Middle Eastern Advertising

Migrant worker-directed mobile phone advert. Loreto station, 12/09.

Got My Eye On You

I used to think that London was the capital of European street art. Living in Milan has made me reconsider that assumption. The intensity of the tagging and political postering here is overwhelming.

This detournement, using an anti-military flyer, is located inside a small municipal park a few blocks away from our apartment, on Padova street, in the middle of an Arab-Latino immigrant ‘hood.

Click on the photo for more detail.

The New Anti-Semitism

What do we make of right-wing incitement against Islam in America, and Arab Americans like Rashid Khalidi? Because it is primarily directed at Jews, despite the fact that most find themselves drawn to Obama, how are we to effectively interpret it, and work to minimize it’s potential consequences? Surely there is serious damage being done here.

Such forms of agitation are designed to erect the most vulgar of barriers between peoples, in this case, two American communities, both of whom share roots in the Middle East and bear unique personal witness to that region’s troubles. In the same way that US foreign policy has made it even more difficult to reconcile Jews and Arabs in the Levant, we must recognize that these kinds of practices also tend to inscribe similar kinds of divisions in the Diasporas we share.

Indeed, it is hard to not see in the kind of language used to classify Obama as a Muslim, and Khalidi a terrorist, a perverse desire to bring the war back to the West, and make sure that the same stresses that characterize life in the Middle East also make themselves felt in America as well. It seems that wherever we go, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is inescapable.

-From an article in progress

Jerusalem Nursing Home

There’s a story I never finish. Every year, I write a new draft, and somehow lose it. It’s about visiting my senile grandmother in a nursing home in east Jerusalem in April 1977. Not just any nursing home, but a converted  Jordanian army barracks, replete with falling plaster and broken pipes. The works.

At least half the patients are elderly Arab men in wheelchairs. Everyone is speaking a different language, including my Palestinian Jewish grandmother, who, for the first time ever, addresses me in fluent German, while her roommate, a giant Armenian woman, insists over and over again, in French, that she is Napoleon.

Imagine being transported thirty-one years back in time, in London, at an installation by two Chinese artists, at the new Saatchi Gallery on Kings Road. The photograph above says it. all.

American Oriental

The main supermarket in 29 Palms, California, home to the largest Marines base in the U.S.

Back from Iraq, the troops bring home a taste for middle eastern food, American-style.

The new desert couture: three keffiyehs, next to a U.S. flag in a surplus store down the street.

(De)Programming the Middle East

If you live in the US and need to follow events in the Middle East closely, Mosaic is absolutely indispensable. A thirty-minute long aggregation of regional television news programming broadcast on Link TV, the show is the brainchild of award-winning producer Jamal Dajani.

A Jerusalem native, and a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I spoke to Dajani about his work on Mosaic for the March issue of Zeek. What transpires is a fascinating conversation about the state of Middle Eastern media today, and its increasing importance for Americans.

If you enjoy this piece, check out Covering the Coverage, and Left of the Middle East. Short excerpts from my book, they cover much of the same topical ground as my conversation with Dajani, but focus on US and otherwise progressive Western news media instead.

Covering the Coverage

His curiosity piqued by a recent article in Haaretz discussing the relative merits of the New York Times‘ coverage of Israel, a colleague asked me if I could point him to what I think are the best studies of Western media reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict. For those who understand the subtext of such inquiries,  the editor couldn’t have asked a more loaded question. To make such a request in today’s environment means that you first have to ask why the question is important, and second, for whom.

Since September 11th, domestic coverage of the Middle East has obviously become more significant. Not just because the attacks on New York and Washington signaled the beginning of a conflict  between America and West Asian Islamists. But, also because of how it placed far more editorial requirements on a news media already struggling – and, in the US, largely failing – to meet the complex cultural demands already required of Mideast coverage by the country’s Jewish and Muslim Diaspora communities.

US news agencies haven’t done the best job of striking this balance yet either. However, there is more English-language, Mideast-based media to rely on than ever before to make up for it. Take for example, Israeli publications like the English edition of Haaretz on the one hand, and Al Jazeera’s English broadcasting service on the other, not to mention all of the translated editions of regional sources in between. Americans now have every opportunity to read news that’s potentially more informative.

Though "local" is not always a synonym for "better", irrespective of partisanship and the limitations international media inevitably find themselves subject to, in comparison, few domestic sources, including the ethnic press, deliver the same quality goods.  Does that mean that American periodicals should hang up their hats? No. Because of this country’s obvious ties to the region – economic, cultural, and military, to name a few – US news outlets are morally obligated to continue reporting on the Mideast.

The question is how. Obviously, one answer would be to create content that was complementary with a foreign reporting that is better privileged for information. Another angle would be to concentrate on commissioning work on the numerous ways in which Americans deliberate about their involvement in a particular country’s affairs. Thus, you emphasize domestic political discussions at, say the State Department, or, amongst Americans with cultural ties to said state, instead of the other way around.

As many editors at American news periodicals will tell you, the two biggest complaints about Mideast coverage are always that its either anti-Semitic, or similarly compromised by a desire to satisfy special interest groups. The problem with such criticisms is that they’re not only frequently incorrect. But, most importantly, that they help divert editorial attention away from very real ethical problems, like learning how to properly tailor international news for a cosmopolitan, multicultural readership – during wartime.   

- From my notebook, Nov 1.

Just Say Fez

Oh No’s new American take on Middle Eastern hip-hop is not without similarly single-minded precedents. In terms of actual full-lengths, Mutamassik’s 2005 LP, Definitive Works, is of equally subversive significance. For anyone familiar with post-war Egyptian pop, from the sampled string sections to the galloping percussion, the influence of Om Kholtum’s band looms large on this Brooklyn DJ’s debut album.

Listening to Definitive last weekend, like a lot of records of its kind, I was struck by the ways in which Mutamassik almost plays with Western clichés of oriental music. Particularly the popularity of specific types of orchestral arrangements, and belly dance signifiers popular during the early ’60s, when cities like Los Angeles boasted of a number of Arab-themed club bands.

I don’t mean to suggest that this album intentionally stakes out a critical position in relation to these long forgotten artists. However, if you’re hip to the phenomenon (think guitar-driven mini-orchestras with fez-wearing, Arab-American and Armenian band leaders, not shriners), its hard not to place the new engagement with Mideast music in American hip-hop in relationship to them.

I own a number of out-of-print recordings by several of these groups, but they’re hidden somewhere deep inside my office closet. This weekend, I’m going to do some serious excavation work, and slap them straight back onto my turntable. I imagine that I’ll find them a bit more ideologically complex than I did before.

Left of the Middle East

From an unpublished conversation with a Jewish magazine editor

We have a terrible disjuncture at present, where the critical coverage that we increasingly rely on in this country comes from progressive sources that aren’t as discriminating in their approach to the Middle East as they should be. Being rightly committed to criticizing imperialism and colonialism, they frequently make the mistake of seeing all of the disparate crises afflicting the region as being different versions of the same political problem. It’s like saying that all Jews or Arabs are identical.

Take a look at how the occupation of Iraq has impacted a lot of progressive reporting on Israel: As the occupation has worsened, it has increasingly conditioned a way of covering the country that has assimilated Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians with the situation created by the Americans in Iraq. The problem is that if this is the general disposition of the left press in covering the region, it therefore makes it difficult to explain the very real differences that distinguish the Iraqi refugee crisis from the Palestinian, Kurdish, or Armenian refugee crises which preceded it.

The Middle East is a very big place. Even within the space of short distances, such as that which exists between Gaza and Ramallah, the cultural and political distinctions can be extraordinary. The irony is that this is partially a product of territorial divisions first introduced by Europeans to the area. We ought to encourage the journalists we work with to strike a better balance between understanding the Middle Eastern experience of the West with the domestic differences that the outside world seems so oblivious towards.

Local Knowledge

A discarded book found on the sidewalk two blocks south, in front of a pretty tough housing project the cops always seem to be raiding. Click on the image for more detail.