The latest film adaptation of the Sixties novel helps us understand the contemporary Middle East and its ecology.

“Based on Herbert’s 1965 science fiction classic, “Dune” is a tale of a rising duke, intergalactic power struggles, a precious spice, and lethal spaceworms. The story, which deals with religion, politics, myth, destiny, heritage, environmental decay and colonialism resonates as much with audiences today as it did when the novel was first published.”

( TRT World ) – The latest Hollywood blockbuster “Dune” is a space opera based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name. While written in the Sixties, its current release is salient as the film reengages audiences with several core themes of the novel.

The novel is replete with Arabic and Islamic references, which raises the question of whether the novel is orientalist, in addition to the film, given the resurgence of cinematic orientalist tropes post-9/11.

Also, while the novel “Dune” won a slew of science fiction (sci-fi) awards, it could also be considered one of the first cli-fi novels, or climate fiction novels. Herbert’s work was prescient given its examination of the ecology of a desert planet that essentially stands in for the Middle East. 

Finally, the novel is relevant due to its trope of resistance and empire. “Dune” is essentially a political thought experiment, examining how charismatic leadership can lead to the defeat of stronger states and empires, salient to US foreign policy, whether it is the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh or the Afghan Taliban.

Techno-Orientalism

In a previous article for this publication, I used Edward Said to examine “Slavery, the “robot,” and Orientalism in science fiction.” I categorise Orientalism as a system of communication that essentialises the East with a series of ‘E’s. The West sees the ‘East’ as Exotic, Erotic, and the Enemy.

For example, in the “Star Wars” franchise, there are Middle East-inspired elements with the Sufi orders reflected in Obi Wan and the Jedi. Orientalist flourishes include the Enemy, the barbaric Sand People and the Erotic, the indolent Jabba the Hut, who smokes a nargile and maintains a harem, which includes princes Leia.

“Dune”, like “Star Wars”, is about a band of rebels who bring down an empire. The protagonists of Lucas’ space opera consist of a rebel alliance brought together from far ranging planets and galactic groups, like Admiral Ackbar, the squid-like commander from the Mon Calamari, to the Ewoks. In Herbert’s work, the rebels are the Fremen, who practice a futuristic form of Islam, seeking to free their desert planet Arrakis and bring down a down an intergalactic empire led by the Padishah Shaddam.

“Dune,” Digital, Dall-E 3, 2024.

The references to the Middle East are not flourishes to exoticise the narrative. The Arrakis depicted in the novel and latest film are not exotic, but enigmatic. There is little that is erotic in “Dune”. The Fremen are not the enemy; you root for them as the protagonists. 

The Fremen are led by a messianic figure, Paul Atreides, who engages in a “jihad” against the empire, but Herbert used this term in the sixties well before the notion become associated with terrorism post-9/11.

It is unusual to have the Muslims as good guys. The only other science fiction franchise that does the same is the “Pitch Black” franchise beginning in the mid-Nineties, also examining a futuristic, intergalactic Islam. The protagonist Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, seeks to save another character, simply referred to as “al-Imam” on his way to complete the hajj in New Mecca on the planet Tangiers-3.

I would argue that the prevalence of a futuristic Islam in both sci-fi stories makes neither orientalist. In both cases Islam is not exotic but banal, interwoven in interplanetary daily life.

Finally, all orientalist films essentialise the Middle East as a desert landscape replete with camels and minarets. The desert in “Dune” does not serve as a mere exotic background but makes an ecological argument. The dunes symbolise the vulnerability and precariousness of human life. The heat and sand, Mother Nature if you will, overwhelms this future civilisation and its technology. The theme of insecurity and the quest for water pervade the narrative. In the face of this powerlessness, the Fremen represent a fight for agency by learning to adapt to the desert, not exploit it. 

Science fiction and empire

The revolt in Arrakis seeks to bring down an intergalactic empire, led by the Padishah Shaddam. While Shaddam does sound like Saddam, the future Iraqi president was relatively obscure when Herbert wrote the novel. However, the title Padishah refers to the highest rank in the Ottoman or Persian empires.

Sci-fi has had a long history of dealing with empire and resistance. One of the first sci-fi pioneers, HG Wells published “War of the Worlds” in 1898 as a commentary on the British extermination of the local population of Tasmania, Australia.

Arrakis could very well be a reference to Iraq. The Spacing Guild in “Dune”, a cartel that controls the production of the Spice that is necessary for space travel is certainly influenced by petroleum and OPEC, which was founded in Baghdad in 1960 (albeit the brainchild of a Venezuelan oil minister). 

In this case “Dune” would fit other sci-fi and cli-fi narratives where Iraq emerges as an imaginative space challenging the 2003 invasion. The film “Avatar” critiqued the rise of mercenary companies, where the planet Pandora stands in for Iraq and Unobtainium, like the Spice, is a reference to oil.  

The 2004 reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” portrayed the villains, the robotic Cylons as Americans, and the humans resisting them as the insurgents, forcing TV audiences, particularly in the US, to see the conflict from an Iraqi perspective.

While sci-fi as a genre is escapist in nature, it simultaneously brings our current reality into greater focus. It reveals our current technophobias and anxieties over the convergence between scientific advance and what it means to be human. 

Close to 50 years separate the novel “Dune” and the film. The themes of ecological precariousness, rapacious resource extraction, and resistance to occupation are as relevant now as they were when the novel was first published. In this case “Dune”, a work of science fiction, is also a political fact.

IMDB’s laconic description of Glazer’s masterpiece, based on a novel by Martin Amis, goes this way: “Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden beside the camp.” The film is an indictment of what Hannah Arendt called “The Banality of Evil.”

The British national Glazer, however, clearly has a difficulty with the Zionist Right, which has appropriated the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews as a primary plank in its platform of bestowing impunity on the Israeli government for whatever atrocity, whatever violation of international humanitarian law, whatever genocide its leaders wish to commit.

In his Oscar acceptance speech, Glazer said,

“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what we did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Here’s the clip:

ABC Video: THE ZONE OF INTEREST Accepts the Oscar for International Feature Film

Daniel Arkin at NBC writes, “Inside the Dolby Theatre, many in the audience could be seen cheering and applauding. Sandra Hüller, the German actor who portrayed Höss’ wife, Hedwig, appeared to be crying and put her hand to her chest.”

He adds, “Billie Eilish, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef wore red pins on the Oscars red carpet symbolizing calls for a cease-fire.”

Glazer’s international platform (19.5 million people watched live) and his universalist sentiments posed a severe difficulty for the Zionist right wing. Glazer was saying that the Holocaust was an event in human history, not solely in Jewish history, and that its lesson is that dehumanization leads to atrocities and even genocide. In wartime Nazi Germany Jews were called “Rats, lice, cockroaches, foxes, vultures.” And then they were murdered in their millions by the National Socialist government.

Likewise, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians in Gaza “human animals.”

Glazer is aware that the Hamas commandos who killed over 600 Israeli civilians on October 7, along with some 400 military personnel, also dehumanized those Jews, allowing them to mow down attendees at a music festival and left wing grandmothers at Kibbutz hamlets.

He was saying that this dehumanization, and its consequences in the casual murder of other human beings, clearly needs to be resisted. But how? How? is the existential question of the twenty-first century.

But for the current full-on fascist cabinet in Israel and its cheerleaders in the United States, the Holocaust and October 7 aren’t about universal values, they are about Jews and Zionism. They are antinomian in effect, justifying Israeli troops in committing any action, any crime. They are a get out of jail free card for Zionists. The Right denies that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, even though over 13,000 children have been killed in indiscriminate bombing and another 12,000 women noncombatants have been killed. How else, they ask, could you destroy Hamas? Even President Biden, however, has begun pointing out in public that there are other ways of targeting a small terrorist organization than killing tens of thousands of noncombatants.

Glazer also violated the tenets of the Zionist Right by saying that his film about the Holocaust is not about what people did in the 1940s but about what people do today. His clear implication is that the tactics the Israeli government is using in Gaza must be condemned for the same reason that the Holocaust must be condemned. These actions, while of entirely different scale, are atrocities that spring from a denial of our common humanity.

Glazer’s most controversial assertion was, “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people.”

He was saying that the Zionist far right of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich had attempted to hijack the Jewish religion to which Glazer and some of his colleagues adhere, and that he rejects this appropriation.

This statement strikes at the core of Zionist nationalism, which insists that Judaism and Zionism are identical. Non-Zionist Jews from this point of view are traitors. Never mind that in opinion polling significant numbers of American Jews express discomfort with the right wing Zionism that has come to dominate Israeli politics.

Because Glazer’s brief, historic statement profoundly threatened the project of what some have called “Israelism,” a cult-like induction of people into the Zionism=Judaism and “Jews must support Bibi” complex of beliefs, some Zionists decided that he must be smeared and his reputation destroyed.

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek deputy opinion editor, author of a book on how “woke” media is allegedly undermining democracy, and inveterate propagandist for the Israeli Right, presented a gross distortion of what Glazer said on X:

I simply cannot fathom the moral rot in someone's soul that leads them to win an award for a movie about the Holocaust and with the platform given to them, to accept that award by saying, "We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness."

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) March 11, 2024

Even X’s community comments eventually flagged the post as misleading, though it is actually a horrid lie, and it is hard to understand why anyone should ever again take seriously anything she says.

Her posting was widely reposted and paraphrased on the Zionist Right, in a disinformation campaign attempting to make it look as though Glazer were an apostate and had abandoned Jewish values rather than standing up for them.

An attempt was also made to push back against the red pins worn by numerous celebrities at the Oscars, symbolizing their call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza (which in polling the majority of Americans of both parties desire).

Foreign policy expert Matt Duss pointed to another disinformation campaign:

pic.twitter.com/h2KG6p0SW1

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) March 12, 2024

Another poster saw a pattern:

Lol.

You can watch the roll out of the propaganda in real time…

As a bunch of geographically dispersed accounts amazingly arrive at the same conclusion simultaneously. pic.twitter.com/tJk7NmfI7z

— Conor Hennessy (@typingduck) March 12, 2024

In fact, the red pins were distributed by ArtistsForCeasefire
who said, “The pin symbolises collective support for an immediate and permanent cease-fire, the release of all of the hostages and for the urgent delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza,”

Israeli propaganda, or Hasbara, as Duss points out, has reached the level of irrationality and of sheer crazy that characterizes QAnon conspiracies such as Pizzagate and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space lasers.

That is why we increasingly have to consider what comes out of AIPAC, the Israeli Prime Minister’s office and other Zionist organizations as QZionism, a form of information pollution.

The Denis Villeneuve Dune films signal that the Fremen Bedouins of the desert planet Arrakis are “Muslim” in various ways, including casting Arab Muslims, shooting in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and the use of Arabic vocabulary, drawing from the Herbert novels. The films have been charged with playing down the Muslim-ness of the Fremen, and perhaps there is somewhat less Arabic in their language and less reference to their religion (which in the novels is ZenSunni). But I think the visual vocabulary of the films makes pretty clear that the Fremen are some sort of descendants, at least, of old earth Muslims.

We are seeing the films in a different context than the one in which the 1965 novel appeared. It is a Cold War novel (as I will explain below). We are now watching it in the wake of the Bush “War on Terror” (against Muslims) to which the Republican Party and elements of the Democratic Party in the US are still committed. For this reason, the films do not use the term “jihad,” translating it inaccurately as “crusade” (ironic!) or “holy war,” in contrast to the Herbert novels. Jihad is a sacred word for Muslims, meaning to exert oneself or struggle for the faith in all sorts of ways– ethically, by donations to charities, by speaking out. It can also refer to taking up arms at the order of legitimate political authority to defend the country. Americans might call it “patriotism.”

We are also watching the second film in the the duology during Israel’s war on Gaza, and it is difficult not to see the Fremen as Palestinians. At least it was difficult for me not to see it in that context, though of course Villeneuve could not have predicted this moment when he and his team were shooting.

The massive firepower and awful destructiveness of the Harkonnen forces recall the intensive aerial bombardment pursued by the Israeli Air Force for five months. The Palestinians of Gaza are not Bedouin tribespeople, of course, but highly urbanized and literate. Still, the search for a religious and political deliverance from a brutal Israeli occupation led them to the fundamentalist Hamas, a dead end. In today’s political atmosphere in the United States, the only sort of resistance against occupation that can be lionized is fictional, in Dune and James Cameron’s Avatar films. Despite their own progenitors’ revolution against King George’s despotism, the majority of Americans nowadays, according to opinion polls, have a knee-jerk tendency to identify with the occupiers and not the freedom fighters.

Warner Bros. Video: “Dune: Part Two | Official Trailer 3”

For those who have not read the book or seen the film, I should give a brief plot summary. A set of planets, each ruled by a Siridar or planetary governor with a noble rank such as duke or baron, owe fealty to an emperor, Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. They form of council of nobles, the Landsraad. Flying spaceships between these imperial planets requires pilots to ingest a psychedelic drug, melange or the “spice,” produced by fungus in the sands exposed to effluvia from young sandworms on the desert planet of Arrakis. The vocabulary here is Islamicate. Padishah is Persian for emperor. Shaddam has the morphology of an Arabic word and may be modeled on Saddam (though not the Iraqi one). Siridar is from the Persian sardar or governor.

Shaddam IV grows concerned about the growing influence on the Landsraad of Duke Leto Atreides of the lush planet of Caladan, and fears Leto may make a play for the throne. He therefore forces him off Caladan and orders him to rule the arid Arrakis instead. In this alien environment, Leto is vulnerable. The emperor puts Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the Siridar of Giedi Prime, up to attacking the House Atreides on Arrakis, and secretly provides imperial Sardaukar troops to help in the assault. Leto is killed but his concubine, Lady Jessica and his son, Paul, escape to the desert and find refuge with the Fremen, tribal desert dwellers. Jessica belongs to a religious order, the Bene Gesserit, who engage in genetic engineering, and Paul is a result of this experiment (though he was supposed to be a girl).

Among the Fremen, Paul is given the personal name Usul (Arabic for “principles,” “foundations”) and the title Muad’Dhib (Arabic mu’addib, one who teaches culture). Paul Atreides, by imbibing the liquid derived from killing and harvesting a young Sandworm, gains superpowers, including prescience, and becomes accepted by the Fremen as their messiah or Mahdi (Arabic for “guided one”). He initially resists the temptation to lead them, seeing visions of a vast murderous horde conquering the known universe if he takes that course. But the Harkonnen attacks back him and the Fremen into a corner, and ultimately he takes on the mantle of the Mahdi, the “tongue of the Unseen” (Arabic lisan al-ghayb). He leads the Fremen in a campaign to overthrow the Harkonnens, and to subordinate the emperor himself.

I first read the book, I think, in 1967 when I was an army brat on a base in Africa. It had won a Hugo award the year before. Like many adolescents of my era, I found the story mesmerizing. We all wanted to be Paul Atreides; Denis Villeneuve, 15 years my junior, admits that the same was true for him. I didn’t understand then that Paul Atreides is an anti-hero, who becomes a monster to fight monsters.

Herbert was deeply influenced by T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which a minor British intelligence official and amateur archeologist depicted himself as the true leader of the Arab Revolt during WW I, in which the Hashemite leaders of Mecca rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. In return for their opening of an internal front against the Ottomans in alliance with Britain, London promised the Hashemites an Arab kingdom that would have encompassed what are now Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel-Palestine, Syria and Iraq (the British may have excluded Christians in Mt. Lebanon from the deal). The sons of Sharif Hussain, Faisal and Abdullah, were of course the actual leaders of the revolt, and were joined by many other Arab chieftain, officers and intellectuals. The predecessors of MI6 and James Bond were embedded with them, but weren’t all that consequential. After the war, the British roundly screwed over their Arab allies, giving Palestine to the Zionists, greater Syria to the French, and colonized Iraq themselves. The British government (both major parties) are still dedicated to screwing over the Palestinians.

Herbert was also inspired by Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise (1960), which recounted the story of the rebellion by Caucasus Muslims against the Russian Empire after it conquered them in the nineteenth century. They were led by Shāmil of Daghestan, a Sufi.

Haris Durrani wonders why Herbert, a Republican, was so open to multi-culturalism and psychedelics, but this bewilderment is anachronistic. Herbert was a fierce environmentalist, as many Republicans were in the 1960s and 1970s. Nixon passed the Clean Air and Water acts. Herbert had Libertarian tendencies, like Libertarian science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who was also very interested in drugs for expanded consciousness. And Herbert hated bureaucracy and big government.

Here’s the thing. In the Cold War era, for Libertarians the ultimate symbol of big government was the Soviet Union. And in that era, conservatives saw Muslims as allies against international Communism. The Eisenhower administration was afraid Muslims would secularize and go Communist, so it actually appropriated funds to encourage pilgrimage to Mecca by improving rail links to the holy city.

Much later, Ronald Reagan (whom Herbert admired) allied with the Afghan Mujahidin, about half of whom were fundamentalists, against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

So Herbert’s symbolic deployment of Muslim Bedouins against the iron law of bureaucracy and Big Government (with the Soviets as the biggest of big governments) was actually entirely in character.

The wrinkle is that Herbert was at the same time very nervous about such alliances with religious groups against the Soviet Union, because he feared their irrational tendencies and their coercive power. One of the strengths of Dune is that there are not really any heroes. There are just bad choices. Shaddam IV tried to centralize power and reduce the power of the nobles, destroying Leto Atreides for his despotism. Paul Muad’Dhib Atreides could only fight back by enlisting the Fremen. But in so doing he distorted the Fremen ethic of a kind of humanist egalitarianism, turning them into fanatical zealots and unleashing interplanetary war. People who see the story as fascist don’t understand that it isn’t an endorsement of either of these two extremes but a critique of them, a sigh of despair by someone who believes in liberty and the individual and fears the arc of reality is going in bureaucratic and authoritarian directions instead. I have argued that it is a Libertarian critique of the 1950s, not a celebration of dictatorship.

Herbert clearly admired much in Islam and its history and culture. It was, in specific, Mahdist movements that aroused his simultaneous fascination and distrust. In this regard, Herbert’s Orientalism is distasteful, since of course many Muslims have waged political campaigns for liberty without surrendering to those impulses. Algerians freed themselves from France without becoming Mahdists, and their revolution looks like a lot of other decolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s, whether in Indonesia or largely Christian Kenya.

Ironically, the biggest force for a messianic fanaticism in today’s world is the US Republican Party, so it turns out that the contemporary face of the Fremen fundamentalists is Donald John Trump. Herbert would have been a never-Trumper. One only hopes that our American fanatics don’t pull us into their holy wars.

Former Osage chief says film will force state to come to terms with its troubled past

By: Carmen Forman 

( Florida Phoenix) – OKLAHOMA CITY — Although many Oklahomans were long ignorant about how white settlers systematically murdered members of the Osage Nation for their oil wealth in the 1920s, “Killers of the Flower Moon” will mark a milestone in how the state addresses its complex and painful history.

The Friday release of the film that shines a spotlight on that dark chapter in Oklahoma will force a deeper conversation about the state coming to terms with its past, said former Osage Nation Principal Chief Jim Gray.

“This history’s been buried just like the Black Wall Street massacre,” he said. “There’s a lot of unfortunate events that have happened in Oklahoma’s past that a lot of people, especially people who live in Oklahoma, just do not know. If it wasn’t for this book and this movie, I don’t think anybody would know this story outside of Osage County.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon,” which will be screened in movie theaters across the world, tells the true story of the Reign of Terror — in which non-Native Oklahomans killed members of the Osage Nation to claim their land and mineral rights that held the key to immense riches.

The Martin Scorsese film is an adaptation of David Grann’s bestselling nonfiction book that taught many Oklahomans about the Osage murders for the first time.

Gray and Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell, formerly the state’s tourism secretary, drew parallels between the release of the film and the state coming to grips with the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Many Oklahomans didn’t know the full story behind the Tulsa Race Massacre or didn’t talk openly about the incident until the city marked the 100th anniversary of the 1921 tragedy in which a white mob destroyed the affluent Black neighborhood of Greenwood in north Tulsa.

The nation turned its attention to Tulsa in 2021 when the city marked the massacre’s centennial with a series of events that included a visit from President Joe Biden.

The nation will once again turn its attention to Oklahoma upon the release of “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The 2023 film “Killers of the Flower Moon” starring Lily Gladstone, left, and Leonardo DiCaprio depicts the true events of the Osage Reign of Terror in 1920s Oklahoma. (Photo provided)

Addressing history

Pinnell said he grew up five minutes from the site of the massacre but never learned about the incident in school. Now, Oklahoma is addressing that history head on, he said.

There is a growing cultural tourism movement for civil rights trails and other historical sites that tell the unvarnished truth about the past, he said.

“What you saw with telling the whole story of the race massacre is that it opened up opportunities for the businesses all along Main Street in Black Wall Street and the new Greenwood Rising Museum,” Pinnell said. “It’s not just a mural anymore. It has to be more than that. And with “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I would say it has to be more than just a movie and a book.”

Gray, who led the Osage Nation from 2002 to 2010, is the great grandson of Henry Roan, whose murder is addressed in Grann’s book and depicted in the movie.

The Osage Nation has about 24,000 enrolled members. Roughly half of them live in Oklahoma.

Filmed in parts of northeastern Oklahoma, “Killers of the Flower Moon” stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, and Robert De Niro. At least 24 members of the Osage Nation and their supporters were murdered during the Reign of Terror, although the death toll is presumed to be much higher.

Scorsese and others producing the film worked closely with members of the Osage Nation, including Gray, to tell the story of the serial murders in a culturally sensitive manner.

When the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this summer, Osage Nation Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear said his people still suffer from the tragedy “to this very day.” But he said working with Scorsese and his team “restored trust” that the director would tell the story appropriately.

Oklahoma Film and Music Office Director Jeanette Stanton praised the director for working closely with members of the tribe to ensure the film’s authenticity.

“Obviously, it’s a story that needs to be told,” she said. “It’s part of our history.”

Gray said it can be difficult to talk about the Reign of Terror when Oklahoma’s 38 other Native American tribes have similarly horrific stories.

Trail of Tears

The federal government forced the Five Tribes to move from their ancestral homelands to Oklahoma before it became a state through a series of arduous marches known as the Trail of Tears.

“We have to make peace with this past of ours and, in some way, move forward with the knowledge that something’s happened that should never be repeated,” Gray said.

Local historian and attorney Bob Burke said allegations of non-Natives breaking the law to steal money from Indigenous Oklahomans in the years after statehood are not new.

Although not taught in schools, Oklahoma’s history is full of stories about the estates of Native American children being stolen and efforts to appoint guardians for Indigenous adults who became wealthy due to oil, he said.

Kate Barnard, Oklahoma’s first commissioner of charities and corrections and the first woman to win statewide elected office, investigated hundreds of cases of wrongdoing involving appointed guardians who stole from the Native children they were supposed to protect, Burke said.

“This part of Oklahoma history is sad and unsettling,” Burke said. “If the movie causes Oklahomans to pause and reflect upon what happened to our fellow citizens a century ago, that is good.”

This story is republished from the Oklahoma Voice, an affiliate, like the Phoenix, of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

 

Carmen Forman

Carmen covers state government, politics and health care from Oklahoma City. A Norman native, she previously worked in Arizona and Virginia before she began reporting on the Oklahoma Capitol.

 

Via Florida Phoenix

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Gaza-based author contemplates creativity beyond the Israeli blockade’s daily misery.

Written byWe Are Not Numbers

 

This story was first published by We Are Not Numbers.  It was written by Dana Besaiso. An edited version is republished here, under a content-sharing agreement. All photos have been shared from Instagram with the permission of the photographer Mohammad Zaanoun.

( Globlvoices.org) – They say misery breeds great art. From John Keats’s powerful poems about his struggle with illness and death, to Vincent van Gogh, who channeled his battle with mental illness into his dramatic and intense paintings, those who suffer can infuse their emotions and experiences into art that holds exceptional power and meaning for the world. The dilemmatic question that comes to mind is: what happens to art when the misery is gone?

Misery as normal

 

For as long as I can remember, my story alongside every other Palestinian’s has been filled with sorrowful events. Even the cheerful and happy ones are, in some way or another, coated with misery.

Whether it’s that girl preparing for her wedding in Gaza, that youth who migrated to secure a better future, or that very old lady sitting on her couch with the key to what was once her home — before the Israeli forces dispossessed her out of it — hanging from her necklace. Her hopes of returning to her house diminish as she watches the repeated Israeli military attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque on her TV.

When my eldest sister, Rasha, graduated with her master’s degree from the United Kingdom, my family and I couldn’t be there to witness her achievement because of the travel restrictions on residents of the Gaza Strip. We had to experience it through photos and videos. Yet, I still considered myself and my family lucky that at least one of us made it!

In the meantime, most of her international friends’ families managed to attend because, for them, it was as easy as booking a ticket and getting on the airplane. We had only dreamed of seeing an airplane, much less flying in one.

Growing up under miserable circumstances

Since I was born, life has been tainted with agony. Growing up in Gaza, we bore witness to destruction, murder, and countless escalations, that we became nicknamed atfal horoob (“children of wars”). We even joke around and say we graduated with a “bachelor’s degree in war,” as we have officially survived four Israeli aggressions, in addition to numerous attacks.

We got so used to moving on after these Israeli escalations that we started believing it was the norm. We carry our losses, sadness, and grief, and keep moving on with our lives. We return to work or school with the heavy baggage of emotions on our backs. Life must go on.

In May 2021, we faced one of the ugliest and most horrifying Israeli aggressions. The 11-day attack resulted in the deaths of 232 Palestinian civilians, including 65 children, over 1,900 injured, and 1,447 housing units in Gaza demolished, leaving countless individuals with no shelter.

I considered myself one of the lucky ones back then. After that escalation, I struggled with survivor’s guilt — a mental response to an event in which someone else experiences loss but you do not.

“Why me?” I would ask myself. “Why did I survive when so many didn’t?” These thoughts haunted me for a while. I had spent each of the 11 nights saying my goodbyes to my family and friends because death was so close.

I considered myself lucky because I didn’t lose someone close to me, didn’t lose my home, or my identity.

And then, life went back to normal — or as normal as it can be.

Misery is part of our daily lives

 

Sad stories are etched in our DNA. I grew up listening to the stories of our grandparents and how they were displaced from their homes during the Nakba of 1948 and Naksa of 1967. I heard about the horrific massacres that happened before I was born, such as the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948, the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, and many more.

These anecdotes are not just part of our history, but rather a part of our daily lives. We face the brutality of the occupation, whether it is the aggression on Gaza or the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, such as in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and Silwan neighborhoods, and others.

I got so used to these stories that I stopped seeing the bigger picture. The continuous and repeated tragedies that affect almost all Palestinians made me lose perspective that this life is not normal.

It is not normal to have an entire family removed from the civil registry because they all died in an Israeli bombing. It is not normal to be denied your childhood because you were locked up in an Israeli prison since you were 13 for a crime you didn’t commit, like Ahmed Manasra.

It is not normal to be traumatized by the sound of a shutting door because it reminds you of the sound of bombing. And it is not normal to lose your four-year-old son, such as Tamim Dawood, because his heart couldn’t handle the sound of F-16s dropping bombs on his neighbors.

What will happen if the misery lifts?

 

I am struggling with the fear that if, inshallah, the Palestinian reality changes for the better, I might lose the inspiration to write. As a person who has lived her life in constant terror, my passion for writing stems from the ongoing struggle to advocate for my fundamental human rights.

So, the question remains: Will I be able to create happy stories that are not rooted in Palestinian misery? Will we ever write cheerful stories? Ones that talk about happiness and success? Ones where people are genuinely happy without mentioning the “in spite of” in the middle of it?

Will I ever write a story about a mother enjoying her son’s wedding without noting that it happened despite the Israeli forces recently demolishing their home before their eyes?

I can only hope that there will come a day when we, Palestinians, no longer have to ask these questions, because we are no longer burdened by misery. We will learn for ourselves whether there is a trade-off in terms of creativity, and whether it is worth it.

 

Featured Image: Palestinian artist Maha Al-Dayya has finished painting artworks of the houses that were destroyed by Israeli planes during the repeated wars on Gaza, July 8, 2023, Gaza Gity. Photo by Mohammad Zaanoun, used with permission.

Via Globlvoices.org

The Bridge features personal essays, commentary, and creative non-fiction that illuminate differences in perception between local and international coverage of news events, from the unique perspective of members of the Global Voices community. Views expressed do not necessarily represent the opinion of the community as a whole. All Posts

 

Written byWe Are Not Numbers

The dean of the Egyptian archeological establishment, Zahi Hawass, spoke out against what he characterized as the appropriation of Egyptian history by American Afro-centrism, in which African-Americans attempt to claim Pharaonic Egypt as a key part of their heritage. An Egyptian lawyer sued Netflix, apparently for libeling the Egyptian nation, and for a while change.org carried a petition against the series that garnered tens of thousands of signatures before it was dropped. There have been social media wars over the issue.

The problems with this controversy are myriad, but they derive in large part from the unsatisfactory category of “race,” and from imposing contemporary understandings of race on ancients.

There are no biological races in the sense that most people understand the phrase nowadays. Homo Sapiens is only about 200,000 or 300,000 years old and has not had time to diversify very much. Moreover, there has been constant gene exchange and intermarriage across groups. A German essayist in the early 19th century said that Germans were fortunate to be a “pure” race. but there are no such things, and that guy was a jerk. Archeologists working among bones in a quarry of ancient Rome found a skeleton belonging to a Chinese or other East Asian man. If he married locally and had children, I guarantee you all Italians are now descended from him. Outward appearance or phenotype is often focused on for describing race, but that is determined by a very small number of genes and it reflects adaptations to climate and UV ray exposure, and can change in as little as 13,000 years when people move to a new place.

As I have pointed out, Ben Franklin in the 18th century did not consider Germans white.

In the early 20th century there were all kinds of disputes over “whiteness.” Some officials saw Lebanese as “Asiatic” and as part of a “yellow peril,” though the courts ultimately accepted Arabs as “white.” An Indian man sued to be allowed to marry a white woman because he was an Aryan and was turned down by the judge. Some people from Appalachia are from a mixed-race group called Melungeons. I may have a bit of Melungeon in my family tree.

In the United States and Britain there is an unfortunate binary of black and white, which is not true in Brazil, where a spectrum of racial appearances is recognized. People with any African heritage at all, no matter how small, are called Black in the U.S. (Except that at least 5% of self-described “whites” in the Deep South actually have some recent African ancestry.)

In Britain things are even more complex. I was living in London in the 1980s and was shocked when an Indian or Pakistani man on television said, “we Blacks.” In the US South Asians nowadays are typically grouped with East Asians as “Asians” and wouldn’t be called Black.

Zahi Hawass argues that Cleopatra, being a descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s generals (Ptolemy) was a Macedonian Greek.

Well, she certainly was. But one of her maternal ancestors was Persian and for all we know her grandmother or mother was Egyptian. She was reported to be the only Ptolemy who spoke the Egyptian language, which may well point to an Egyptian mother.

Mustafa Amin laments that Jada Pinkett Smith has made her “black” rather than “white,” and says that since she was Greek she would have been “blonde.” In other words, he has adopted into Egyptian Arabic American racial categories.

Even if Cleopatra’s mother was Egyptian, of course, it would not make her Black.

A recent genetic study of Egyptians in the ancient period in middle Egypt found that in the 2,000 years before Christ, these Egyptians were closely related to Levantines and Anatolians and Europeans and had much less sub-Saharan ancestry than is common in today’s Egypt. The authors admit, though, that things may have been different in Upper Egypt where there was known to be intermarriage with Nubians.

Ironically, during the past 1300 years Egyptians have come to have more sub-Saharan heritage, about 20 percent. My guess is that this is a result of Islam, since West Africans came through Cairo for pilgrimage to Mecca and settled in Cairo for trade and study. There was also household slavery, with some slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, but it was only one factor among many.

If the question is skin color though, if ancient Egyptians were close to Levantines they would have been olive-skinned. The genetic study said they had dark eyes. Moreover, that they had less sub-Saharan African ancestry than was common in the past two millennia does not mean they had none. Would they really have looked very different from Adele James?

So, people should chill out. Egypt is proud of being African and is a major force in the African Union. Egyptians shouldn’t give in to the kind of racism that is now plaguing Tunisia.

In the ancient world, no one looked at Cleopatra through a racial lens. No one cared what race she was, nor did they have a concept exacly like ours. (Ours are anyway mostly wrong.) She was a powerful sovereign over a country that served as the breadbasket of the Mediterranean. Julius Caesar loved her and had a child with her. Marc Antony also wooed her. They were mesmerized by this powerful woman, who they hoped could help them prove victorious in Roman power struggles. Her femininity, her power, her magnetism made her a significant figure in history. She was likely neither black nor white in contemporary American terms. But she was African, and the African continent celebrates here. Why is it so bad if the African diaspora also celebrates her?

Images of the protests that followed the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Zhina Amini on Sept. 16, 2022, in Iran and reports of the government’s brutal crackdown have circulated widely on social media. This flow of information comes despite efforts by the Iranian regime to throttle internet access and censor information leaving the country.

One effective method the protesters have hit on has been to use TikTok, the video-sharing app better known for young people posting clips of themselves singing and dancing. The way video clips are shared on the social media platform and the protesters’ clever use of labeling have helped activists circumvent the information blockade of Iran’s tech-savvy security services and reach a wide audience.

As a researcher who studies young people and participatory culture – art and information produced by nonspecialists, including fan fiction and citizen journalism – I believe that TikTok is proving to be an effective tool of political activism in the face of severe repression.

Key to its effectiveness is how TikTok works. Each TikTok video recorded by the user is typically 60 seconds or shorter and loops when finished. Other users can edit or “stitch” someone else’s TikTok video into their own. Users can also create a split screen or “duet” TikTok video, with the original video on one side of the screen and their own on the other.

Stitching and duetting

To use TikTok, a protester in Iran typically uses multihop virtual private networks, meaning VPNs that send internet traffic through multiple servers, to route around government internet blackouts just long enough to post a video to TikTok. There, TikTok users who support the protester “like” the video thousands of times, stitch it into other videos, and duet it to then be liked, stitched and duetted again and again.

In the process, identifying information about the original poster is obscured. Within minutes the protester becomes anonymous even as the message spreads. Even if the video is flagged for violating TikTok’s community guidelines, its sharers like and incorporate its duets too quickly for TikTok to remove the original content from the platform completely.

In one video that has received over 620,000 views, Iranian-American attorney Elica Le Bon urges viewers to share all Iranian content to make sure the world keeps paying attention. In another, TikTok user @gal_lynette directs her 35,000 followers to instantly duet videos made by Iranian women as a form of citizen journalism to “keep their reporting – their story … alive.”

Gaming the algorithms

Elsewhere, TikTok user @m0rr1gu tells her 44,000 followers how to share that content without triggering community guidelines violations. This advice includes using “algospeak,” or code, for bypassing community guidelines violations. For TikTokkers boosting Iranian content, this means altering the word “Iran” in captions, among other tactics.

Gaming TikTok’s algorithm helps ensure that the people most likely to share this content can find it. For example, Iranian-American TikTokker Yeganeh Mafaher tapped a recent celebrity scandal’s virality by titling a video “Adam Levine Also DMd Me,” only to announce “Okay, now that I have your attention, the internet is going to be cut off in Ir@n.”

By removing the word “Iran” but leaving Levine’s name searchable, Yeganeh was gaming the algorithm to help her retain her viewers who were seeking Iranian content while also “hashbaiting” additional users who were following the celebrity scandal. Up to that point, Yeganeh’s most-viewed revolution-related video was a history of hijab laws that garnered nearly 341,000 views. The Levine video exceeded 1.6 million.

Yeganeh’s account had previously recorded her experiences as an Iranian-American citizen and attracted followers interested in Iranian culture. After Amini’s death, she credited her followers with boosting her account to the point that she was interviewed by cable news host Chris Cuomo on NewsNation to discuss the uprising.

Song of a movement

A key element of a TikTok video is its audio track or “sound,” often a song that provides a thematic thread across stitched and duetted videos. The sound of many of the videos depicting the events in Iran, with more than 11.7 million views, is the song “Baraye” by Iranian singer-songwriter Shervin Hajipour.

The song’s lyrics are derived from a string of Farsi tweets that detail Iranians’ reasons for revolution. Hajipour was detained because of the song but was later released. “Baraye” has since become a global protest ballad.

Shervin – Baraye |

Worried for Hajipour’s safety, TikTokkers supporting the uprising united in an effort to shield him from backlash by posting thousands of videos directing users to nominate “Baraye” for the Grammys’ newest special merits award, best song for social change. In October, the song had received 83% of the 115,000 nominations, which increased international attention on Hajipour and the song. Baraye went on to win the social change Grammy on Feb. 5, 2023.

“Baraye” and related hashtags are shared resources that help make TikTok a platform for participatory politics. As the world watches Iran, TikTokkers game the platform’s algorithms to amplify Iranians’ videos beyond the reach of the Iranian government.

There are active TikTok campaigns for everything from Grammy nominations to scripting emails to local representatives and global leaders. Videos teach laypeople to discreetly host Iranian web traffic and direct users to local protests. They share petitions for G-7 leaders to expel Iran’s diplomats and the U.N. to hold the Iranian government accountable for its crimes against international law. As state executions of protesters have begun in Iran, the #StopExecutionsInIran campaign has clocked over 100 million views on TikTok.

Why is Iran’s TikTok generation demanding ‘Women, Life, Freedom’? – BBC News

These interactive tools and the platform’s algorithm for promoting content are what transformed TikTok from teen dance app to powerful global platform for protest and political action. While much is uncertain as Iranians fight for change and their supporters worldwide flood an unlikely platform to boost their voices, one thing seems likely: The revolution may not be televised, but it will be liked, stitched and duetted.

This story has been updated to include the song Baraye’s Grammy win.

Whitney Shylee May, Ph.D. candidate in American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The move against the enormously popular actress shows how thin-skinned and frightened the Iranian state has become, as widespread protests continue three months after they began. The arrest came the same day that Iran’s petroleum workers announced that they were going on strike for higher wages and better working conditions. Some oil workers had already engaged in work stoppages earlier this fall in solidarity with the protests, though this labor action mainly mentioned economic motivations. The workers in Asalyueh did lash out at corruption and ineptitude on the part of Iranian officialdom. Rallies were depicted on social media at “Ahvaz, Kharg, Asalyueh and other oil facilities in the south-western parts of the country” according to BBC Monitoring.

The pro-regime Tasnim news service, which is close to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, said that she “has been arrested for her actions in publishing false and distorted content, inciting riots, and supporting anti-Iranian movements.”

Mohsen Shekari, a cafe barista, was hanged on December 9 on charges of waging war on God, of blocking a thoroughfare, and of wounding members of the security forces with a bladed weapon.

Ms. Alidoosti had written on Instagram, ”His name was Mohsen Shekari. Every international organisation who is watching this bloodshed and not taking action, is a disgrace to humanity.”

The government is accused of arresting 18,000 protesters in the past 3 months and of having killed over 500.

A month ago, Alidoosti posted a picture of herself unveiled on social media holding a sign with the slogan of this fall’s protests, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” written in Kurdish. Alidoosti is Persian but was showing solidarity with the martyr of the current protest movement, Mahsa “Zhina” Amini, a Kurdish young woman who died in the custody of Iran’s morality police, who had arrested her for being insufficiently veiled in public.

Alidoosti starred in 2016’s The Salesman which was voted best Best Foreign Language Film at the the 89th Academy Awards. She, however, boycotted the Oscars that year to protest then-President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban visa policy.

The Salesman, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, tells the story of a married couple involved in a stage production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” An intruder assaults her in their recently-rented apartment, and her husband (played by Shahab Husseini) sets out to get revenge, even though she wants to put the whole thing behind them.

The Salesman streams at Amazon Prime and is included in the subscription.

“‘The Salesman’ Official Trailer (2016)”

( Middle East Monitor) – On 1 December, Netflix began streaming Farha (2021) worldwide, despite immense pressure directed at the platform to prevent its debut. The film is director Darin J. Sallam’s first full-length feature and chronicles the coming-of-age story of its heroine, Farha, a 14-year-old Palestinian teenager who possesses a voracious appetite for books and learning. Farha’s cultural background is that of a villager – her Arabic dialect infused with the authenticity often associated with Palestinian grandparents, particularly the generation born in the decade just before or that of the Nakba itself. Yet, what makes Farha a distinguished heroine isn’t necessarily her linguistic veracity, it is her bravery and her desire to pursue her education at a school in the neighbouring city. At the start of the film, she is seen at one with the land, collecting water from the local spring, eating figs straight from the communal trees and collecting almonds in her satchel, still intact and unpeeled. She goes through the motions of her chores in the village, but her mind often wanders into the literary worlds of the books she reads, novels gifted to her by her best friend Fareeda, who is from a city-dwelling family not far from the village from which Farha hails.

The first scenes of the film show Farha as a dreamer, a girl who urges her father, a man of mayoral standing, to register her in the city’s school. Her father is hesitant as he believes her economic livelihood is best secured through the arrangement of marriage and that the local Quran recitation learning groups provided by the Sheikh are a sufficient education. Still, Farha fights for her desire to learn and secures the support of many an ally in her extended family and community to finally convince her father. On the eve of the Nakba, he signs her enrolment certificate. Throughout the film, there are peripheral present-absent signifiers of just how troubling the situation in Palestine has become. Talk of resistance tactics and meetings between rebels and the officials hint that the historical events of the Nakba and its tragedy are on the cusp of eruption. These more politicised characters weave in and out of frames of the film, infiltrating the scenes with reminders, only to give way to Farha’s experience, which remains at the centre. Slowly but surely, the viewer’s understanding expands organically with Farha’s, and we see that this curious girl, who had very little understanding of the depth of this dire situation, is forced to contend with its brutality as a witness and as a survivor of violence, loss and dispossession. In fact, Farha’s father hides her in a closet where she remains trapped throughout the most violent moments that befall her village, and she is left alone to deal with the aftermath.

The film was produced by TaleBox, a production company co-founded by Sallam and producer Deema Azar. Ayah Jardaneh also served as the producer of the film. The film likewise received support from Laika Film & Television, Chimney, The Jordan Film Fund – Royal Film Commission, the Swedish Film Institute and the Red Sea Film Fund (an initiative of the Red Sea Film Festival). It remains a largely Jordanian-based initiative, highlighting the lived experience of Palestine and Palestinians, with support from European-based organisations. On a political level, Farha has depicted the tragedy of the Nakba for the first time through film and employs what the late Palestinian American scholar, Edward Said, has called the “permission to narrate” the Palestinian experience against many odds.

In response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its aftermath, Said penned “Permission to Narrate” for the Journal of Palestine Studies in 1984. In it, he notes: “A disciplinary communications apparatus exists in the West both for overlooking most of the basic things that might present Israel in a bad light and for punishing those who try to tell the truth.” In short, Said’s argument can be summed up as such: despite declassified archives, countless human rights reports, international organisation inquiries and both official and ethnographic accounts of Palestinian plight and dispossession from Nakba to diaspora and from Nakba to military occupation, the Palestinians have been denied the right to narrate their own stories. They have also been denied the privilege of seeing their experience reflected back at them through film and literature and, by extension, preventing them from experiencing the catharsis that comes with artistic acknowledgement and representation. Farha has granted the Palestinian diaspora permission to narrate this story on one of the world’s largest entertainment streaming platforms. More importantly, Farha’s story has been recounted, in numerous iterations and manifestations, 700,000 times by the first generation of the dispossessed. The trauma of that memory remains forever fixed in the minds of the descendants of those who were forcibly displaced – a global diasporic population of nearly six million people and counting – approximately half of the total population of 12 million Palestinians across the historical homeland and outside of it. This population has been classified by the international community, despite its many failures towards it, as ipso facto stateless.

While on the one hand, Farha has been hailed by many viewers as an incredible feat, it comes as no surprise that the film has been targeted by Israeli officials and has caused outrage. Israel’s Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman issued a statement condemning Netflix, stating his belief that: “It’s crazy that Netflix decided to stream a movie whose whole purpose is to create a false pretence and cite against Israeli soldiers.” Though Farha has been screened globally in many film festivals and series since its debut in 2021, at venues such as Dubai-based Cinema Akil and intentional film festivals, including the Toronto Film Festival, the Red Sea Film Festival and others, it is its recent reincarnation on Netflix and its screening at Saraya, a theatre in Jaffa that has caused the most outrage towards the film. The Israeli government has threatened to act against Saraya and has encouraged a mass exodus of subscribers to Netflix. While many regional and international news networks hail the film for its artistic and historical merits, there is also a cacophony of discordant opinions about it, with publications like Fox News and The Times of Israel labelling the film as “terrible” or as “lies and libels”, whilst other major publishers such as The New York Times tiptoe around the film’s representations, selecting its words carefully to maintain its readership. Sites such as IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes have seen an onslaught of divided reviews: either five-star glowing recommendations from the film’s supporters or comments of rage and disbelief from its detractors.

In all the opinions emerging in the now global conversation surrounding this film, there has been no mention of Sallam’s other smaller work, The Parrot, a 2016 short film she co-directed with Amjad Al-Rasheed. In eighteen powerful minutes, The Parrot follows the story of a Tunisian Jewish family who arrives in Haifa and takes up residence in a home belonging to a Palestinian Greek-Orthodox family. Their clothing, blue-tinted walls and Christian iconography, which borrow heavily from the aesthetic and colour-scape of local churches, are left behind by the displaced family. The breakfast and tea on the table are still hot, and the new occupants, played by Tunisian actress Hend Sabry as Rachel and Palestinian citizen of Israel Ashraf Barhom as Mousa, are haunted by the spectre of the family that once lived there and by the constant echoes of the parrot that was left behind and calls out after the Palestinian boy who owned him asking for a kiss. The parrot also repeats “where are you?” and “why are you looking at me like that” incessantly.

Yet, for viewers who are unaware of the Nakba, this imagery and the story of Palestinian displacement remain subliminal. Instead, what takes centre stage is the othering of Eastern Jews who find themselves in Euro-Israeli modernity, one that they can’t quite figure out. As such, by the end of the short film, many viewers would engage in a conversation about the depiction of an intense encounter between the Tunisian Jewish family and their Ashkenazi neighbours, who look at the architecture and structure of the house in Haifa with envy, bewildered at how Eastern Jews, othered and orientalised, had acquired such luck. The film is as much a critique of ethnic relations among Israelis as it is about the Palestinian exodus, and, like Farha, it tells a tragic tale through beautifully directed cinematography and crafted set and costume designs. The pleasing nature of Sallam’s use of pastels, verdure and white stone almost works as an antidote to the harsh emotional blow to the nerves that her cinematic tales have delivered thus far and will continue to do in the future.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

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