The Path from Peace: More Settlements

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Doing the Right Thing! Thanks, John Carroll University

Those might recall my earlier post about the sit-in by John Carroll students in support of including a non-discrimination clause regarding sexual orientation; the following memo from President Niehoff reverses the earlier draft proposal which declined to take such action. Thank you to the President and the Board for their taking this progressive move, an act of moral courage, and for the students, faculty, staff, and others who made this decision a clear one. There is work to be done, and probably state or federal law will require this sort of clause shortly anyway; but it's never too early to do the right thing.

To: The John Carroll University Community

From: Robert L. Niehoff, S.J.

Date: March 12, 2010

RE: Diversity and Inclusiveness at John Carroll

Earlier this week, members of the Board of Directors met with student and faculty representatives to discuss our campus climate and the possible inclusion of sexual orientation in our non-discrimination policies.

The Board wholeheartedly supports our continued efforts to create a safe environment for all which includes members of the LGBT community. Remaining faithful to our Jesuit Catholic character, we seek a more diverse and inclusive campus community.

There is important work ahead for all of us. The Board has requested that I act expeditiously to develop a revised non-discrimination policy and report to them on three essential actions at our May meeting:

1) As recommended by the Diversity Task Force, strengthen our reporting systems and investigative processes for all issues of bias, harassment, intimidation, and threats on campus. This may include the implementation of the Ombudsperson process.

2) Work with faculty to address issues of fairness and equity for all faculty concerning hiring, tenure, and promotion (such as the issues identified in the McCourt/Hagedorn Report), and make appropriate Faculty Handbook adjustments.

3) Complete a legal review to determine how a change in the University’s non-discrimination policies might be accomplished in a way that is consistent with current laws and regulations. This process will include a review of the practices at the other 27 Jesuit colleges and universities.

The conversations that took place this past week were an important step, and I am pleased that our campus can engage in a spirit of inquiry where different perspectives are valued. This is at the heart of our Jesuit Catholic tradition.

I extend my thanks to everyone, especially to the students who accepted our invitation to engage with the Board in a thoughtful dialogue about their experiences and points of view.

I look forward to working with faculty, staff, students, alumni, and others to build on this momentum.

Blessings-

"Why Israel Jailed Me for 'Talking Too Much'" by Jamal Juma'

Why Israel jailed me for ‘talking too much’

All we Palestinians want is a life free from racial discrimination. We could use a little support from Obama.

By Jamal Juma’ / March 9, 2010

East Jerusalem

The Palestinian elected leadership is weak. And even with Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan this week, the renewed Middle East peace process appears to be little more than a charade.

Israel has taken this opportunity to crack down on Palestinians who advocate nonviolent protests against the Israeli West Bank segregation barrier and charged them based on questionable or false evidence.

I know: I was arrested for talking too much. All we Palestinians want is a life free from racial discrimination.

During 2009, 89 peaceful apartheid wall protesters were arrested; since January, more than 40 have been arrested.

The US president’s support for nonviolent protest could go a long way. However, President Obama's repeated failure to protect the very rights and peace he has called for is a heavy blow to Palestinians. Especially now that Israel has taken to crushing the grass-roots equivalent of Palestinian Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings.

The power and importance of nonviolent protest is close to America’s heart. Decades after African-Americans’ historic sit-in at the Woolworth’s counter,

Palestinians live under a regime strikingly similar to Jim Crow. My Palestinian friends from the West Bank cannot eat dinner with me at my favorite Jerusalem restaurant. They would need to obtain Israeli “permits” to visit me, a privilege given to very few. They would be forced to endure several checkpoints or would have to defy Israeli martial law.

For my friends in Gaza, getting a permit to visit Jerusalem is nothing but a dream. Meanwhile Israeli settlers live illegally on our land, sail through checkpoints, and travel freely.

And it does not end there. One of the world’s strongest armies pounded our cities in Gaza with white phosphorous and encloses us in isolated, shrinking Bantustans almost with impunity.

Yet, every Friday, Palestinian villagers losing precious agricultural land to Israel’s wall turn out to protest peacefully. Unarmed farmers and entire families march to defend their lands. They do so though 16 have been killed, many just kids. They continue to show up though thousands have been injured.

In October, I expressed concern over the arrest of my colleague Mohammed Othman. Shortly before his arrest, Israeli soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint took him aside and warned, “We’re going to arrest you, but it’s difficult with you because all you do is talk.” I wrote then, “If talking is a crime, if urging the international community to hold Israel accountable for theft of our land is a crime, then we all are vulnerable.”

Less than two months later I, too, was sitting in an Israeli prison cell – for talking too much.

As they dragged me from my house, Israeli occupation forces threatened my family’s well-being, saying they would only see me again after a prisoner exchange.

Because we Palestinians are under military occupation, where military decrees sharply limit political activity, the struggle for our most basic human rights is, by default, criminalized. Once arrested, protesters do not face civil courts, but military courts which blatantly violate international standards of fair trial

Fortunately, individuals around the world, including European diplomats, demanded my release. Amnesty International’s role was vital in suggesting that detained activists such as Abdallah Abu Rahma, Mr. Othman, and I were in fact prisoners of conscience. Othman and I were released within a week of Amnesty’s intervention.

Jack Gilbert's "A Brief for the Defense"

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.


by Jack Gilbert From REFUSING HEAVEN (Knopf, 2005)

Spiritual Retreat on Gospel Nonviolence [March 19/20]:

Spiritual Retreat on Gospel Nonviolence [March 19/20]:

Please join us for a special Lenten spiritual retreat on Gospel Nonviolence facilitated by Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy of the Center for Christian Nonviolence. Hosted by St. Malachi parish, this retreat is co-sponsored by the churches of St. Patrick, St. Colman, St Wendelin, and Pax Christi Cleveland, the Cleveland Catholic Worker Community, and CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations]. The retreat will be held at St. Malachi church Fri/Sat March 19 and 20. [Fri. evening from 7 - 9 pm and Sat. from 830 am - 5 pm] Lunch on Saturday provided. A free-will offering will be accepted from those able to give. Please help us get the word out about this dynamic retreat and bring your friends. Please carpool if possible. Friday evening portion of the retreat will be in the church of St. Malachi; Saturday portion will be in the church hall.

For more info see the flyer at www.centerforchristiannonviolence.org [under "Events"] or call Joan Daly at 1.440.333.1755.

"If we don't teach our children nonviolence, someone else will teach them violence."
Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

"The Battle of Blenheim": Robert Southey playing with skulls

by: Robert Southey (1774-1843)

T'was a summer evening,
Old Kaspar's work was done,
And he before his cottage door
Was sitting in the sun,
And by him sported on the green
His little grandchild Wilhelmine.

She saw her brother Peterkin
Roll something large and round
Which he beside the rivulet
In playing there had found;
He came to ask what he had found,
That was so large, and smooth, and round.

Old Kaspar took it from the boy,
Who stood expectant by;
And then the old man shook his head,
And with a natural sigh,
"'Tis some poor fellow's skull," said he,
"Who fell in the great victory.

"I find them in the garden,
For there's many here about;
And often when I go to plough,
The ploughshare turns them out!
For many thousand men," said he,
"Were slain in that great victory."

"Now tell us what 'twas all about,"
Young Peterkin, he cries;
And little Wilhelmine looks up
With wonder-waiting eyes;
"Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for."

"It was the English," Kaspar cried,
"Who put the French to rout;
But what they fought each other for
I could not well make out;
But everybody said," quoth he,
"That 'twas a famous victory.

"My father lived at Blenheim then,
Yon little stream hard by;
They burnt his dwelling to the ground,
And he was forced to fly;
So with his wife and child he fled,
Nor had he where to rest his head.

"With fire and sword the country round
Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then,
And new-born baby died;
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory.

"They said it was a shocking sight
After the field was won;
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun;
But things like that, you know, must be
After a famous victory.

"Great praise the Duke of Marlbro' won,
And our good Prince Eugene."
"Why, 'twas a very wicked thing!"
Said little Wilhelmine.
"Nay ... nay ... my little girl," quoth he,
"It was a famous victory."

"And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win."
"But what good came of it at last?"
Quoth little Peterkin.
"Why, that I cannot tell," said he,
"But 'twas a famous victory."


"The Battle of Blenheim" is reprinted from Historic Poems and Ballads. Ed. Rupert S. Holland. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1912.

Vexing Resistance, Complicating Occupation: A Contrapuntal Reading of Sahar Khalifeh and David Grossman

Here's a link to a recent article of mine, published in College Literature, called "Vexing Resistance, Complicating Occupation: A Contrapuntal Reading of Sahar Khalifeh's Wild Thorns and David Grossman's The Smile of the Lamb."

Here's the abstract:
This article examines two novels representing the fifth year of Israeli occupation of the West Bank (1972)--Wild Thorns, written by (Palestinian) Sahar Khalifeh (Arabic: سحر خليفة) and The Smile of the Lamb, written by (Israeli) David Grossman--testing the possibilities and limits of Edward Said's notion of contrapuntal reading in the Israeli/Palestinian context. While both novels address primarily their own nation, both bridle against the limits of nationalism. Wild Thorns dramatizes the diversity of struggle within Palestinian society to resist military occupation, complicating Orientalist views of Palestinian society. By contrast, The Smile of the Lamb examines the psychological and moral damage of occupation to both Palestinians and Israelis. In tracking the relationship between an Israeli soldier in moral crisis and an Arab outcast grieving the death of his son, Grossman's novel opens up the possibility of cross-national identification in ways that echo and extend Khalifeh's novel.

Here are the epigraphs and first paragraph:

The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when
it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work
on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its
future--these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time
decided in narrative. As one critic has suggested, nations themselves
are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives
from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and
imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between
them. (Said 1993, xiii)

Two children of the same cruel parent do not necessarily love each
other. They often see in each other the image of the past oppressor.
So it is, to some extent, between Israelis and Arabs: the Arabs fail
to see us as a bunch of survivors. They see in us a nightmarish
extension of the oppressing colonizing Europeans. We Israelis often
look at Arabs not as fellow victims but as an incarnation of our own
past oppressors: Cossacks, pogrom-makers, Nazis who have grown
mustaches and wrapped themselves in keffiyehs, but who are still in
the usual business of cutting fewish throats. (Oz 1996, 8-9)

Sumud is watching your home turned into a prison. You, Samid, choose
to stay in that prison, because it is your home, and because you fear
that if you leave, your jailer will not allow you to return. Living
like this, you must constantly resist the twin temptations of either
acquiescing in the jailer's plan in numb despair, or becoming crazed
by consuming hatred for your jailer and yourself, the prisoner.
(Shehadeh 1982, viii)


Suicide Bombers. Religious War. Unwanted. PLO. Arafat. Aggressive. These were among the initial (and anonymous) free associations for the word "Palestinian" that my students wrote down and shared during the first day of my course on Palestinian and Israeli Literatures. (1) How do earnest and thoughtful Midwestern college students at a fine liberal arts university come to such reflex impressions?

We need look no farther than our mass media. Take, for example, an issue of Newsweek Magazine, dated June 25, 2007, during the battles for control over Gaza between Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah, which preceded the 2009 Gaza bloodbath. The cover photo shows a Hamas fighter, dressed in black and face hooded except for his eyes, straddling atop a tank and holding an AK-47 (pointed, as it happens, right to "JOLIE," whose name and story graces the header title: "ANGELINA JOLIE TAKES ON THE WORLD." (2) The main title--"Why Gaza Matters: NEW VIOLENCE, OLD HATREDS AND A GROWING RADICAL THREAT TO AMERICA'S HOPE FOR THE MIDEAST"--attempts to situate the conflict in Gaza as part of our concern, our hopes for the Middle East (for democracy, ironically, given our complete embargo of the democratically-elected Hamas government). The image is menacing, phallic and almost faceless.

Inside the magazine, the panoply of photos that illustrate the story falls into all-too-familiar categories of Orientalist images of Middle Eastern life: 1) masked fighters, 2) the dead, 3) mourning hijab-wearing women, and 4) swarming crowds. All these images, save one, are images of people without faces, whose faces are occluded, shut off, or lost in crowds. If the face-to-face encounter is, to paraphrase Emmanuel Levinas, the ethical moment, the moment in which we encounter the radical and irreducible otherness of another person, we can say without hesitation that the images displayed in these photographs render such an encounter almost impossible.

There is one exception to this Orientalist cast of images, however. It appears in the blurred face of a Palestinian youth turned toward the camera as he helps others lay a bleeding Palestinian man onto a gurney in an emergency room. He is overcome with terror, and his face is almost pleading. In this moment, we as viewers are interpellated into the scene, and find ourselves in the moment that Levinas describes as when "the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death" (qtd. in Butler 2004, 131). For all the possibilities that this photograph invites, it also invites the uneasily imperial response--we must save these people from themselves--rather than ask, "How has it come to this?"

read on to see what these novels have to say about how it has come to this, and where next...

Reckoning with Torture

I wish I could be there for the reading in DC, but I imagine that this will become a book soon. If you're going, give me the details!

Greening the Community: Green economy, organic environments, and healthy people

You are invited to attend
Greening the Community: Green economy, organic environments, and healthy people.
April 9-10 at CWRU


This event is Beyond Pesticides' 28th National Forum
co-convened by Beyond Pesticides Ohio and CWRU Medical School's Swetland Center for Environmental Health


This fabulous Forum includes a free tour of the Cleveland Botanical Garden, two evening receptions, breakfast and lunch catered by the Mustard Seed and a tour de force of national speakers with local speakers, too. Topics include cutting edge health science, lawn pesticide bans, protecting pollinators, thinking beyond your plate, organic gardening and farming.


All of this for the new $25.00 "recession rate."


For a full list of speakers, panels, schedule and registration visit www.beyondpesticides.org/forum.


Come! We'll have fun!


For more info contact Barry Zucker, Executive Director, Beyond Pesticides Ohio 216-291-3424 bzucker@beyondpesticidesohio.org


Cosponsors of Greening the Community include:


Bioneers Cleveland, Community Gardening Program (OSU Extension), Cuyahoga Greens, Cleveland Botanical Garden, Cleveland Food Co-Op, Doan Brook Watershed Partnership, Earth Day Coalition, EcoWatch, Environmental Health Watch, GreenCityBlueLake Institute, Holden Arboretum,Nature Center at Shaker Lakes, Local Food Cleveland,Neighborhood Progress Inc., North Union Farmers Market,Northeast Ohio Sierra Club, Northern Ohio Wellness Connection,Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association, Ohio Environmental Council, Treez Please, and University Circle Incorporated.

The Hilarious, Absurd Elia Suleiman!