At a town hall meeting this week in Florida President Obama was asked an unusual question – unusual not so much for its candor (who can forget the candid – if misguided – question addressed to McCain by a bemused elderly lady, aghast at the idea that Obama was one of them Ay-rabs?) but for its astuteness: how does Obama explain America’s support for Israel and Egyptian human rights violations when he specifically decried human rights violations in his State of the Union speech last Wednesday night?

It should be of no surprise to the readers of this blog that the answer to this straightforward question was a circuitous non-answer, beginning with something about the entire region being a smoldering brew of human misery and misfortune in the first place, winding around a statement of unwavering support for the “vibrant democracy” that is Israel, and culminating in a very tepid concession to the “legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people”. (The “Egypt” part of the question was tellingly ignored)

It seems the honeymoon days of “Palestine” (the symbolic usage of which James Zogby waxed poetic about in The Huffington Post) are over – we’re back to “the Palestinian people” now.

And, as if most of us didn’t know it already, gone are the days when we could pretend that this time, THIS TIME, it would be different.

Maybe we were so brow-beaten by Bush’s ignorance-plus-arrogance-times-ten combo, or perhaps we were even guilty of some reverse-racism, expecting that an ultra-educated, mixed-race man who probably knows a thing or two about injustice might be prevailed upon to fight for the opposite if given the chance. For whatever reason, we expected more out of Obama. We expected far better than this.

Some will gloat – of course they knew it all along, it doesn’t matter which puppet sits in the Oval Office, the puppeteers remain unchanged. Others will hang their head sheepishly and mutter something about it being the system, not the man. Still others will ask the faithful to persevere, for what weapons do peace activists around the world have but faith and perseverance?

Faith and perseverance are nice, but so are reality checks.

The reality is that no president in recent history had been swept into office with as much optimism, support, and both the mandate and majority to actually change things. And yet, plus ça change…

It may be time, even as the cultural and economic supremacy of the United States is put to the test, for activists, politicians, and all those looking forward to an actual Palestinian state one day to prepare for the next chapter in the Middle East peace process. One that sidesteps the US (and yes – Canada under our current cabinet) in favor of creating alliances (with China? India? Brazil?...) based on leverage and mutual benefit as opposed to begging for table scraps that never come.

Click here for The Huffington Post’s reporting on the event: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/28/obama-asked-why-us-doesnt_n_440816.html

Please note that the views expressed by the author of this blog are his/hers alone, and do not necessarily represent the positions of CJPME.

December 6, 2009, marks an important anniversary in Quebec’s history, one cloaked in sorrow and punctured with disbelief. Twenty years ago this week, fourteen young, would-be engineers were gunned down, execution-style, in the classrooms, hallways, and communal spaces of their university while their male classmates stood watch, unable to help.

With every macabre anniversary – five years to the day, ten years, fifteen, twenty – Quebecers join in mourning and wonder how it came to pass that their tolerant nation could have produced this rabidly primitive brand of tragedy.

In Quebec we remember this day not because it was the bloodiest in our history, but because every time we relive the scene in our minds, the one where a crazed man with a semi-automatic rifle enters a classroom and orders the male students out, leaving the women behind, we want to scream. We want to imagine that if it had been us in that room we would not have stood by, impotent, as one man killed so many women for no other reason than they were women. And every year we take a moment to remember that this was not a crime that affected “only” fourteen women, but a chilling reminder that so many people in this world continue to feel justified in taking out their anger, frustrations, and social impotence on their mothers, daughters, wives, cousins, and neighbors. It’s a reminder that an embarrassingly huge swath of society – even in democratic and liberal Quebec – is still subject to what is arguably the world’s most far-reaching, systematic, and damaging of human rights violations: misogyny.

And as I fight to have the grievances of Palestinians heard in Canada and the human rights violations of Israel to be exposed, I wonder why the Arab people – whether suffering under occupation and dictatorships, or flourishing in Western democracies – continue to consider the suffering of Middle Eastern women as “negligible” or simply accept it as a way of life in the Middle East.

I can already see eyes rolling.

How can you defend women’s rights when Gaza is under siege, when Israel can kill 1400 in one fell swoop!

1400 deaths? That’s truly a horrifying number. And many of those dead are in fact women, something we like to underscore when seeking to expose the cruelty of the Israeli army, implying with this carefully chosen emphasis that we recognize women as a group deserving of special protection.

But how do honor killings stack up against this terrible number? How many women are killed, maimed, disfigured, or even jailed (usually to protect them from being murdered by relatives) for engaging in normal human behavior – talking, flirting, kissing, associating, or possibly even (though usually not) having sex with men?

A few dozen? A few hundred? A thousand?

In 2000, the UN estimated the figure of honor killings at 5,000 worldwide. The UN, Amnesty International, and plenty of other human rights groups around the world have since agreed that this number is grossly underestimated. It continues marching upwards and onwards, encountering little organized resistance from Arab religious moderates, intellectuals, professionals, public servants, academics or even humanitarians – those same people who are so vocal in their yearning to sit at the table of global discourse but whose silence on atrocities committed by their kin and in their midst speak louder than anything they could ever say about their stand on universal human rights.

Silence is a position too. It is precisely because of the maddening weight of silence that Quebec has chosen not to be silent on the deaths of fourteen young women, twenty years ago.

For those tempted to use culture as a scapegoat, consider that many populations torn by war and conflict have historically clamped down on the rights and freedoms of women as a means of holding on to their cultural identity, as if women represented the last defensive front in a war against a nation’s integrity and continuity. Amnesty International reports that countries as culturally diverse as Argentina, Egypt, Guatemala, Iran, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Palestine, Peru, Syria, and Venezuela have codified in their laws “honor” as a partial or complete defense against murder.

But as diverse as the above list is, the reality is that nowadays, only in the Middle East do well-meaning people who would regard the death of a woman at the hands of an Israeli soldier as a crime, regard the same woman’s murder at the hands of her family as justifiable, defensible “under the circumstances”, or even honorable.

Still, it might seem difficult or even a little cruel to heap yet another layer of criticism and responsibility on the backs of suffering, besieged populations for their mistreatment of women – but only if you define women as something other than human.

Women’s rights are human rights. They are not two different concepts. Any wavering or pandering to ludicrous cultural mores only helps maintain an idea as old as religion itself, that some cultures are truly superior to others, and it is the responsibility of these superior cultures to impose social order on “savages”.

It should be a source of absolute shame to each and every Muslim and Arab Canadian that in a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum ranking 128 countries by their treatment of women, 10 of the bottom 12 were majority Muslim.

We have succeeded in out-macho-ing some of the most macho peoples to have ever existed: most Latin American countries now have majority female populations because their governments ensure women survive labor and have equal access to education and health care as men. India – a culture that still burns brides for inadequate dowry – does better at educating women and providing them with economic opportunity and independence than any Muslim country. China, once famous for foot-binding and female infanticide, has shrugged off the crueler and more inhumane aspects of its cultural legacy and now enjoys a 40% female participation in the workforce, fuelling economic explosion in the 21st century.

Speaking of economic expansion, a recent UN Arab Human Development Report remarked:

“The rise of women is in fact a prerequisite for an Arab renaissance.”

I can only sit here and wonder how those who labor so tirelessly to persuade others to support and foster a lasting peace in the Middle East persist in ignoring the largest elephant in the room, the one that dwarfs the death toll of Israel’s latest massacre, one that continues to kill, maim, harass, de-humanize, and force into submission millions of people everyday, and that’s directly contributing to the dismal economic backwardness of the Middle East.

Israel is not preventing millions of women from seeking an education or joining the workforce. Medieval laws, cultural stigma, a sick and twisted obsession with female virginity, and the conspiratorial silence of the privileged among us are.

In the age of iphones and Youtube, an image is worth a thousand blog posts. If you can stomach watching a modern day stoning, complete with mobile phones, uniformed police standing impotently on the side, a crazed and angry mob venting all its despair and frustration on one love-struck teenaged girl, then google the name Du’a Aswad.

Quebec’s reaction to the killing of 14 women was to “never forget”. What has been the Arab and Muslim communities’ reaction to D’ua’s murder?

What is yours?

Please note that the views expressed by the author of this blog are his/hers alone, and do not necessarily represent the positions of CJPME.

Picture it.

You’re a nine-year old recent immigrant, one-time exemplary student, forced by a certain language law that shall remain nameless to undergo a year-long French immersion program ironically called (I can only imagine, by a civil servant with a twisted sense of humour) “Welcome Class” where you find out that anything you accomplished in your home country wasn’t worth much if you couldn’t speak French. You would expect that the government, in its wisdom, would enlist culturally-sensitive teachers to ease the transition of impressionable, terrified, and in some cases, somewhat traumatized youngsters into Canadian and Quebecois society.

You’d be wrong. Or at least you would have been in a certain classroom in 1987 Saint-Laurent, Quebec.

“What is this?”

The teacher, who shall also remain nameless, pointed to the picture I’d been asked to draw of myself earlier that day with the word “Palestine” scripted in a child’s hand underneath. It was past 3:30 pm, the class had emptied, and a ragtag group of fellow-immigrant friends with whom I communicated mainly through sign language were waiting for me outside. Also, the teacher had spoken in French which at that point in my life, sounded like what you might get if you played a Pink Floyd tape backwards.

Eventually, through a combination of terrible English (hers), exasperated explaining (mine), and yes, sign language, I managed to decipher that Miss Cultural Sensitivity 1987 could not understand how a person born in Beirut, Lebanon, could possibly call herself Palestinian. My nine-year-old self threw around words I once thought of as mundane as “bread” or “water” but were actually inflammatory, misunderstood, and controversial in this frosty new country of mine. Words like “refugee” and “birthplace” versus “racial ancestry” or even “travel visa” versus “passport”.

Clearly in no mood to argue, my teacher tore off the part of the picture that said “Palestine” and wrote “Lebanon” instead. She hung it back up on the wall, along a row of similarly crafted self-portraits, drawings with words like “Syria”, “Iran”, or “El Salvador” written in brightly coloured crayons underneath the smiling stick figures.

The curiously altered piece of art was the subject of some discussion among my classmates the next morning, but I quickly cleared it up. Though I was born in Lebanon I had never, in my entire life, held a Lebanese passport. My grandparents were Palestinian, as are my parents, which in turn makes me Palestinian. Simple. The kids got it. The adult had not. Call it an early lesson in absurdity.

Some years later I’d come to understand that in the Western world, unlike the one I’d come from, there was not one set of laws for some people, and another for others. It didn’t matter that your grandfather was born in a small coastal village south of Jaffa where he tended the local coffee shop until the Nakba of 1948. Neither the olive hue of your skin, nor the distinctive shape of your eyes ever drew any special attention beyond mildly annoying comparisons to Disney’s Princess Jasmine.

What mattered in this new country was a newfangled notion regarded as quaint where I’d come from. If you were born in Canada, you were Canadian. If you weren’t, you could become one through a clear and unbiased process, after which you were every bit as Canadian as the descendants of Samuel de Champlain. It was a cultural quirk that had pitted the preconceived notions of a stubborn nine-year-old against those of a narrow-minded teacher.

But that was 1987.

In 2009, the picture has become very different.

In 2009 Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was taken back to his native Afghanistan by his father when he was a minor and was subsequently labelled an “enemy combatant” in a questionable conflict, with questionable goals and questionable motives still sits in a cell located in a tropical naval base of questionable repute and origin. He’s been sitting there since 2002, waiting for the federal government to throw a charge at him that actually manages to stick.

Also, in 2009, Suaad Mohamud, a Canadian citizen was finally allowed back into Canada after being unlawfully detained for three months in Kenya because a customs official didn’t think she looked like her passport picture too much. Maybe she’d lost weight; maybe she’d gotten a haircut, or switched her glasses for coloured contacts. Who knows. You’d think the process standing between you and three months in an African prison would come down to something substantial than whether you were having a “fat day” or not. Anyway, she’s back, after DNA testing established that she was indeed the biological mother of a Canadian kid whose two-week stint with babysitters had turned into three months. The Canadian IDs, credit cards, transit tickets and old dry cleaning stubs hadn’t done the trick.

Finally, this summer, a bittersweet ending to a six year ordeal. The court-ordered return of Sudanese-Canadian, Abousfian Abdelrasik to Montreal after countless efforts by the federal government to bar his re-entry, each more surreal and cruel than the next (decreeing, for example, that he will be re-issued a Canadian passport if he can purchase his ticket back to Canada, knowing full well that all his assets have been frozen, and invoking a law stating than anyone caught assisting Abdelrasik in obtaining return fare to Canada can be prosecuted. George Orwell couldn’t have made this up).
September 11th marks the eighth anniversary of the event that triggered the reconsidering of such quaint notions as citizenship rights, Canadian support for citizens incarcerated abroad, or even clemency requests for Canadians sitting on death row – a practice in direct violation of Canadian laws and principles.

South of the border, a Black man ran for president on a platform of change, and won. Here in Canada, our government has morphed into a gleeful champion not of its citizens, but of the laws and decrees set by the now-defunct and discredited Bush administration, ex-rulers of a foreign nation.
Some might say the tables have turned.

Some might say the world the nine-year-old immigrant girl had left behind, the one her coddled teacher knew nothing about, had triumphed over Canadian principles and values. That Canada is slowly turning into the kind of place where things like where your grandparents were born, or how much you look like a character from Disney’s Aladdin, matter more than what kind of passport you hold.

Some might also say a Canadian passport is no longer worth much at all.

Please note that the views expressed by the author of this blog are his/hers alone, and do not necessarily represent the positions of CJPME.