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| 3 (indirectly related) articles from ny times |
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| mwishka |
| 07/13/02 at 14:17:49 |
| my apologies for the amalgam style of this posting. there are reasons, but they're um complicated --- you know, one of those secret agent things. very very raw deal for you if i tell you why..... (hee heee there was a very funny word in here.. but i fixed it - why don't i see these when i put them up? i find things all over the place --later, always. sorry to anyone who needed a tiny chuckle for today and missed the funny word...) mwishka ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== July 13, 2002 Journalist of Jenin's Despair Dies of Wound By JAMES BENNET with JOEL GREENBERG ENIN, West Bank, July 12 — Jenin's militants and Israel's military have made this city notorious as a place of death. But to Imad Abu Zahra, it was home, and as a journalist he struggled to express its history, its turbulent politics and its desperation. Today, he died of a wound he suffered on Thursday, when he made his last effort to tell the world about life here by photographing Israeli tanks downtown. Two other Palestinians, including a 13-year-old boy, were killed today, by Israeli gunfire in the Gaza Strip, bringing to at least 36 the number of Palestinians killed since June 20, when Israel began seizing West Bank cities in response to back-to-back suicide bombings in Jerusalem. Another death was reported though not confirmed. At least 17 of those killed have been unarmed civilians, said the Israeli human rights group B'tselem. The Israeli offensive in the West Bank, which has the tacit backing of the Bush administration, has succeeded so far in stopping suicide attacks in Israel. Cafes in Jerusalem — at least those that stayed open on the Jewish Sabbath — were jumping tonight, after weeks of fearful silence. The price to Palestinians has been high, with hundreds of thousands of people who Israel acknowledges are innocent virtually prisoners in their homes, under 24-hour curfew and stringent travel restrictions. Some have paid for the heightened military alert with their lives, including Randa al-Hindi, 45, and her 2-year-old daughter, Noor. Returning home from a relative's wedding, they were shot dead last Saturday as their truck, in a foggy dawn, approached Israeli Army outposts around the isolated Gaza settlement of Netzarim. The army at first denied that its troops had opened fire, then said they had fired warning shots after spotting suspicious people. An army investigation found that soldiers had violated the army's firing regulations. The soldiers involved will face disciplinary hearings, an army spokesman said. The curfew had been temporarily lifted here on Thursday when Mr. Abu Zahra, 34, was shot. The Israeli Army said today that it was investigating. The army said that on Thursday afternoon, two armored vehicles were moving through the downtown area when one hit a light pole and became stuck. A crowd gathered, and Palestinians threw firebombs and then opened fire, prompting the soldiers to fire back, the army said. Witnesses here contradicted that account. Said Shawqi Dahla, a photographer for the official Palestinian news agency, was with Mr. Abu Zahra when they spotted the armored vehicle, about 150 feet down Salahadin Street. "We thought it was a good picture," he recalled from a hospital bed here. With the curfew lifted, Palestinians were moving through the streets, Mr. Dahla said, but there had been no gunplay or other violence. The two men began taking photographs, Mr. Dahla said. Both wore vests marked Press, though only Mr. Dahla's was bulletproof. One of the armored vehicles began shooting, he said. Mr. Dahla was shot in the left shin, Mr. Abu Zahra in the right thigh. The journalists managed to reach cover in a nearby hair salon, its gray stone door frame today still marked with Mr. Abu Zahra's crimson handprint. No ambulance could reach them, said Mr. Dahla and Ali Samoudi, a Reuters television cameraman who arrived within minutes. After about half an hour, a taxi carried them to Jenin Hospital, the witnesses said. The large-caliber bullet that struck Mr. Abu Zahra had opened a grapefruit-size wound in his right thigh, destroying more than two inches of his femoral artery, said the surgeon who operated on him, Nihal Sawalha. "It was a very big wound," she said. "There was almost no blood in his body." Mr. Abu Zahra's heart and breathing stopped as he arrived at the hospital, Dr. Sawalha said. She resuscitated and stabilized him. But this morning, after two heart attacks, he died. Mr. Abu Zahra often called some foreign journalists he met in Jenin to update them on events here, in hopes of drawing attention to the city's plight and perhaps getting a little work. He telephoned one reporter last month to describe how Israeli soldiers had seized his father's house for a night, searching it and using it as their headquarters to question the neighbors in what he called "a kind of violence and humiliation." He loved journalism, his family said, and he carried three press identification cards, including an Israeli-issued card that expired in 1996. He started his own newspaper that year, calling it simply Jenin. His father, Subhi Abu Zahra, a retired English teacher, proudly displayed copies today. Imad Abu Zahra interviewed an elderly resident about the city's heritage, and he published another story about a local artist. But while he criticized Israel's occupation of the West Bank, he also criticized the mayor of Jenin, and for that he was jailed and his paper shut down, his relatives and others here said. Mr. Abu Zahra had just been awarded a fellowship to study television journalism in England, his family said, and he planned to leave Jenin at the end of the month. But his relatives had no doubt that he would have returned to cover life here. "He was belonging to his city, intimately," said his father, his voice steady but his eyes red. Today, in the town of Deir al Balah in the central Gaza Strip, Israeli forces exchanged fire with Palestinians while arresting wanted men, the army said. Palestinian officials said Israeli soldiers had opened fire on a police station there, killing one policeman and Muain al-Adaini, 13. In the West Bank, Palestinian security officials said Jamal Arrar, 37, died after he was shot by Israeli troops near Qalqilya. Arabs' Statehood Plan CAIRO, July 12 — The Arab states, dismayed that the United States has basically ignored their call for a specific timetable for defusing Arab-Israeli violence, will propose a two-year plan for the establishment of a Palestinian state, senior Arab officials said today. The proposal will be made next week during a series of meetings that the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia plan to hold with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others at the United Nations and in Washington. ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== July 13, 2002 Silencing a Palestinian Moderate By ANTHONY LEWIS hy would Israel shut down the office of the leading Palestinian moderate? Many asked that question when Israeli police acted this week against Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al Quds University and the Palestine Liberation Organization's designated representative in Jerusalem. They carted off his files and changed the lock on the door. Mr. Nusseibeh has been a voice for peace over many years. In 1988, before a two-state solution was policy on either side, he told me that Palestinians should say to Israel: "We don't want to destroy your state, but we want our own state alongside." Last fall he said Palestinians should give up their claim of a right to return to homes in Israel. In short, he is the perfect example of the new kind of leadership, peaceful and pragmatic, that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and President Bush have said the Palestinians must have before there can be political negotiations on an end to the conflict. Why target him? The answer is that important elements in the Israeli government do not want a real two-state solution and do not want political negotiations with a reformed Palestinian leadership. They prefer the present situation: the West Bank occupied or tightly controlled by Israel, with an increasing number of Jewish settlers. The last thing they want is a respected Palestinian interlocutor. The police raid was ordered by Uzi Landau, minister of public security in the Sharon government. A hard-line member of the Likud Party, Mr. Landau opposed the Oslo agreement, with its call for gradual Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory in favor of Palestinian control. Jerusalem is a second part of the disinclination to negotiate. Mr. Landau and others on the political right oppose giving up any part of Israel's claimed sovereignty over greater Jerusalem. But Palestinians say they must have the capital of their state in East Jerusalem, which is overwhelmingly Palestinian in population. No Palestinian leader would, or politically could, accept a final agreement without at least a small, symbolic Palestinian piece of Jerusalem. The previous Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, recognized as much at Camp David two years ago when he offered the Palestinians sovereignty over parts of East Jerusalem. Israelis like Mr. Landau who say they will refuse to negotiate about Jerusalem are in effect saying there will be no negotiations. Mr. Landau said Mr. Nusseibeh's role as Jerusalem representative of the P.L.O. was an effort to "undermine Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem." Mr. Nusseibeh has no power there, but he is visible. And he comes from a family that has been prominent in Jerusalem for centuries. The Nusseibehs hold the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, given to them by the quarreling Christian sects because they could not agree on which should have them. Where does Prime Minister Sharon stand on these questions? He did not tell Mr. Landau to move against Sari Nusseibeh. But given the positions he has stated frequently, there is no reason to think that he opposed the police raid or disagreed with its objectives. Mr. Sharon has made clear that his idea of a "Palestinian state," if he ever agreed to its creation, is very different from the viable state that international negotiators have had in mind. He envisages islands of Palestinian territory, not contiguous, surrounded by Israeli settlements, highways and military units. It would not include any part of Jerusalem. Mr. Sharon and Mr. Landau did not worry about United States reaction to the Nusseibeh raid. They believe they have carte blanche from President Bush to act as they wish against the Palestinians. Mr. Bush's recent speech really withdrew the United States from an active role for the moment. So Israel felt no sting from a White House statement that the Nusseibehr>Palestinian suicide bomber. Rather than being motivated by revenge and hatred, Nurit Elhanan and her husband Rami, both 52, are fighting for peace. They are campaigning for an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, calling it a cancer that is feeding terror. Nurit, a doctor of language at Israel's Hebrew University, said: "No real mother would ever think of consoling herself with the killing of another mother's child. "Israel is becoming a graveyard of children. The Holy Land is being turned into a wasteland." Graphic designer Rami agrees: "If an Israeli child is killed and the next day a Palestinian child is killed, it's no solution. "Our daughter was killed because of the terror of Israeli occupation. Every innocent victim from both sides is a victim of the occupation. The occupation is the cancer feeding Palestinian terror." Last week, following two suicide bt Seattle mosques for possible ties to Al Qaeda, a lawyer for a former mosque member said today. "The grand jury is looking into a lot of things," said the lawyer, Robert Leen, who declined to be specific. Mr. Leen confirmed the inquiry in an interview, after The Seattle Times reported today that investigators here had identified a half-dozen core members of the group but had gathered information on more than 100 others who had dealings with one of the mosques, Dar-us-Salaam. The newspaper said members of the group had ties to Abu Hamza al-Masri, a suspected Qaeda recruiter who was born in Egypt, runs a London mosque and is wanted in Yemen on terrorism charges. Mr. Masri told The Associated Press after the Sept. 11 attacks that it would be a blessing if God destroyed the United States. Only today, he attended a London meeting of several militant Muslim leaders, who joined in condemning the United States. The Times also said federal investigators believed that the Seattle group might have scouted a ranch near tiny Bly, Ore., in the fall of 1999 as a possible site for a terrorist training camp. Bly is in Klamath County, whose sheriff, Tim Evinger, said today that the ranch had "never been off the radar screen of the joint terrorism task force" led by the Portland office of the F.B.I. He declined to give details. Mr. Leen, the lawyer who confirmed the inquiry, represents Semi Osman, 32, who is charged with trying to obtain citizenship fraudulently and with owning a handgun whose serial number was removed. Mr. Osman was born in Sierra Leone, holds a British passport and has lived in the United States since the late 1980's, Mr. Leen said. Mr. Osman formerly attended the Dar-us-Salaam mosque, which closed after being damaged in an earthquake in February 2001. It is members of that mosque, and of one that opened nearby after the earthquake, who have been under investigation, Mr. Leen said. The F.B.I. and the United States attorney's office here declined to comment. But in Bly, Kelly Peterson, a local truck driver and cowboy who previously trained horses for the ranch's owner, Ivan Fisher, said Mr. Osman lived at the ranch with a woman and two children for about three months in 1999. Mr. Peterson and other Bly residents said Mr. Osman had been known around town as Sammy and had stood out in his tunic and skullcap. Mr. Peterson said that he had heard gunfire at the ranch but that "people fire guns around here all the time." He said he had seen nothing out of the ordinary there. Regarding Mr. Osman's stay at the ranch, Mr. Leen, his lawyer, said, "I don't think your information is inaccurate." Mr. Leen was clearly familiar with the ranch, volunteering the name of Mr. Fisher, the owner, and saying, "Ivan Fisher raised sheep there, that's true." Mr. Leen said Mr. Osman had refused to cooperate with investigators. He said that Mr. Osman was not a terrorist but that "it's true he was a member of a mosque where it's clear there were some things going on that probably bear some investigation." A spokeswoman for the Seattle Police Department, Deanna Nollette, said several people at the Dar-us-Salaam mosque told officers who investigated a 1998 assault that a large number of weapons were stored inside the building. She declined to comment further. Mr. Osman was arrested on the fraudulent-citizenship charge this May, after accusations that he had entered into a sham marriage in the early 1990's to gain citizenship. Besides the handgun, investigators serving a search warrant found a visa application for Yemen and a passport from Lebanon. The passport, issued in 1981, bears Mr. Osman's photograph but the name Sami Samir el-Kassem, documents filed in federal court in Seattle show. ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== |
| 07/13/02 at 17:27:56 |
| mwishka |
| Re: 2 more |
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| mwishka |
| 07/13/02 at 14:19:54 |
| ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== July 13, 2002 U.S. Peacekeepers Given Year's Immunity From New Court By SERGE SCHMEMANN NITED NATIONS, July 12 — The Security Council today concluded an unusual wrangle between the United States and many other members, unanimously adopting a resolution that effectively gives American peacekeepers a year's exemption from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court. After several hours of intense negotiations behind closed doors, the Council held a brief public meeting to adopt the compromise text. Immediately afterward, the Council renewed the mandates of two United Nations peacekeeping missions that had been held hostage by the dispute — the mission in Bosnia and the one in the Croatian peninsula of Prevlaka. Most members of the Council emerged visibly relieved by the conclusion of a confrontation that had stretched into weeks of tense negotiations between the United States and a growing body of nations. Those nations, including the entire European Union, Mexico and Canada, formed a strong front to resist the American demands for blanket immunity for American peacekeepers from the new court. The compromise resolution drew on an existing article in the 1998 Rome Statute under which the International Criminal Court was created, declaring that for one year, the court would not open proceedings against any United Nations peacekeeping personnel from countries that do not accept the court. The Council would have to renew the request after that. For the Bush administration, the resolution was a retreat from its initial demands for blanket immunity with almost automatic annual renewal. For the other members, simply allowing the Security Council to interpret an existing international treaty was a concession. In the end, both sides claimed to have satisfied their core demands. Americans had relative immunity for a year, the Europeans maintained the integrity of the court, and for both sides, peacekeeping could continue. "It offers us a degree of protection for the coming year," said the United States ambassador, John D. Negroponte. But in comments clearly intended for opponents of the international court back in Washington, he declared that the resolution was only a first step. "Should the I.C.C. eventually seek to detain any American, the United States would regard this as illegitimate — and it would have serious consequences," he warned. "No nation should underestimate our commitment to protect our citizens." Most diplomats agreed with Secretary General Kofi Annan that the notion of any peacekeeper coming before the court, which was created to prosecute extraordinary war crimes, human rights violations and genocide, was utterly remote. The dispute evolved, however, into the first public test of wills between the administration of a lone superpower generally suspicious of multilateral institutions and a galaxy of smaller nations increasingly looking to such organizations. In the end, diplomats said both sides had learned that the other could not be dismissed. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador, who was broadly praised for his leadership in the debate as president of the Security Council for July, said the compromise was a "significant achievement" by governments that realized they had to preserve "two very important institutions, the newly born International Criminal Court and its integrity, and United Nations peacekeeping, with the full contribution of all United Nations members." "The United States learned it can't shout loud and make everyone move," said another European diplomat. "And everybody else learned you can't push the United States beyond its limits." Not everyone took that pragmatic stance. Paul Heinbecker, the ambassador from Canada, who had called for a special session of the Council earlier in the week to let nonmembers like Canada have a say, icily declared that the vote was a "sad day for the U.N." "We are extremely disappointed with the outcome," he said. "We don't think it's in the mandate of the Security Council to interpret treaties negotiated somewhere else." A cluster of nongovernmental organizations supporting the international court also expressed disappointment with the result. "The Bush administration rolled a diplomatic tank over the International Criminal Court statute via an unlawful Security Council resolution," said Vienna Colucci, international justice specialist with Amnesty International. But French diplomats, who had led the resistance to the American demands, said they were satisfied. "For us, what was paramount was the authority of the newborn International Criminal Court, and it seems to us that the result which we just adopted is absolutely in line with the Statute of Rome," said Jean-David Levitte, the French representative. The key to winning over the resisters, diplomats said, was America's agreement to move toward the actual provisions of the treaty, rather than demanding blanket immunity. The final compromise declares that "if a case arises" involving current or former peacekeeping officials from countries that do not subscribe to the court, the court will not begin any investigation or prosecution over the next 12 months. A similar provision exists in the Rome Statute, allowing France and other members to declare that the treaty had not been tampered with. ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== July 13, 2002 An Arab Poet Who Dares to Differ By ADAM SHATZ ERLIN — "If I had to choose one word to describe myself, it would be peasant," the poet known as Adonis said recently in his cozy office at the Institute for Advanced Studies here. It is an uncharacteristic note of humility, coming from a man who renamed himself after the Greek fertility god and who is widely considered the Arab world's greatest living poet. Adonis (pronounced AH-doh-nees) was born Ali Ahmad Said to farmers who raised him in a Syrian village without electricity. But the only patch of land this urbane, irreverent man has cultivated is the garden of language. Wearing a tweed jacket and a button-down blue shirt, Adonis, 72, has a wild shock of hair, a grizzled face, clever eyes that always seem to be reaching for their target, and the light step of someone who has been on the move for nearly a half century. Small and excitable, he can shift in a moment from literary theory to literary gossip. Some Arab poets are more popular than Adonis — Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, for instance — but none are more admired. A pioneer of the prose poem, he has played a role in Arab modernism comparable to T. S. Eliot's in English-language poetry. The literary and cultural critic Edward Said calls him "today's most daring and provocative Arab poet." The poet Samuel Hazo, who translated Adonis's collection "The Pages of Day and Night," said, "There is Arabic poetry before Adonis, and there is Arabic poetry after Adonis." Experimental in style and prophetic in tone, Adonis's poetry combines the formal innovations of modernism with the mystical imagery of classical Arabic poetry. He has evoked the anguish of exile, the spiritual desolation of the Arab world, the intoxicating experiences of madness and erotic bliss, the existential dance of self and the other. But what defines his work, above all, is the force of creative destruction, which burns through everything he writes. "We will die if we do not create gods/We will die if we do not kill them," he once wrote, echoing his favorite poet, Nietzsche. Poetry, he said, is "a question that begets another question" — a deeply subversive stance in a region in which poets are often expected to take stands and provide answers. Why is there so much didactic poetry in Arabic? Speaking in French, Adonis gets straight to the point: "It's a tradition, beginning with Islam, which introduced the ideological use of poetry to the world long before Communism. There's a line that runs from Islam to the caliphs to the parties of right and left." Thanks to the difficulty of his work, and his often vehement critiques of Arab society, Adonis is more respected than loved by Arab readers. Adonis, for his part, appears to relish his contrarian reputation, sneering at "the public" as "an ideological notion" and trying to please it "a sign of decadence for a true work of art." Asked about the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who is said to have been chosen over him for the Nobel Prize in 1988, he said, "Mahfouz is more of a symbol than a great writer." As for his rival Arab poets, they are "continuing the tradition with a few variations, whereas I am the rupture with the past, I am the one who is revolutionizing the order of things, and that is ultimately what matters." Adonis, who lives in Paris, is spending the year in Berlin, where he hopes to finish the fourth volume of "Al-Kitab" ("The Book"), a Dantesque journey into what he calls "the inferno of Arab history," beginning with the death of the Prophet Muhammad and concluding with the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. As a member of the Alawites, a Shiite minority in Syria, Adonis has always had an acute sense of being an outsider, and "Al-Kitab" offers a radically heretical view of Arab history, as seen by its many dissidents. "I am among those who seek the ills of the Arabs in their own history, not outside of it," he said. An outspoken champion of secular democracy and a ferocious critic of organized religion, Adonis has published many studies of Arab culture and history, notably the book "The Changing and the Fixed: A Study of Conformity and Originality in Arab Culture." In that volume, banned in certain Arab countries as heresy, Adonis accused Islam's clerics of perpetuating what he calls past-ism — a stubborn tendency to cling to what is known and to fear the new. According to Adonis, even apparently secular forms of politics in the Arab world, notably Arab nationalism and Marxism, are religious in structure, presenting themselves as revelations — absolute truths that confirm received wisdom instead of fostering debate. "We live in a culture that doesn't leave a space for questions," he said, puffing on a cigarillo. "It knows all the answers in advance. Even God has nothing left to say!" He let out a high-pitched giggle, as he often does after saying something particularly ominous or apocalyptic. What the Arab world needs, more than anything, he said, is a "revolution of subjectivity" that would emancipate people from tradition. Until this inner revolution occurs, he warned, Arabs would know only a secondhand modernity, a dangerous brew of hollow consumerism, rigged elections and radical Islam. "There is no more culture in the Arab world," he said. "It's finished. Culturally speaking, we are a part of Western culture, but only as consumers, not as creators." To American readers of Fouad Ajami and V. S. Naipaul, Adonis's criticisms of Arab society may have a familiar ring. But what sets him apart from these men is that he writes in Arabic for an Arab audience, and that he is equally critical of the West, particularly the United States. "What strikes me about the States," he said, widening his arms as if he were conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, "is the richness of American society on the one hand and, on the other" — he brought his hands together as if he were measuring a grain of sand — "the smallness of its foreign policy." Since Sept. 11, some readers have turned to Adonis's chilling 1971 poem, "The Funeral of New York," a vision of the city in flames that has a strong claim to being "The Waste Land" of our time. In the poem, a nameless narrator wanders through the Financial District and Harlem, looking in vain for Walt Whitman's ghost and angrily imagining "an eastern wind" uprooting skyscrapers, "a cloud necklaced with fire" and "people melting like tears." "New York, to me, is both heaven and hell," he explained, adding, "When I read this poem today, it frightens me." The eldest of six children, Adonis was born in 1930 in Qassabin, on the coast near Latakia. Although his father could not afford to send him to school, he taught his son to read poetry and the Koran. According to a well-known story, when Shukri al-Kuwatli, the first president of the newly independent republic, visited nearby Jableh, the 14-year-old Adonis insisted on reading a poem he had written for the occasion. The president was dazzled by the boy's gifts. "Tell me, what do you want?" he asked him. "I want to go to school," Adonis replied. Within a week, the president had arranged for Adonis to attend a French-run high school. From there he went on to the University of Damascus, where he studied German philosophy and discovered Rimbaud and Baudelaire. At 19 he changed his name to Adonis because he couldn't get poems published under his own name. "I am a pagan prophet," he often says, a self-description that, like his name, is the subject of many jokes among his Arab peers. In 1956, after spending a year in prison for antigovernment activities, Adonis fled to Beirut, then a vibrant, cosmopolitan haven for Arab poets, exiles and rebels. With his friend Yusuf al-Khal, a Lebanese poet, he edited the seminal journal Shir (Poetry), a forum for experimental Arabic poetry as well as European verse in translation. "All the poetry in the Arab world in this period was either traditionalist or nationalist," Adonis recalled. "What we were trying to achieve was a rediscovery of the self, against the tribe, against the umma, against all these ideological forms of culture. And though we were often boycotted and accused of Americanism and other sins, everyone acknowledges today that all that is true and real in Arab poetry comes from Shir." In 1968, Adonis created another influential journal, Mawaqif (Positions), which enlarged the focus of Shir by addressing the politics — and the illusions — of Arab nations after their defeat by Israel in 1967. When the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt was at his apogee, Mawaqif devoted a special issue to skewering the ideology of pan-Arabism. The next issue took on an even more sacred cow, the Palestinian movement. "Our project was to put into question an entire culture and history, not just poetry," he said, "in order to renew Arab thought." Adonis said he would have been happy to stay in Beirut, but the civil war there made that impossible. During the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, his bedroom was bombed while he sat with his wife, Khalida, in the living room. A year later he settled in Paris, choosing, as he puts it, the "hell of exile" over "the hell of daily life" in the Arab countries. Hell may seem a strong word to describe the life of a middle-class literature professor at the Collège de France, but the earthly comforts of life in exile, he said, come with a painful sense of solitude, as well as the ever-present menace of the fatwas issued against him. "We are all seen as renegades and anti-Muslims, and we're all on hit lists," he said, referring to secular Arab intellectuals. Meanwhile, he said, fundamentalism is nourished by the Israeli military campaign in the West Bank. "We are caught," he said, "between fundamentalism and the silence of our Jewish intellectual friends." "The Palestinian problem," he continued, lowering his voice for emphasis, "goes beyond politics. It is an ethical problem, and ethics is never on the side of power. Jews and Palestinians must live together, whether it's in two states or in a federation." He paused, sipping from a glass of red wine. "Religion has ceased to be a culture and become a mythology, for Islam as well as Judaism. These are people who do not recognize, or reflect the other, in their language, people completely closed in on themselves. Everyone pretends that God told them his last words." He laughed heartily, but he did not look happy. ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== ==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=<+++>=+==+=+=+==+=+=+==+=+=+== |
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