovic

Note: this essay was published by Literary Magic Magazine in January 2009.

Originating in diverse religious thought, the problematic of “gift” has for centuries been present in art as well as in philosophical discourse. Most recently the question of gift was taken up by the continental philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book Given Time I: Counterfeit Money. Basing his argument on the century old work by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, Derrida went on to stress the “poisonous” nature of any “gift-giving” (playing on the German word “Gift” which means poison). Put differently, this entails that any giving of a gift is never simply an act of generosity but always carries an element of economic exchange within itself. There is no such thing as an altruistic gift to Derrida. When we give or donate something the receiver feels indebted to give something back in return. What is more, we automatically expect re-payment, at least in form of symbolic return such as gratitude, respect, being acknowledged as the donor and thus as some kind of a beneficiary sovereign.

Therefore, it is no mere chance that the theme of “gift-giving” permeates the work of our most important artists today, especially those who deal with both philosophical and theological aspects of human condition. This is true for any kind of artistic expression.

One of the central figures in modern filmmaking currently preoccupied with the problematic of “gift” is the Danish director and screenwriter Lars Von Trier. His production boasts with several thematic trilogies: Europa, Golden Heart, The Kingdom (unfinished), and the planned USA – Land of Opportunities trilogy of which the first two films have been released so far, Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005). Von Trier is known for his principal “rock in the shoe” premise of experimental filmmaking. He was one of the founders of the school of filmmaking called Dogme 95, and a production company Zentropa, independent of the Danish state.

Von Trier’s filmography has always born elements of gift-giving problematic. This is in particular true of his latest films, which bear more overt theological overtones than his early work. Even though the “gift” is an abstract idea and an umbrella term for assorted types of phenomena, Von Trier narrows his focus to one particular gift, in fact the gift of freedom, independence or rather individual sovereignty.

One can begin with his major feature, Breaking the Waves (1996), which broadened his reputation as an innovative, important and groundbreaking artist. Already in this film, the religious aspect of grace that is central to his latest production has started to swell up. Young, pious Bess marries Jan, an oilrig worker. She prays that he return to land, which he does, yet due to a horrible accident that leaves Jan crippled. This “gift” of retrieved husband bears a bitter aftertaste. It is as if Bess is being punished, or made give something in return for her husband.

Feeling guilt and obligation towards her husband, Bess gives in to his absurd request that she have intercourse with other men and tell him about the experience. One could claim that the bizarreness of Jan’s demand is a disguise of his gift to her, a secret gift of freedom from a life under social constraints that oblige her to tend a physically handicapped husband, as much as the constraints of her deep love to him. However, given Derridean analysis, if Bess does not see this as a gift, is it really a gift. If she cannot understand Jan’s demands as a means of setting her free, is she really free? Not even the objective eye of an outsider can focus on only one option. In a sense, Bess is being liberated in this uncanny psychological process staged by her depressed husband. Furthermore, she is also mercilessly manipulated by Jan’s pragmatic thinking, and his inability to receive her gift of love because he can never even hope to return it. Does his goal justify the means? Is his gift an act of his egotism or pure generosity? Does Bess have to go through an ordeal, or even a strange kind of purgatory to find out she has always already been free as an individual, religious or not? Von Trier leaves us with no easy answers. There are no clear dichotomies between good and evil, gift and sheer exchange. As Thomas Beltzer suggested, Von Trier’s “work cannot be reduced to anyone’s message, not even his own.” Von Trier cannot be simplistically classified as a Christian zealot on the basis of his professed Catholic sentimentality. His films have that rare ability to implode in themselves and thus prevent closure, obstruct our ability to decide upon the only correct interpretation.

Waiting for the final chapter in the USA trilogy, we can so far conclude that the nature of gift is the main theme of Dogville and Manderlay, apart from the overarching exploration of the American class systems. In fact, it seems that the sociological as well as phenomenological nature of “gift-giving” is fundamental in any analysis of class, racism, systems of rule, statehood, then also the question of sovereignty of individual, family, community, and finally state.

In Dogville, the woman called Grace is “bestowed” like God’s gift upon a small community. She is welcomed and sheltered as a fugitive yet eventually nearly every citizen takes advantage of her, and eventually rapes her. In the end, her mighty father arrives and offers Grace a possibility to punish the entire community because they mistreated her, because they did not pay enough respect to the gift of Grace/grace.

Emblematically, this brings into question the purity of the Christian idea of bountiful grace of God. In other words, one could almost think that Von Trier only pushes the old question of hell. Yet still, why are there injustices? Do we deserve hell, be it in afterlife or on Earth, because we mistreat the gifts of God, because we use them and perhaps do that inappropriately? Maybe we are ungrateful for the gifts and therefore ought to be punished like the inhabitants of Dogville. Still, if gifts, be they divine or mundane, are acts of generosity why the demand at return, why insist on punishment in the closing act? In an allegorical sense, why is Grace not turning the other cheek but strikes back with a vengeance? Again it seems impossible to settle on only one simple alternative.

Moving onto Manderlay, Von Trier stays with his protagonist Grace, this time plunging her into a small town seventy years behind the rest of the U.S. in terms of human rights, civil rights movement, integration of slaves, etc. Once again, Grace perceives herself as a gift to this Godforsaken place. She sees all the errors of the past, all the crimes of white population still lingering with this group of black slaves. In Grace’s own simile they are like “caged birds”. Not even after the death of their owner do they dare leave the farm and go outside the steal gates.

In a bout of empathy, Grace rebels against her “what-is-in-there-for-me” father, a cruel gangster who only believes in immediate profit and cannot care less about mercy and gifts. Grace decides to bring enlightenment, freedom and democracy to the “negroes” as well as the whites, all of them mummified in another era. Upon freeing them all from their bonds, Grace is offered thanks. She is pleased with her inceptive contribution, yet emphasises that they do not need express gratefulness for what is so fundamentally human: freedom. Freedom is not hers to give. It has already been given to each and every one them upon birth. It ought to be considered the ultimate gift of God, of which no man can bereave any other. Still, Grace goes on to believe that she is a kind of saviour and a teacher who takes action into her hands: she liberates the black community from slavery and re-educates the bigoted white working-crew at the farm.

As he does with Dogville, Von Trier ends Manderlay rather appropriately with a series of photographs, this time from American history of slavery and civil rights movement. In fact, the last picture in this slide show is that of the giant Abraham Lincoln statue in white marble being cleaned by an African American. One cannot but wonder whether there could be a statue of Martin Luther King next to Lincoln’s, perhaps in black marble.

How far have we really come since Lincoln, this reformer of America? This question is the central theme of the film. It is evoked through every element of the narrative and overemphasised by the rather condescending voiceover (though beautifully read by John Hurt). Time and again, Von Trier reminds us that we have forgotten this and he slips it like a rock into our too comfortable shoe. Perhaps we rather conveniently think there should be no prejudices in the modern world and oftentimes choose to pass on with our eyes closed.

Furthermore, it is the problem of “gift” that lies underneath everything, especially any discussion of injustice. As we pinpointed earlier, the gift of freedom is to Grace the most essential and unquestionable part of being-human, which is always the case even when it appears differently. There is no doubt that slavery, torture, and social injustices are old evils that keep scourging the world, today certainly as much as ever. But morally speaking, what exactly should we do about that? We have to act, as Grace shouts at her father, we have to free people, spread democracy, even when it means taking to doubtful measures. The connection to the American enterprise in Iraq and the idea of pre-emptive warfare is clear.

When we act we mean to give a gift. Grace claims freedom is natural, and that she as a white woman “made” the black people what they are. Therefore, it is her responsibility to return what “her” people bereaved them of. In other words, she feels guilty, like the two gentlemen from Baudelaire’s story “Counterfeit Money” (used by Derrida) who feel indebted to give alms to the anonymous beggar they encounter on the street. Somehow the logic of social equality forces these men and Grace to realise that they have profited from the unfortunate lot, and in a just society they need to give back. The alms giving is originally a religious institution, yet the basic philosophy behind it has become a fundamental element of socialism as well, hence we have institutionalised forms of donation at the level of state.

In the end of Manderlay, nearly the same scenario from Dogville repeats itself. Grace finds out she has been deceived, but what is more she does not understand that she has all along had prejudices against black people herself, that she has all along believed in the seven categories of “negroes” recorded in the red “Bible” of the deceased slave-owner.

It is, however, true that from the very beginning Grace has despised the red notebook as an example of sheer evil, a blueprint of slavery and oppression. Yet, she has nevertheless abided by its prescriptions when reorganising the community and leading them into freedom and democracy. In the end she thinks her crucial error lies in misclassifying one man under the wrong category.

The moment Grace believes she has accomplished her plans and paid the African Americans back more than they bargained for, she feels ready to leave and let the community lead their own lives in democracy she has taught them.

However, the former slaves reveal to her that it was not the old slave owner who wrote the red book of rules and categories, but one of them. Moreover, most of the others were aligned with him as well. Suddenly, and to Grace’s immense chagrin, they want her to reside at the farm and ignore everything she has given them: counterfeit democracy and spurious human rights. They demand that she stay and act as their new white leader, a merciful one yet who understand the evil structure of the world. The world is simply not ready for them, they claim. It is still a jungle too dangerous for birds born in cage, which is a fairly common though subtle use of the wilderness metaphor in the critique of a modern civilised Western world.

Once again, Grace is furious. She takes a whip and lashes one of the men, the “proud negro” from category 7, whom she saved from flogging in the beginning when she first arrived at the farm. Now she does what she could not imagine any civilised human being would do. But she feels justified, they have betrayed her, deceived her, they did not acknowledge her bountiful gift of freedom. In fact, they seem to have resented her gift all along while only pretending they were appreciating her presence and help. In fact, they all seem to classify into category 1, the ambivalent, i.e. face shifting “turncoat negroes”. Therefore, she has to punish them. Only this time her father is not there to give her a hand. He looks at her from a safe distance thinking she has finally understood how things work in the world.

The end has for some reason been the payback time in Von Trier’s latest films. At this point, Von Trier, like Derrida, seems to paint a dismal picture of goodness, grace and gifts in this if not in afterlife. Yet the ambivalent nature of his art remains, and as Beltzer maintains, Von Trier might be working in the heritage of T.S. Eliot, “depicting the wasteland and then transcending it with faith”.

Rather than attempting one final judgment of Von Trier, it might therefore be appropriate to finish with a caution note that the reason for writing this whole article may be a kind of repayment for the gift of insight, or at least food for thought that Von Trier has given us as over the years

GAZA ON MY MIND II

The other day, I deviated from the main purpose of this blog (to review literature) and posted my initial thoughts about the piles of dead and wounded children in Gaza. I will in a week or so try to post my translation of a story by a Bosnian writer Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi from her book Catharsis-Dreams, the dream number 7, about Gaza. The story is quite excellent in that it embarks on an imaginary journey with the revered and beloved Anna Frank all the way to Gaza and back to her little room just before the monsters take her. This is one of my examples of the fiction telling the truth by putting you on an extended journey, not merely facing the facts like those of today’s bloodbaths in Gaza, but a journey beyond to good morals, ethics, compassion, will to help etc. The dream suggests that the phrase “gas chambers” does not merely signify actual cells in concentration camps but also Anna Frank’s room, and indeed the entire Gaza, an open area but so closed, suffocating, “the perfumery of rot”, as the author suggests, which resembles Ben Okri’s description of Nigerian ghetto in The Famished Road. The suggestion is not to equal the Jew with the Nazi, or to wash anyone’s hands, but rather to point out that the suffering is the same, Anna Frank did not suffer less than Palestinian civilians. I lived like they for two years and it was quite enough. I don’t know what would have happened with my mind if everything stayed the same for decades. Shakespeare’s Shylock famously asked whether or not a Jew has a soul, and bleeds like the next man. Remember his lesson. Some Jews went out protesting against the military actions and the continuing occupation as you can see here.

When I wrote my book Illegitimate (which will be out any time), and it’s prequel Thinner than a Hair (to be published in 2010), I tried to show between the suffering of European Jews and Bosnian Muslims, and how both suffered in Bosnia, which was the place in the heart of Europe where the Jews found shelter when they were expelled (together with the Muslims) from Spain centuries ago. Most of Bosnian Jews left during the war, and some went to Israel. I felt really sad seeing that one of them, Ivan Ceresnjes, who was in fact R Karadzic’s candidate for the President of Bosnia sent a number of pictures depicting Palestinian children as the military, dressed as suicide bombers etc. as some kind of reason, justification for the slaughter of kids in Gaza. Two pictures were particularly ridiculous. Here they are:

Ivan Ceresnjes obviously means to say: Look these are dangerous Palestinian kids, stone-throwers, they attack our fences and soldiers like beasts. This is so bizarre you don’t know whether to cry or laugh out of anguish.

This to me is fiction that tells lies, ideology at its purest, the exact opposite of fiction as the undermining of ideology, fiction that draws attention to ideological brainwashing. This reminds of the story told by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek about the film of an Israeli soldier barging into a family home and taking pity of a Palestinian kid because he too has a kid with the same name. Zizek says this is ideology at its purest because the footage does not serve to show the war should stop, that the occupations must cease, but rather “Look we are all humans and make human mistakes”. What happens in Gaza today is an awfully enduring mistake, or rather not a mistake at all but calculated program. It is human because beast do not organize slaughter parties of their kind. (Remember the image from Kubrik’s 2001, where the monkeys and HAL 9000 become intelligent and immediately start murdering. A wonderful critique of reason. I wonder how would this iconic Jew make Middle-East 2009.)

In my essay section I posted my old essay entitled “Literature on my Mind” which was partly inspired by Rushdie’s essay on the bloodshed in Bosnia called “Sarajevo on my Mind” where Rushdie, to my surprise, actually had nice things to say about Muslims and seemed anguished about their suffering and slaughter. He likes raising his voice when it comes to banished and prosecuted writers, so I’d very much like to hear him raise his voice now, over and again, otherwise, like I said before, his supposedly critical mind produces mere idle talk.

Below I copied an article by Mark LeVine, a Jewish academic who criticizes Israeli politics that turn Gaza into a gas chamber (see the phosphorus rain on BBC) and brings to light some recent development in the West, the ways different communities are reacting to the horror not even Conrad can exhaustively describe. LeVine’s article is copied from Al Jazeera.

Who will save Israel from itself?
By Mark LeVine

One by one the justifications given by Israel for its latest war in Gaza are unravelling.

The argument that this is a purely defensive war, launched only after Hamas broke a six-month ceasefire has been challenged, not just by observers in the know such as Jimmy Carter, the former US president who helped facilitate the truce, but by centre-right Israeli intelligence think tanks.

The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose December 31 report titled “Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report,” confirmed that the June 19 truce was only “sporadically violated, and then not by Hamas but instead by … “rogue terrorist organisations”.

Instead, “the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement” occurred after Israel killed six Hamas members on November 4 without provocation and then placed the entire Strip under an even more intensive siege the next day. According to a joint Tel Aviv University-European University study, this fits a larger pattern in which Israeli violence has been responsible for ending 79 per cent of all lulls in violence since the outbreak of the second intifada, compared with only 8 per cent for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.

Indeed, the Israeli foreign ministry seems to realise that this argument is losing credibility.

During a conference call with half a dozen pro-Israel professors on Thursday, Asaf Shariv, the Consul General of Israel in New York, focused more on the importance of destroying the intricate tunnel system connecting Gaza to the Sinai.

He claimed that such tunnels were “as big as the Holland and Lincoln tunnels,” and offered as proof the “fact” that lions and monkeys had been smuggled through them to a zoo in Gaza. In reality, the lions were two small cubs that were drugged, thrown in sacks, and dragged through a tunnel on their way to a private zoo.

The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them.

With each new family, 10, 20 and 30 strong, buried under the rubble of a building in Gaza, the claim that the Israeli forces have gone out of their way to diminish civilian casualties – long a centre-piece of Israel’s image as an enlightened and moral democracy – is falling apart.

Anyone with an internet connection can Google “Gaza humanitarian catastrophe” and find the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Territories and read the thousands of pages of evidence documenting the reality of the current fighting, and the long term siege on Gaza that preceded it.

The Red Cross, normally scrupulous in its unwillingness to single out parties to a conflict for criticism, sharply criticised Israel for preventing medical personnel from reaching wounded Palestinians, some of whom remained trapped for days, slowly starving and dying in the Gazan rubble amidst their dead relatives.

Meanwhile, the United Nations has flatly denied Israeli claims that Palestinian fighters were using the UNRWA school compound bombed on January 6, in which 40 civilians were killed, to launch attacks, and has challenged Israel to prove otherwise.

War crimes admission

Additionally, numerous flippant remarks by senior Israeli politicians and generals, including Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, refusing to make a distinction between civilian people and institutions and fighters – “Hamas doesn’t … and neither should we” is how Livni puts it – are rightly being seen as admissions of war crimes.

Indeed, in reviewing statements by Israeli military planners leading up to the invasion, it is clear that there was a well thought out decision to go after Gaza’s civilian infrastructure – and with it, civilians.

The following quote from an interview with Major-General Gadi Eisenkot that appeared in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth in October, is telling:

“We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective these [the villages] are military bases,” he said.

“This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised.”

Causing “immense damage and destruction” and considering entire villages “military bases” is absolutely prohibited under international law.

Eisenkot’s description of this planning in light of what is now unfolding in Gaza is a clear admission of conspiracy and intent to commit war crimes, and when taken with the comments above, and numerous others, renders any argument by Israel that it has tried to protect civilians and is not engaging in disproportionate force unbelievable.

International laws violated

On the ground, the evidence mounts ever higher that Israel is systematically violating a host of international laws, including but not limited to Article 56 of the IV Hague Convention of 1907, the First Additional Protocol of the Geneva Convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention (more specifically known as the “Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949″, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the principles of Customary International Humanitarian Law.

None of this excuses or legitimises the firing of rockets or mortars by any Palestinian group at Israeli civilians and non-military targets.

As Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur, declared in his most recent statement on Gaza: “It should be pointed out unambiguously that there is no legal (or moral) justification for firing rockets at civilian targets, and that such behavior is a violation of IHR, associated with the right to life, as well as constitutes a war crime.”

By the same logic, however, Israel does not have the right to use such attacks as an excuse to launch an all-out assault on the entire population of Gaza.

In this context, even Israel’s suffering from the constant barrage of rockets is hard to pay due attention to when the numbers of dead and wounded on each side are counted. Any sense of proportion is impossible to sustain with such a calculus.

‘Rogue’ state

Israeli commentators and scholars, self-described “loyal” Zionists who served proudly in the army in wars past, are now publicly describing their country, in the words of Oxford University professor Avi Shlaim, as a “rogue” and gangster” state led by “completely unscrupulous leaders”.

Gazans inspect the damage after an air strike hit a mosque [GALLO/GETTY]
Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, has declared that Israel’s actions in Gaza are like “raising animals for slaughter on a farm” and represent a “bizarre new moral element” in warfare.

“The moral voice of restraint has been left behind … Everything is permitted” against Palestinians, writes a disgusted Haaretz columnist, Gideon Levy.

Fellow Haaretz columnist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Amira Haas writes of her late parents disgust at how Israeli leaders justified Israel’s wars with a “language laundromat” aimed at redefining reality and Israel’s moral compass. “Lucky my parents aren’t alive to see this,” she exclaimed.

Around the world people are beginning to compare Israel’s attack on Gaza, which after the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers was turned literally into the world’s largest prison, to the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Extremist Muslims are using internet forums to collect names and addresses of prominent European Jews with the goal, it seems clear, of assassinating them in retaliation for Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Al-Qaeda is attempting to exploit this crisis to gain a foothold in Gaza and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, as well as through attacking Jewish communities globally.

Iran’s defiance of both Israel and its main sponsor, the US, is winning it increasing sympathy with each passing day.

Democratic values eroded

Inside Israel, the violence will continue to erode both democratic values in the Jewish community, and any acceptance of the Jewish state’s legitimacy in the eyes of its Palestinian citizens.

And yet in the US – at least in Washington and in the offices of the mainstream Jewish organisations – the chorus of support for Israel’s war on Gaza continues to sing in tight harmony with official Israeli policy, seemingly deaf to the fact that they have become so out of tune with the reality exploding around them.

At my university, UCI, where last summer Jewish and Muslim students organised a trip together through the occupied territories and Israel so they could see with their own eyes the realities there, old battle lines are being redrawn.

The Anteaters for Israel, the college pro-Israel group at the University of California, Irvine, sent out an urgent email to the community explaining that, “Over the past week, increasing amounts of evidence lead us to believe that Hamas is largely responsible for any alleged humanitarian crisis in Gaza”.

I have no idea who the “us” is that is referred to in the appeal, although I am sure that the membership of that group is shrinking.

Indeed, one of the sad facts of this latest tragedy is that with each claim publicly refuted by facts on the ground, more and more Americans, including Jews, are refusing to trust the assertions of Israeli and American Jewish leaders.

Trap

Even worse, in the Arab/Muslim world, the horrific images pouring out of Gaza daily are allowing preachers and politicians to deploy well-worn yet still dangerous and inciteful stereotypes against Jews as they rally the masses against Israel – and through it – their own governments.

What is most frightening is that the most important of Israel’s so-called friends, the US political establishment and the mainstream Jewish leadership, seem clueless to the devastating trap that Israel has led itself into – in good measure with their indulgence and even help.

It is one that threatens the country’s existence far more than any Qassam rockets, with their 0.4 per cent kill rate; even more than the disastrous 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon, which by weakening Israel’s deterrence capability in some measure made this war inevitable.

First, it is clear that Israel cannot destroy Hamas, it cannot stop the rockets unless it agrees to a truce that will go far to meeting the primary demand of Hamas – an end to the siege.

Merely by surviving (and it surely will survive) Hamas, like Hezbollah in 2006, will have won.

Support for the war remains high in Israel[GALLO/GETTY]
Israel is succeeding in doing little more than creating another generation of Palestinians with hearts filled with rage and a need for revenge.

Second, Israel’s main patron, the US, along with the conservative Arab autocracies and monarchies that are its only allies left in the Muslim world, are losing whatever crumbs of legitimacy they still had with their young and angry populations.

The weaker the US and its axis becomes in the Middle East, the more precarious becomes Israel’s long-term security. Indeed, any chance that the US could convince the Muslim world to pressure Iran to give up its quest for nuclear weapons has been buried in Gaza.

Third, as Israel brutalises Palestinians, it brutalises its own people. You cannot occupy another people and engage in violence against them at this scale without doing even greater damage to your soul.

The high incidence of violent crimes committed by veterans returning from combat duty in Iraq is but one example of how the violence of occupation and war eat away at people’s moral centre.

While in the US only a small fraction of the population participates in war; in Israel, most able-bodied men end up participating.

The effects of the latest violence perpetrated against Palestinians upon the collective Israeli soul is incalculable; the notion that it can survive as an “ethnocracy” – favouring one ethnic group, Jews, yet by and large democratic – is becoming a fiction.

Violence-as-power

Who will save Israel from herself?

Israelis are clearly incapable. Their addiction as a society to the illusion of violence-as-power has reached the level of collective mental illness.

As Haaretz reporter Yossi Melman described it on January 10, “Israel has created an image of itself of a madman that has lost it”.

Not Palestinians, too many of whom have fallen prey to the same condition.

Not the Middle East Quartet, the European Union, the United Nations, or the Arab League, all of whom are utterly powerless to influence Israeli policy.

Not the organised Jewish leadership in the US and Europe, who are even more blind to what is happening than most Israelis, who at least allow internal debate about the wisdom of their government’s policies.

Not the growing progressive Jewish community, which will need years to achieve enough social and political power to challenge the status quo.

And not senior American politicians and policy-makers who are either unwilling to risk alienating American Jewish voters, or have been so brainwashed by the constant barrage of propaganda put out by the “Israel Lobby” that they are incapable of reaching an independent judgment about the conflict.

During the US presidential race, Barack Obama was ridiculed for being a messiah-like figure. The idea does not sound so funny now. It is hard to imagine anyone less saving Israel, the Palestinians, and the world from another four years of mindless violence.

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and the soon to be published An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.

The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of Al Jazeera.