Suheir Hammad's "On the Brink Of (for Rachel Corrie)"/More on Rampaging Bulldozers

Suheir Hammad's "On the Brink Of (for Rachel Corrie)" is an elegy for an American activist who died when an Israeli bulldozer crushed her to death as she knelt, trying to stop yet another house demolition. The IDF driver of the bulldozer was acquitted of wrongdoing, ostensibly because he said that he did not see her. Never mind that she was wearing an orange vest and held a bullhorn in her hands.

Whether or not this individual was guilty of seeing or not seeing, the larger blindness should be clear. Why are Palestinians routinely and pervasively denied housing permits, even Palestinians who are Israeli citizens? Why does Israel engage in collective punishment of Palestinians by destroying houses where a family member was suspected of participating in violence? Meanwhile, the Caterpillars keep building new Israeli settlements in occupied territories, in defiance of international law....

Behind the Bulldozer Rampage/The Story of Hosam Dwayyat

In a rather typical way, Steven Gutkin's AP story of a Palestinian's rampage with a bulldozer down Jerusalem streets (killing three, and wounding 45) buries the context in which a person might suddenly decide to rampage with a bulldozer down Jerusalem streets. As such, it creates the impression that this is simply a bloodthirsty madman.

Anyone who knows anything about the Israeli/Palestinian situation knows that bulldozers are not inert earthmovers, they are part of the weaponry of both Israeli expansion and Palestinian destruction. This story does not mention that the man had recently been denied the permit to expand his own house and was likely going to have to have it demolished (and fined $50,000). Here is Gutkin's AP story, then please read on to find Israel Shamir's story of the killer, Hosam Dwayyat, and what pushed him over the edge.

July 2, 2008, 7:28AM
Palestinian uses bulldozer in Jerusalem rampage

By STEVEN GUTKIN
Associated Press

Chaos on Jerusalem street JERUSALEM — A Palestinian man plowed an enormous construction vehicle into cars, buses and pedestrians on a busy street today, killing at least three people and wounding at least 45 before he was shot dead by an off-duty soldier.

Traffic was halted and hundreds of people fled in panic through the streets in the heart of downtown Jerusalem as medics treated the wounded.

Three Palestinian militant groups took responsibility for the attack, but Israeli police referred to the attacker as a "terrorist" acting on his own.

The attack took place in front of a building housing the offices of The Associated Press and other media outlets. A TV camera captured the huge front loader crushing a vehicle and an off-duty soldier killing the perpetrator by shooting him in the head several times at point-blank range as onlookers screamed.

A half-dozen cars were flattened and others were overturned by the Caterpillar vehicle. A bus was overturned and another bus was heavily damaged. Israel's national rescue service confirmed three deaths, and the bodies lay motionless on the ground covered in plastic.

A woman sprinkled water over a baby's bloodied face, a rescue worker stroked the hair of a dazed elderly pedestrian and a loved one raised the bleeding leg of a woman sitting outside the overturned bus.

"I saw the bulldozer smash the car with its shovel. He smashed the guy sitting in the driver's seat," said Yaakov Ashkenazi, an 18-year-old seminary student.

Esther Valencia, a 52-year-old pedestrian said she barely escaped the carnage.

"He almost hit me. Someone pushed me out of the way at the last moment. It was a miracle that I got out of there."

Eyal Lang Ben-Hur, 16, was in a bus when the driver yelled out, "Get out of the vehicle! Everyone out!" People fled in a panic, he said, and the bus was hit an instant later.

The attack occurred in an area where Jerusalem is building a new train system. The project has turned many parts of the city into a big construction zone.

Today's attack represented a departure from militants' previous methods, which were mostly suicide bombings and shootings.

During the second Palestinian uprising, which erupted in late 2000, Jerusalem experienced dozens of suicide bombings and other attacks. The city has been largely quiet in the past three years, though sporadic attacks have persisted. In March, a Palestinian gunman entered a Jerusalem seminary and killed eight young students.

The three organizations that took responsibility for the attack included the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, which is affiliated with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The other two are the Galilee Freedom Battalion, which is suspected of being affiliated with Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a fringe left-wing militant group.

The Hamas militant group, which runs the Gaza Strip and is currently maintaining a fragile cease-fire with Israel, said it did not carry out the attack but nevertheless praised it.

"We consider it as a natural reaction to the daily aggression and crimes committed against our people in the West Bank and all over the occupied lands," said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri.

Despite the Palestinian claims of responsibility, Israeli police chief Dudi Cohen said the attacker appeared to be acting alone.

"It looks as if it was a spontaneous act," he said.

Abbas aide Saeb Erekat condemned the violence.

"We condemn any attacks that target civilians, whether Israelis or Palestinians, and President Abbas has been consistent in his position to condemn any attacks, including the one in west Jerusalem, that target civilians," he said.

Police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said the man was an Arab from east Jerusalem and had a criminal background. Channel 1 TV, citing police, reported that the attacker, a man in his 30s, worked for a construction contractor. Police chief Cohen said the attacker was the father of two children.

In contrast to West Bank Palestinians, Arab residents of Jerusalem have full freedom to work and travel throughout Israel. Many Jerusalem Arabs work in the construction industry, possibly helping the attacker to easily gain control of a construction vehicle.

About two-thirds of Jerusalem's 700,000 residents are Jews, and the rest are Palestinians who came under Israeli control when Israel captured their part of the city in 1967. Jerusalem's Arabs are not Israeli citizens but hold Israeli ID cards that allow them freedom of movement in the city and throughout Israel.

Israel's national rescue service said at least 45 people were wounded in today's attack. At one point, a paramedic lowered a screaming baby into an ambulance.

Wounded people sat dazed on the ground amid piles of broken glass and blood stains on the street. A baby had blood all over its face, and the driver of the construction vehicle was slumped motionless over the steering wheel.

"Where's the baby? Where's the baby?" said one distraught man as he ran from the overturned bus.

Yosef Spielman, who witnessed the attack, said the construction vehicle picked up a car "like a toy."

"I was shocked. I saw a guy going crazy," he said. "All the people were running. They had no chance."

At one point, witnesses said a female traffic cop shot at the perpetrator, after which he slumped over with his eyes closed. Then he suddenly lifted himself back up and continued his rampage, the witnesses said.

Hen Shimon, a 19-year-old solider, said the whole scene was a "nightmare."

"I just got off the bus and I saw the tractor driving and knocking everything down in his path," she said. "Everything he saw he rammed. He had a gun and started shooting at a police officer."

Cassia Pereira, office manager for AP's Jerusalem bureau, watched the attack unfold outside her window.

"I saw him but it was too late and there was nothing to do," she said, with tears in her eyes. "I was in panic I couldn't say a word ... I realized something was not normal, something was wrong."

The mayor of Jerusalem, Uri Lupolianski, said his daughter was on one of the buses rammed by the attacker, but was not injured.

"To our regret the attackers do not cease coming up with new ways to strike at the heart of the Jewish people here in Jerusalem," Lupolianski said.

Here's Shamir, providing some important context.

Heemeyer Rides Again
By Israel Shamir
7-6-8

?This is a human interest story. It could have happened anywhere, but it happened in Jerusalem. Yes, we have Jews and Arabs here, but this is a story about men and women. It would make a good subject for a film, or for a novel, as it includes romantic love, beautiful young lovers separated by prejudice, severe and unjust punishment meted out in the name of law and order - and untimely death.

A few days ago, a young Jerusalemite got aboard his Caterpillar tractor, ran amok on the main street, hitting buses and cars and was finally shot dead by a vigilante. Why did it happen? For the same reason an American, Marvin Heemeyer, did his deed. When a man is pushed too far, too hard, he snaps. One weeps, another one commits suicide, and yet another one takes a gun and shoots everybody in sight ­ or rolls his bulldozer over cars and people.

Marvin Heemeyer was a Colorado welder who, on June 4, 2004, drove his bulldozer through the town hall, the office of the hostile local newspaper that editorialized against him, the home of a judge and others. He was pushed too hard: the municipality had blocked his access road, his livelihood had been ruined, his simple requests were being refused. The young Jerusalemite, Hosam Dwayyat was pushed much harder.

Hosam was born in Jerusalem after the Jewish takeover, and grew up in a village on the outskirts of the city. Sur Bahr, his village on the edge of the desert with its shepherds and sheep, is not a bad place: it is walking distance from both the Old City of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Houses are nice, spacey and covered with white limestone, surrounded by small gardens.

Hosam, like all the youth of Sur Bahr lived in the twilight zone between Jews and Palestinians. He spoke Hebrew and Arabic, had Israeli and Palestinian friends, went to discos and concerts, could go to Tel Aviv or West Jerusalem like an ordinary human being, like you and me. However, on his way he would frequently be stopped, searched, ordered to present his documents, detained, beaten and released: Israeli security police, Border Guards, do this regularly in order to remind an Arab that he is an Arab. For this reason, the dwellers of East Jerusalem hesitate to venture westward, much like you'd hesitate to visit a violent South Bronx.

But Hosam was young, and youth does not surrender easily. Some eight years ago, and he was 24, he had met a young Russian girl Marina who was 19, and they fell in love. He was her first love, and she did not hide her happiness.

?
The Russians are a breed apart in the social mosaic of Israel. Though nominally "Jewish", they have kept their Russian identity, and their own ways. They were not infected with Jewish chauvinism in the cradle. For Russians, Jewishness is a private thing, not a public identity. In the internationalist Soviet Union and in its successor states, boys and girls fall in love with or befriend a person without regard to his or her ethnic and religious origin, and it does not cause a ripple, let alone a storm. Upon arrival to Israel, these good-natured young people are classified by rather arrogant Israelis as "Johnnys-come-lately". They are snubbed and socially rejected. They have little contact with youth of good social standing, while the children of poor Oriental Jewish suburbs are too foreign for them. The Russians do not share the ideals of other Israeli Jewish communities, i.e. military valour and the amassing of wealth.

The Palestinians, especially those brought up in the bigger cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa-Tel Aviv and Ramallah, are closer to the Russians than are members of other communities: they are smarter, behave like gentlemen, and do not look down on Russians. They intermarry, or have romantic connections with them, quite often. Among my immediate friends, a young Russian girl married a boy from Batir, and now she lives in that village near Jerusalem with her new family. Another one had a Palestinian boyfriend for two years, before breaking up for personal reasons.

Hosam and Marina went steady; they lived together for a while in Tel Aviv. "Hosam liked Israelis", Marina told the newspaper this week. But their love was crushed upon the rocks of apartheid.

Liaisons between nominal "Jews" and goys cause much alarm or outright hatred in official Israel. A few days ago, the largest Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, informed its readers that "the Kiryat Gat municipality has decided to act against female teenagers falling in love with young Bedouins and they presented a 10-minute film titled Sleeping with the Enemy". In June, the Israeli army removed an Israeli girl named Melissa, 23, who married a local man named Muhammad Hamameh, 25, from the village of Husan. There is a vigilante organisation called Yad Leakhim that fights intermarriages and conversions to Christianity or Islam, and they are busy interfering with interracial happiness.

Marina's parents received hints and odd looks from neighbours. It was explained to them that "it is not done", that it is "sleeping with enemy". They conveyed this pressure to their daughter, but strong-willed Marina moved to live with her boyfriend and his family. He wanted to marry her, but Russian girls rarely marry so young, and ­ like other Western girls ­ they do not necessarily want to marry their first boyfriend. They still want to flirt with others, while seriously minded sincere young men may well disapprove of it. You do not have to be a Russian and/or Arab to know about this. Moreover, you do not have to be a Moor to be aware that jealousy may cause you to slap the flighty partner, and slap he did. In a moment of anger, Marina complained to the police, and they took away her lover. Marina tried to take her complaint back; at that time she was pregnant and lived with Hosam's parents. "He slapped me when he had reason to feel jealous", she said last week. But even her intervention in favour of Hosam in the court did not help ­ he was sentenced to 20 months of jail.

Jerusalem judges are notoriously anti-Arab; they'd have to be, as they approve of so many unjust acts towards Arabs. Here they saw a chance to break a forbidden liaison of a nominally Jewish girl with a goy, of teaching the Russians and the Palestinians a lesson. But there was another reason, and it was equally relevant. In post- feminist Israel, as in many other Western countries, a woman may not withdraw her complaint against a man. The state provides for the ham-fisted over-protection to women. It is ready to do violence to real women for the sake of "Women's Rights." In an unrelated case, Israeli minister Hayim Ramon kissed a soldier girl. She complained, but later withdrew her complaint. Police pursued her all the way to Latin America and forced her to complain, threatening her with charges of making a false accusation. The feminists witch-hunted Ramon all the way to court, and they still refer to him as a "rapist". So Hosam and Marina could suffer their same fate in any feminist-ridden European country.

Last week Marina, 27, still pretty, slim and blond, bewept Hosam and told a reporter that she was and still is in love with him, her first love and the father of her child she was now bringing up alone. She was angry at the vigilante, a far-right activist who kept shooting at unarmed Hosam. She shed tears for the man Israeli authorities and media had already judged to be an "evil terrorist". For years, Marina hoped he'd forgive her momentary lapse and come back to her after his release. But he did not return. His family arranged for his marriage, and he tried to reshape his life in the Palestinian milieu after his failure in the Israeli one.

This second try was even worse. Once his family had had much land, but it was confiscated to build nearby Jewish neighbourhood. The remainder of their land was confiscated to build the Wall, a fourteen-feet-tall monster that cut them off from Bethlehem and the desert. On what was left, he built a house for his new family, for his wife and two children.

But a Palestinian may not build a house in Jerusalem, even on his own land, and he can't ever get a permit. Hosam had been met by Israeli "justice" a second time, with equally disastrous consequences. They ordered him to demolish the house and fined him $50,000. After that, he snapped, took his front-loader tractor and ran amok in the centre of Jerusalem, ramming cars and buses. He was quickly shot dead.

There are some local specifics, and bulldozers as well as killing of an attacker are permanent fixture of the Arab-Israeli conflict: a Jewish bulldozer driver drove his armoured machine over the American peace activist Rachel Corrie who defended a Palestinian home from demolition and was never prosecuted. Another Jewish bulldozer driver shared with the world his experience of razing Jenin: "I had no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with the D-9, and I have demolished plenty. For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people. I had lots of satisfaction in Jenin". While the Jewish vigilante who killed Hosam was called "hero", Arabs who killed Jewish murderers in Hebron or in Shafa Amr were prosecuted for murder.

However, putting aside le couleur locale, such a story could happen almost anywhere, in the US or in Europe. Some prejudices are common: A young girl could get cold feet right before marriage. A jealous youngster could slap his flirty girlfriend. Feminist judges could separate a young couple. She could remain alone loving him and bearing his child. City hall could demolish anybody's house for being built without a permit or in order to build a bypass. A man could become incensed and mete his vengeance on whoever came his way Death Wish style. And here in Israel, as in your country, we are first of all human -- men and women. This is an optimistic tragedy: normalcy creeps in through the holes in apartheid.

It is not necessary to view every event through the binary, Jew- Goy, or Jew-Arab perception. This perspective is dearest with people for whom their Jewishness is more important than their humanity. For them, denial of the "tractor terrorist murder of Jews" is "another blood libel against Jewish people". They force their binary view onto others. Thus, Prime Minister Olmert and the Labour leader Barak immediately sent their police forces to disturb the mourning family, and, equally devoted to the Jewish paradigm, President Bush, UN chief Ban Ki-moon and sundry others condemned the "bloody terrorist". Even good guy Seth Freedman wrote that "Israelis should be under no illusions as to why we're being targeted by terrorist killers such as Hosan Dwayyat". Their counterparts in Hamas, Hezbollah and the mythic Galilee Liberation also claimed responsibility, or "understood" Hosam's actions as those of resistance. The yellow press of Israel and of Jewish communities abroad invented his criminal past ("the convicted rapist, burglar and drug dealer"), his terrorist call to God and his hatred of Jews.

But this miasma of obsessive hate can't transform the human tragedy: that of an unhappy man pushed too far, whose broken body was washed by the tears of a Russian Israeli girl named Marina.

PS. Only Gilad Atzmon, Israeli saxophonist and writer of note, wondered "why the Israelis are entirely sure that it was an act of terror. It may as well be that the man was slightly mad, he might have had a phone row with his wife or alternatively a soaring dispute with his Israeli boss that made him flip. I would assume that in order to declare an incident to be an act of terror, a terrorist motivation or a scenario must be established first. Without establishing such a motivation we are doomed to admit that we are dealing here with a criminal case that must be investigated. We should as well refrain from jumping to conclusions."

He was right here, though, in a moment of despair, he came to the wrong conclusion continuing "However, the Israelis seem to be pretty convinced here. The Israelis are indeed united, and it is good that they are so united because it allows us to see what the Jewish state is all about. Sadly, there is no partner for peace in the Israeli society Unfortunately, and this is indeed a tragedy, the Palestinians are at the forefront of the most crucial battle for a better world. The Palestinians have been captured in a grave encounter with a psychotic, phantasmic, bloodthirsty self-centric Jewish national identity that knows no mercy."

Not only native Palestinians, but Israelis too, including nominal Jews, are at odds with this Jewish paradigm, or identity. Just as normal women suffer from their feminist defenders, ordinary Israelis officially classified as "Jews" do not need defence from the binary perception priests. While abroad, every man can choose whether to accept Jewish identity -- in Israel we have it forced upon us. Israeli unity is a phantasm as seem from afar; up close, you see men and women with their own preoccupations, and "professional Jews" are even rarer in Israel than elsewhere.

Like Gilad, I doubt that 'Jews', i.e. the people who uphold this identity, will agree by their own good will to any fair arrangement with native Palestinians. But unlike Gilad, I consider Israelis, including nominal Jews, to be capable of such an arrangement. For we do not fight Jews, we fight the Jewish identity, and we can win. If the Russians succeeded in making Jewishness a private thing, not an identity, so can we.

As long as there are Israeli girls like Marina and Israeli men like Gilad, there is a chance for peace. Better than a chance -- a certainty!

No wonder Americans are so misinformed about the conflict.

Nil'in, in the Footsteps of Bil'in/Another Palestinian Town Fights the Wall

I just read about the recent siege of Nil'in on KABOBFEST blog, and I'm struck by how these towns have been engaging in (mostly) nonviolent resistance, as a result of Israel's "security barrier"/fence/apartheid wall (depending on which side you're on). The wall has separated Palestinians from each other (literally cutting through some towns), from their orchards and fields, and from easy movement.

The Strokes' "Hard to Explain"/(Guilty Pleasures Series)

Rock and roll as puerile rebellion, as escape at all costs. Notice the video, how the archetypes of mobility as freedom are fully engaged. I first heard this in a friend's apartment in San Francisco, at the end of a long journey with a Russian poet, from coast to coast. A long journey where words could no longer bridge worlds. This song sent me back home.

Birth/Independence Days: Thinking of Whitman & Beginnings

It was my birthday yesterday, the unheralded number 38--after loving the fact that Whitman had begun his song in "Song of Myself" at 37--"I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,/Hoping to cease not till death...."

I'm reading Whitman these days, partly in preparation for a course, and partly because I like to go back to him on beginnings and anniversaries of all sorts--I recall, as a college student, bringing Whitman into a snowy Ryerson Woods on New Year's Day, as a way to welcome the year.

"Beginners"

How they are provided for upon the earth, (appearing at intervals;)
How dear and dreadful they are to the earth;
How they inure to themselves as much as to any--
What a paradox appears their age;
How people respond to them, yet know them not;
How there is something relentless in their fate, all times;
How all times mischoose the objects of their adulation and reward,
And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same great purchase.

Walt Whitman

Thinking of Whitman writing those poems for his first edition of Leaves of Grass, essentially my age, I was struck by how much Whitman is the poet of the hale, and how remarkable that would have been in time (whether or not he was performing such healthiness!). (And how, again, Dickinson is the ideal counterweight to his magnanimity and brisk optimism, in her exploration of "pain" and its "element of blank.")

How happy I was, then, to find that the first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass was published on July 4th, 1855. On yesterday's Writers Almanac, I learned that "On this day in 1855, the first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass was printed. It consisted of 12 poems and a preface. The printers were friends of his, and they did not charge Whitman for their work. He helped set some of the type himself. 'Grass' is a printer's term; it refers to a casual job that can be set up between busy times."

(I had promised myself to read the first edition after reading Ron Silliman express his preference for it over the later editions, I'm committed.)

Whitman's excesses are, in small doses, delicious. They invite the grand permission, and even allow for self-conscious skeptics to say, perhaps under their breath: O Me! O Life!

How quickly it all seems to pass by.

Emily Wilson's Review of John Tipton's translation of Ajax (Flood Editions)

I have intended to write a review of Tipton's translation of Ajax, but it just hasn't happened yet; this review goes a good distance to describing why it's a timely and unfortunately timeless work--though it doesn't quite say, as it should, that it's one of the first examples of what we'd now call P.T.S.D. behavior (with a nod to Homer's depiction of Achilles' own rage/PTSD). Ajax as ancestor to Timothy McVeigh...

Bright Oblivion By Emily Wilson
This article appeared in the July 21, 2008 edition of The Nation.

July 1, 2008

Human civilization is premised on the idea that human beings should not kill one another. But in war, killing other people must somehow become acceptable--morally, legally and psychologically. One way to achieve this is to imagine the enemy in nonhuman terms. "They," our opponents, must be as unlike us as possible: we can kill them if we see them as demons, foreigners, heretics, dots on the radar screen--or, most common, as animals.

But by denying the opposition any humanity, and therefore making them killable, we risk making ourselves something less than human. The Chorus in John Tipton's haunting new version of Sophocles' Ajax comments on the hero's crazed attempt to massacre his own comrades in arms: "now it closes hoods the head/theft of feet that can move/to thrash for an oar/dropped from a quick ship." The images of hooded prisoners from Abu Ghraib told us more than we wanted to know about how hard it is to look an enemy in the eye. In medieval and early modern Europe, the executioners and torturers were the ones who wore hoods; in Abu Ghraib, young American soldiers were trussing their victims up to look like the aggressors. But is some kind of blinding--of the enemy, or of oneself--necessary to enable one to kill with a clear conscience? And how do you remove the blindfold when the war is over? The hooding of the head is associated, in Tipton's rendition of the play, with the madness of Ajax, which consists of a failure to tell the difference between animal and human, killer and victim, enemy and friend.

Ajax was composed by Sophocles probably sometime in the 440s BC--the decade before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. In this period, Athens was consolidating its military and economic power in the Greek world, forming new allegiances and breaking old ones. The city was also undergoing cultural and intellectual changes: the sophists ("wisdom-teachers") were introducing new ideas about science, society, religion and morality into the public and private spheres, which seemed to some citizens to threaten their traditional values and way of life.

Sophocles' tragedy tells of Ajax--a great hero of the Trojan War, but never the greatest, a warrior associated with old-fashioned valor and physical courage. After the Greek victory over the Trojans, the Greek generals held a contest to decide who should inherit the magical armor of Achilles, which his divine mother, Thetis, had given him. Ajax's archenemy, Odysseus, wins the competition. In Sophocles' play, as in Homer's Iliad, Odysseus seems--at least at first--like the exact opposite of Ajax: he represents brains over brawn; trickery over courage; the new sophistic values of flexibility, cleverness and rhetoric over the old ideal of death before dishonor.

As the play opens, Athena, goddess of wisdom, finds Odysseus, her favorite hero, prowling round Ajax's tent, like--in Tipton's translation--a "bloodhound--snout to the ground!" The image introduces the central idea that killing may erase the difference between human and animal. The goddess explains that Ajax, overwhelmed by rage at not getting the prize, tried to kill all the Greek leaders in the night. But the goddess deluded him, and instead, he killed the Greek's captive animals. The scary, Damien Hirst-like illustration on the cover of Tipton's translation (a color photo of nearly two dozen bloody heads of decapitated horned sheep) seems to hint that killing animals might be just as brutal as killing people. But Sophocles' play is not a call for animal rights. It is ironic, in the classic Sophoclean fashion: Ajax's killing of animals is a mark of insanity--whereas massacring people would have been, supposedly, sane. Throughout the play, Sophocles' focus is not on animals but on people, and on how little control we have over the consequences of our actions.

The most puzzling and memorable part of the play is the central episode (sometimes referred to as the Renunciation Speech), in which Ajax, who is known for his staunch inflexibility, suddenly speaks in a new and moving key. The defensiveness is gone, and he seems willing to submit to time and the gods:

All of everything--it never ends.
Secrets emerge and facts are buried.
Eventually nothing should surprise.
Time breaks
Our promises and our strong will.

His intention now is to carry away the sword he took from his old enemy, Hector:

I'll go to a trackless place
and I'll cover this ugly weapon,
bury it where no one sees.
Night and hell can have it.

The climax of the speech is a series of beautiful, ambiguous generalizations:

the stretch of worst night ends
in the white dazzle of day;
there are winds that can calm
any groaning ocean; and even sleep
in time must release its prisoners.
What else could we reasonably think?

Tipton captures something distinctively Sophoclean in his combination of the clear, almost clichéd gnomic utterance with flashes of surprising, alien imagery (such as "the white dazzle of day"): "the truth has teeth you know," as the Chorus comments later.

The "trackless place" in which Ajax will hide the sword turns out, of course, to be his own body. Ajax has changed only so much: he retains his "strong will" for honor, even when he declares that it is lost. Critics argue about whether honest Ajax really means to deceive his wife and friends here--an action surely more worthy of Odysseus. But deception is too crude a term. This Ajax is both different and the same as he ever was, and the speech is precisely intended to show that mutability and permanence are not opposites but are mutually reinforcing. There is even a kind of bleak comfort in knowing that nothing is always the same:

No one stays by you forever.
Companions will give you false shelter.
In the end it works out.

You might think that the play ought to end as soon as Ajax's companions discover his dead body. But it doesn't. The suicide of Ajax comes just past the play's midway point, and Sophocles lets things drag on into a squabble between the remaining Greek generals about whether to give a proper burial to Ajax's corpse. The tone and even the language, as Tipton notes, "degenerates into petty insults and seemingly pointless bickering." The pointlessness is the point. The end of Ajax shows us a world where there are no real heroes left--or, rather, where heroism and courage have to be reinvented as mental qualities rather than physical ones. In this play, the biggest reversals happen not on the battlefield but in the minds of men. Ajax tries to take on the most dangerous of enemies--Agamemnon and Odysseus--but ends up killing the weakest of creatures: a herd of sheep. Hector's sword kills Ajax even when Hector is dead. The lesson, as Odysseus learns it, is that any one of our actions may have unforeseen results. If you begin a war, or fight in one, you never know who will die. It could be them; it could be us. In such a world, the willingness to change with the times is a virtue. The old code of paying back evil with evil may keep people stuck in a cycle of killing, even when the war is supposedly over.

Menelaus (whose "problem launched 1,000 ships," as Tipton's Chorus comments) and his brother, Agamemnon, insist that the Greeks ought not to bury Ajax, who wanted to kill them all. Menelaus argues that leaving Ajax unburied is the only way to discipline him for his insubordination and restore discipline in the ranks: "But what goes around comes around./He burned hot--now I do." The final reversal of the play is that Odysseus, Ajax's old enemy, is the one who argues that he must be given a funeral. Agamemnon asks, "So should I permit this funeral?" and Odysseus answers, "Yes. I'll need one myself someday."

Tipton, who is highly conscious of the resonances of Sophocles' play with the current conflict in Iraq, includes a number of anachronisms, which anchor the play firmly in the present. For instance, his Ajax kills himself with Hector's gun, not his sword (a distracting mistake is that this Ajax also claims to be killed with "my own weapon," rather than simply "self-killed"); the Chorus compares Ajax to "a fast aircraft" and meditates on "the statistics of missiles." There are more obscenities than the conventions of Greek tragedy would have allowed: when Ajax realizes that he has "murdered farm animals" instead of soldiers, he shouts "Fuck. FUCK!" These details make it clear that we are to see these soldiers as modern combatants, struggling with the physical realities of modern warfare.

Tipton's language is spare yet dense, colloquial yet somehow foreign. His rendering of Sophocles is often very loose, perhaps not always deliberately (for instance, I could see no particular purpose in Ajax's woman, Tecmessa, saying, "You took my father from me," when the Greek means, "You deprived me of my father-land"--patris, not pater). Yet Tipton's play is intended to be not a crib but a re-imagination of Sophocles for our age. It corresponds line for line to the original and uses a strange metrical form, what Tipton calls "a counted line," one which uses one English word for every metrical foot in the Greek. Except for the choral passages and lyric interludes, every line in the play has six words. One might think this system would not sound or scan like poetry in English, but it is surprisingly effective and works as an equivalent for Greek meter (which is based on syllable length).

At his best, Tipton is able to break down the Greek text and rewrite it as if from scratch--digging up and reconstructing the force behind abstractions and alien idioms. His renderings of the Greek term tuche--a very common word meaning "fate," "luck" or "chance"--are a case in point. Tipton never uses the heavily archaic English word "fate." Instead, he unpacks the thought behind the line. When Tecmessa appeals to Ajax to accept what has happened, a pedestrian version of the Greek would go something like this: "O Ajax, my master, there is no greater evil for human beings than necessary fate." In Tipton, this becomes:

Ajax, there's nothing you can do.
There's never anything anyone can do.

Tipton's Greeks inhabit a world where the gods are almost entirely absent, and where there are no powers or abstract forces that explain the course of events. When somebody asks, "Why did this have to happen?" Tipton's Chorus replies, "it just did."

Sometimes, conversely, Tipton creates abstractions where there are none in the Greek. Odysseus pities Ajax in his madness and generalizes about his vision of human beings: "I see that we--all the people who are alive--are nothing but images or an empty shadow." In Tipton, the object of the verb in the first phrase is not "we" but "life":

If you stare hard at life
you see we're nothing but shadows.

Tipton's version has a chilling power that derives partly from its infidelity to Sophocles. His Odysseus creates a strange, alienating distance between the observer (not himself, but that impersonal "you") and the observed--shadowy human life. Similarly, Tipton's choral odes are deliberately "disembodied"--as he explains in the afterword, he eliminated all uses of the first person in order to turn the Chorus into the "disturbed unconscious to the play itself." The words of Tipton's Chorus bear almost no relation to the literal meaning of the Greek, but they contain some of his most arresting passages. Tipton picks up Sophocles' images and entirely ignores his syntax, producing a Surrealist, dreamlike effect:

the night now shot
dawn astounds from tomorrow
while crazy horses wander
the meadows kill Greeks
root and branch

The technique is similar to Ezra Pound's mistranslations in "Homage to Sextus Propertius." Pound's poem includes a number of apparent philological errors (such as translating "canes," which comes from the verb cano, "to sing," as if it came from canis, "dog"). One early reader of Pound commented, "If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him but suicide." But Pound was a poet, not a professor, and he rejoined that "there was never any question of translation, let alone literal translation. My job was to bring a dead man to life, to present a living figure." Tipton, too, is a poet, and he succeeds brilliantly at creating a living, contemporary Sophocles. His version is a chilling mirror.

Even outside the choral passages, Tipton makes his characters far more alienated from one another than they are in Sophocles, and far more directly aggressive. Tipton does not capture much of Sophocles' tragic irony, which often depends on a frustrated desire for communication and an idea that language says more than we can hear. For instance, when Athena asks Ajax about what he thinks he has done, when he is still under the delusion that the victims he has killed were his human companions, she says, in the Greek, tethnasin andres? (The men are dead?). Ajax thinks that Athena is emphasizing the first word--"they are dead"--and answers, thanontes (dead). But of course, the audience realizes that the goddess is also asking whether Ajax still believes that those dead were men. In Tipton, the goddess's question becomes merely sarcastic, not ironic: "So I gather you killed them?" This goddess obviously knows better than dumb, crazy Ajax and has no time to drop oracular hints.

The human characters in Tipton's version yell accusations and imperatives at each other but almost never ask for help. Tecmessa, Ajax's concubine and baby-mother, becomes much ruder and more assertive than she is in Sophocles. An expression of pity becomes "You're pathetic," and when Tecmessa pleads for advice--oimoi, ti draso, teknon? (Alas, child, what shall I do?)--Tipton eliminates the hint of vulnerability: "No, I won't just sit here," she asserts. Tipton also gets rid of the complexity of Tecmessa's relationship with her master by presenting her as a wife, not a slave: when she says, simply and directly, "Now I am a slave," he translates, "Now you hold title to me." Sophocles' evocation of shifting allegiances and dependencies, friendships and enmities and complex social networks, is turned into a more brutal, simpler vision: it's a dog-eat-dog world.

But these characters' resistance to gentleness and frailty still honors something of the shock value in Sophocles' play. It allows, above all, for a riveting, goose-bumps-inducing presentation of Ajax--as the ultra-tough guy, the Marine, who tells Tecmessa, "Here, quick, take this kid away./Seal up the house. No crying./Stop being so damn sentimental, woman." We are reminded that the notion of death before dishonor is hardly confined to the ancient world. With such an attitude, after any kind of humiliating mistake, how can you ever act like Odysseus: give up, bury the dead and let the troops go home?

Alain Badiou's "Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art"

Instead of selectively quoting Alain Badiou, as I had a couple days ago, here is his fifteen theses on art and its relationship to empire. As I wrote a couple days ago, I have deep reservations about the logical leaps he makes, even as I recognize my own longstanding attempts to think about resistance and resistance poetry. There, indeed, is a consonance between his theoretical articulation and what language poets have sought to accomplish...

Alain Badiou -
Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art
1. Art is not the sublime descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and sexuality. It is the production of an infinite subjective series through the finite means of a material subtraction.

2. Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone.

3. Art is the process of a truth, and this truth is always the truth of the sensible or sensual, the sensible as sensible. This means: the transformation of the sensible into a happening of the Idea.

4. There is necessarily a plurality of arts, and however we may imagine the ways in which the arts might intersect there is no imaginable way of totalizing this plurality.

5. Every art develops from an impure form, and the progressive purification of this impurity shapes the history both of a particular artistic truth and of its exhaustion.

6. The subject of an artistic truth is the set of the works which compose it.

7. This composition is an infinite configuration, which, in our own contemporary artistic context, is a generic totality.

8. The real of art is ideal impurity conceived through the immanent process of its purification. In other words, the raw material of art is determined by the contingent inception of a form. Art is the secondary formalization of the advent of a hitherto formless form.

9. The only maxim of contemporary art is not to be imperial. This also means: it does not have to be democratic, if democracy implies conformity with the imperial idea of political liberty.

10. Non-imperial art is necessarily abstract art, in this sense: it abstracts itself from all particularity, and formalizes this gesture of abstraction.

11. The abstraction of non-imperial art is not concerned with any particular public or audience. Non-imperial art is related to a kind of aristocratic-proletarian ethic: Alone, it does what it says, without distinguishing between kinds of people.

12. Non-imperial art must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.

13. Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn't exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this inexistence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art : the effort to render visible to everyone that which for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn't exist.

14. Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

15. It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

Two Takes on "You Don't Mess with the Zohan"/Depicting Israelis and Palestinians...

Here are two takes on how Israelis and Palestinians get depicted in Adam Sandler's recent film/vehicle/ego juggernaut. The first is from David Denby, and appeared in the New Yorker, and the second is from Remi Kenazi, and appeared in Populist America. Critics of such criticisms might say that this is much ado about nothing, that none of this matters, but Kenazi says it's precisely that imperviousness to seriousness that enables the perpetuation of its dehumanizing stereotypes. Read on, and carry with you as a prophylactic when you watch Sandler carry on...

“You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” is an obscene, ridiculous, and occasionally very funny movie, and if it ever gets to the Middle East it will roil the falafel tables on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide. I’m not sure the picture won’t panic the Middle West as well. Written by Judd Apatow, Adam Sandler, and Robert Smigel, and directed by Dennis Dugan, the auteur of “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry,” the movie is about a fabulous Israeli counter-terrorism agent (Sandler) who has a bulging crotch and dangerous hands (he karate-chops Palestinian machine guns into carrot sticks). Zohan, however, has had enough of war and “the hate.” After an epic contest with his nemesis—an extremist Palestinian warrior known as Phantom (John Turturro)—Zohan fakes his own death, leaves the tumultuous Promised Land for the slightly less crazy New World, and settles in a mixed Arab and Israeli neighborhood in New York, where he works in a Palestinian-owned beauty salon, cutting hair. Making the “smooth and silky,” it turns out, is all he has ever wanted to do. He cuts, he styles, and he sleeps with the store’s elderly clientele, who line up on the sidewalk outside for their appointments with the Israeli wonder. Forty years ago, in “The Producers,” Zero Mostel slept with rich old ladies in order to raise money for a Broadway show; Zohan labors on behalf of a corner store, demonstrating, once again, that small business is the soul of the American economy. The movie is agitated into being by Sandler’s pelvis, which constantly undulates, like an industrial washing machine. As for Turturro’s Phantom, he’s not waiting for martyrdom and the seventy-two virgins; he sleeps with a harem of terrorist groupies while nurturing his own commercial longings for a shoe store in faraway America. Eventually, the two men, with armies of émigrés behind them, meet somewhere in the battle zone of lower Manhattan, where the real struggle is fought against a boastful Trumpian real-estate developer, and victory is measured in frontage rather than in fronts.

“Zohan” burlesques a host of solemn and bloodstained issues, turning warriors into sex hustlers and would-be Rotarians. The movie propels many liquid substances (mousse, etc.) into the air; it’s crude beyond belief, and it includes knowing jokes about the way Israelis speak English and make a living in America—jokes that may puzzle anyone west of the Monongahela. When Zohan needs to rush from neighborhood to neighborhood, he rides on the top of a Moishe’s moving van, then hops to another moving van—it’s the Jewish express train. The movie also devotes detailed attention to the curious procedures of Jewish-owned electronics stores, which attract customers with allegedly rock-bottom prices while rapidly (but perpetually) “going out of business.”

In the new millennium, we seem to be getting a genre of profane, sloppily made, ethnically knowing, but good-hearted movies—pictures with aggressively liberal values proudly displayed beneath crummy jokes. As in the “Harold & Kumar” epics, “Zohan” presents America as a multifarious bazaar where gangs of enraged white males who hate everybody are the only people who don’t fit in. In commercial comedy, mutual acceptance is now the hip mode of humor. Future academics will see “Zohan” as un texte obamiste.

This moviegoer has no trouble with lowbrow comedy. The problem with “Zohan,” however, is that it’s like a kid who tells you a silly joke, gets a laugh, and immediately tells the same joke again. “Zohan” invents a few things; then it repeats and repeats. When Sandler plays Ping-Pong with a grenade, or kickboxes an opponent with both feet at once, the movie teases the feats that audiences know are impossible without digital. But, as this kind of joke is staged over and over, the media irony wears off. Digital has become so omnipresent in the summer season that even spoofing it seems secondhand. “Zohan” would have been funnier if it had stayed closer to realism. In the same way, it’s funny the first few times the elderly ladies come out of their sessions with Zohan, their clothes askew and their eyes glazed—as a minor outrage on sexual propriety. Zohan is presented as a saint bringing unexpected miracles into the lives of the broken-down. The hypersexed hairdresser is a satirical take on the old Warren Beatty role in “Shampoo,” yet Beatty played the stud with a rather graceful chagrin. He was a little guilty about it, while Sandler just goes on and on. Does Adam Sandler, sleeping with half of New York, really think he’s Yahweh’s gift to women? ♦

First published at http://www.populistamerica.com/you_dont_mess_with_the_racism
You Don't Mess With the Racism

July 1, 2008
by Remi Kanazi

I love Adam Sandler. From Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore to the Chanukah Song, the predecessor of the Superbad generation has effortlessly conquered the domain of slapstick comedy and inappropriate jokes. But damn you Scuba Steve! If you're going to propagate misinformation about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, do it quietly - or at least in your non-comedic life.

You Don't Mess With the Zohan, Sandler's new flick, takes Hollywood chicanery and stereotypes that denigrate Arabs to an unprecedented level - surpassing hit flicks like the Kingdom, the Siege, and every Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris movie that came before it. I group Zohan with other shamelessly racist action movies because a film should at least be minutely funny to be categorized as a comedy. For the Sandler diehards and hilarity-loving skeptics, I should clearly state: using race and prejudices to engender laughter is not the problem.

Mel Brooks and the creators of South Park exploit stereotypes far beyond anything Sandler has ever done, but unlike Zohan, I don't think insidious propaganda and underlying racism drive their comedy. After all, if this hebetudinous clunker was just comedy, Sandler and company wouldn't have, as the New York Times reported, sought out Arab actors to give the movie "legitimacy." Their search was successful and a few token Arabs showed their presence to innocuously inform the public that it is okay to vilify the crazy towel-headed terrorists once again.

What makes this movie even worse than many of the unfavorable movies made post-9/11 is Zohan's disarming presentation; it is a comedic approach to understanding the inner workings of the substandard Arab people. Like the job stealing Mexicans, the liquor store robbing Blacks, and the HIV infested gays, negative stereotypes in Zohan strip down the Arab people to RPG wielding animals that senselessly thirst for Jewish blood.

From the start of the film, Sandler's character, Zohan, is positioned as the altruistic hero - an Israeli Mossad agent who reluctantly kills Palestinian "terrorists," while forgoing his real dream: to cut hair in the US for Paul Mitchell. Zohan is "brave," "lovable," and "funny," and even his stereotypical chauvinism is eaten up by women (and men) throughout the movie - including his eventual Palestinian love interest, Dalia.

Compounded with played out, corny penis gags, the Israeli narrative is interwoven into the fabric of the film, including propagandistic reminiscences by Zohan's father who recalls the oft-repeated myth of being surrounded "on all sides" by powerful enemies during the Six Day War - a war in which Israel preemptively struck and dominated those "enemies." In line with Israeli and Western intelligence, Israel won the war in six days (and five hours, as Zohan's father dutifully reminds us) - so much for existential threats and heroic narratives.

Other historical revisions include a reference in a verbal battle between a Palestinian and Israeli shop owner, in which the Palestinian proclaimed, "Give it up, like you gave up the Gaza Strip!" This biting taunt, while not as blatant as the common stereotype, infers that Israel "gave up" the Gaza Strip and further insinuates that Israel had claim to it. The "humorous" jeer glosses over the glaring reality: Israel still occupies Gaza's borders, airspace, imports and exports, and has economically strangulated and suffocated 1.4 million Palestinians in the world's largest open-air prison.

But rewriting history (and regurgitating jokes from 1996) is hardly the movie's worst crime. The portrayal of Palestinians as ugly, dirty, incompetent, stupid, goat loving terrorists was jammed down the viewer's throat more times than Zohan's lame hummus jokes. It becomes obvious to the audience why these good looking, suave, kindhearted Israelis have to kill these evil Palestinian "terrorists" - because they hate Jews more than they hate soap.

The most egregious grievance by a Palestinian "terrorist" throughout the film was the stealing of a pet goat. Israel has killed more than 4,000 Palestinians since the start of the second intifada, including nearly a 1000 children, yet the main gripe of these rabid "terrorists" is a stereotypical love for hillside animals. This "inoffensive" scenario is the equivalent of a scene in a Hollywood "comedy" made by a Palestinian filmmaker stereotypically portraying Jews as pissed off about being sent to Auschwitz because they found out that Hitler was going to make them pay for the train ride.

A particular scene in Zohan went beyond comprehension: Sandler's casting agency rounded up a handful of children to play Palestinians throwing rocks at Zohan. What does Zohan do in response to the actions of these soon-to-be terrorists? He gleefully catches the stones and turns them into the equivalent of a balloon animal. One is supposed to toss aside any arising sensitivities and overlook the many instances Israeli snipers and soldiers have shot Palestinian children in the head or taken their eyes out with rubber bullets because of these rocks Zohan takes with a smile.

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The posturing of the noble and affable Mossad agent is a slick attempt to humanize Israel and make the Mossad (an outfit that has engaged in countless operations of state terrorism) look like the valiant GI Joe force in the Middle East combating jihadi thugs in the name of good. But Sandler's character is not only a hero, he's also a humanitarian. There are multiple scenes where Zohan informs the audience that Israelis do their best to minimize the loss of innocent Palestinian life, when an examination of the conflict by Israeli human rights organizations exposes quite the opposite.

Other stereotypes saturate the movie. The Palestinian salon that Zohan gets a job at is described as a dump, Palestinians constantly cheer for the "terrorists," a crowd of Palestinians applaud the death of "heroic" Zohan (which he faked), and the "terrorists" are so stupid and illiterate that they purchase Neosporin instead of liquid nitrogen to make their bomb to kill Zohan. There is no distinction made between Hezbollah, Hamas, jihadists, and terrorist sexcapading sheiks. Furthermore, the film conveniently illustrates how Israelis in the US, as "fellow" natives of the Middle East, suffer the same discrimination and tribulations as Arabs in a post-911 world. Oddly, Israelis are passed off as "brown" and "other" like the Arabs in the film, yet Zohan's parents look like European Ashkenazi Jews.

Moreover, while Israelis are shown as native hummus loving Middle Easterners, Zohan's family is portrayed distinctively differently from the backwards Arabs. Zohan's parents are sweet, comforting, reasonable and accepting from beginning to end, not rigid like their Arab counterparts. Even when Zohan finally captures Dalia's heart, his parents show up in America and warmly embrace their relationship without question - while Dalia and others resist the notion of a courtship between the two and tells Zohan that her family would never accept him. Ah, if only all Arabs could just get to know Israelis and see how kind, generous, and amorous they all are, the sooner we could all sit in a circle singing Kumbaya over s'mores and unfunny Zohan hummus jokes.

The worst dialogue throughout this 102 minute laughless action flick is made by Dalia (played by Emmanuelle Chriqui), Zohan's eventual Palestinian love interest. She serves at the omnipotent propagandist - blaming the troubles of the conflict on "extremists" and "hate" on both sides. She endlessly and vaguely laments about how much "hate" there is "over there," and describes to Zohan that things are "different here." As any knowledgeable American knows, Palestinians and Israelis love each other here in the US; they frequently have bake sales together; they form sit-ins for blind coexistence on college campuses; and have Palestinian/Israeli karaoke nights where they sing their favorite Beatles tunes like Give Peace a Chance.

What Sandler, and co-writers Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel, fail to understand is that before there was Hamas, Yasser Arafat, Fatah, the PLO, or any resistance movement, there was the dispossession of the Palestinian people, whereby 780,000 indigenous Palestinians were displaced from their homeland by Jewish gangs and terror groups. Flash forward 60 years and the Palestinian people are living in squalor in demolished towns and refugee camps enduring a 40 year occupation that strangulates their economy and diminishes any semblance of normalcy or a proper life.

What we are to believe by watching this film is that if everyone would just stop "hating" (which Israelis are depicted as clearly willing to do, while Palestinians resist it vehemently) Israelis and Palestinians could effortlessly live together in harmony. But "hate" has little to do with a conflict rooted in a people's desire for basic human rights and an end to oppression.

In the end, everything ends up happy and joyful: Zohan gets the girl, he saves the block from a conniving mall developer, and the "terrorists" stop terrorizing. But the jovial ending left a sour taste in my mouth. As nearly a dozen "nameless" Palestinians were killed by innocent and heroic Israeli soldiers last week and another report of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza went unnoticed in the US press, people were laughing all over the country at how stupid, feeble, violent and backwards Arabs are. A diehard Sandler fan proclaimed: "He's making it for 13 year old boys. It's Critic Proof." That's what scares me most of all.

Listen to Martin Espada's "The God of the Weather-Beaten Face": For Conscientious Objector Camilo Mejia

Larry Smith, Ann Smith and I have been choosing poems for our peace poetry anthology, and I came across this poem again today.

Listen to the poem here.

Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" Meets Gitmo

Judges use poetry to weigh in on Guantanamo Bay detainment...

Judges cite nonsense poem in Guantanamo case
By MATT APUZZO | Associated Press Writer
2:03 PM CDT, June 30, 2008
WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court reviewing evidence at Guantanamo Bay compared a Bush administration legal argument to one made by a hapless, dimwitted character in a 19th century nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cited the 1876 poem, "The Hunting of the Snark," in ruling that the military improperly labeled a Chinese Muslim as an enemy combatant. The ruling was issued last week but an unclassified version of the opinion was released only Monday.

It was the first time a court has reviewed the military's decision-making and considered whether a detainee should be held. The ruling provides guidance to federal district judges, who are about to begin reviewing dozens of such cases now that the Supreme Court says detainees can challenge their detention in federal court.

The appeals court said military review panels, known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals, were unable to assess much of the evidence against the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, and at times treated accusations as evidence.

"The big issue now is, can any CSRT decision survive this kind of scrutiny?" Parhat's lawyer, Susan Baker Manning said.

Parhat is one of a group of Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, being held at Guantanamo Bay. Their case has become a diplomatic and legal headache for the U.S., which has tried to find a country willing to accept the Uighurs (pronounced WEE'-gurs) even as it defended its decision to hold them as enemy combatants.

The Justice Department concedes that Parhat never fought against the U.S. and says it has no evidence he was planning to do so. The case hinges on Parhat's connection to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a militant group that demands separation from China. Parhat says he considers China, not the United States, the enemy.

The U.S. says it has classified intelligence that ETIM is affiliated with al-Qaida, though officials have not identified the source of that intelligence. The judges said there's credible evidence that the source is the Chinese government, "which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs."

The three-member court, which was made up of two Republican judges and one Democrat, was particularly pointed in its criticism of the argument that evidence is reliable because it appears on multiple documents.

"The government insists that the statements made in the documents are reliable because the State and Defense Departments would not have put them in intelligence documents were that not the case," the court wrote. "This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true."

The judges compared the argument to the logic in Carroll's nonsense poem, in which a hapless crew hunts for a creature that is never quite defined. The Bellman, the ship's leader, led his men across the ocean, guided by a map that was just a blank piece of paper. He rallied and reassured his crew simply by repeating himself.

"I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true," the Bellman says in the poem.

"Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true," the court wrote.

The court said Parhat deserved a new hearing or should be released -- though it didn't say to where he would be released. The U.S. does not want to send him to China for fear he will be tortured. Justice Department spokesman Erik Ablin said the agency is evaluating its options.

Here's the end of the poem by Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"

Fit the Eighth - The Vanishing


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.
They shuddered to think that the chase might fail,
And the Beaver, excited at last,
Went bounding along on the tip of its tail,
For the daylight was nearly past.

"There is Thingumbob shouting!" the Bellman said,
"He is shouting like mad, only hark!
He is waving his hands, he is wagging his head,
He has certainly found a Snark!"

They gazed in delight, while the Butcher exclaimed
"He was always a desperate wag!"
They beheld him--their Baker--their hero unnamed--
On the top of a neighboring crag.

Erect and sublime, for one moment of time.
In the next, that wild figure they saw
(As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,
While they waited and listened in awe.

"It's a Snark!" was the sound that first came to their ears,
And seemed almost too good to be true.
Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
Then the ominous words "It's a Boo-"

Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air
A weary and wandering sigh
Then sounded like "-jum!" but the others declare
It was only a breeze that went by.

They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away---
For the Snark *was* a Boojum, you see.


The End