Focal Points Blog

Intra-Jewish Discrimination in Israel

A Mizrahi feminism cut-and-paste primer.

By Michael Quinones, August 22, 2014

In Israel Ashkenazi women often marginalize Mizrahi women. (Photo: Matthew Powell / Flickr)

In Israel Ashkenazi women often marginalize Mizrahi women. (Photo: Matthew Powell / Flickr)

Cross-posted from There Will Be War.

Jews are the most privileged group of citizens in Israel. Jews of European descent, called Ashkenazim, form the top of a class hierarchy while Mizrahim—Jews of African or Asian descent and Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries—are often marginalized socially, economically and politically. This extends to the feminist establishment, which started out as a movement spawned and then dominated by middle to upper middle-class, educated Ashkenazi women who preached universal female solidarity in the face of the patriarchy. Feeling unrepresented, ignored and/or ostracized, many Mizrahi feminist activists broke away from what they viewed as an Ashkenazi women’s movement unsympathetic to their own ideas of liberation, which were particular to their situations. Mizrahi women were critical of Ashkenazi insularity and discrimination—some claiming experiences of racism—but without political, social or economic capital, their voices have often been suppressed and kept from influential circles and media.
Read More

The Flowering of Feminism in Hungary  

“Women’s liberation” made little if any impact in the latter days of the Communist era.

By John Feffer, August 22, 2014

 

Judit Acsady was an early feminist in Hungary. (Photo: John Feffer)

Judit Acsady was an early feminist in Hungary. (Photo: John Feffer)

Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com.

The feminist movement, which gathered strength in the 1960s and 1970s in the West, arrived in East-Central Europe much later. Women’s equality was a stated principle of the Communist governments, and official women’s organizations operated in all of the countries. But the official representation of women remained rather conservative. Alexandra Kollantai’s Marxist challenge of patriarchal structures such as marriage and the family was long forgotten as were the more radical emancipation movements that coalesced during the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian empire. “Women’s liberation” made little if any impact in the latter days of the Communist era. The social mores in the region were overwhelmingly traditional. The opposition movements tended to reflect this traditionalism as well.
Read More

Pakistan’s Payback for Drone Attacks

The United States mounts attacks on Pakistani soil — and the Pakistani military actually invades Afghanistan.

By Russ Wellen, August 21, 2014

 

When Pakistan’s military itself invades Afghanistan, it nudges our campaign there into the realm of the farcical. (Photo: Jared Rodriguez / Flickr)

 

While on vacation, the editor is re-running old posts that have retained their timeliness.

In the course of an October 3, 2011 article at MEMRI titled The Failing U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan, Tufail Ahmad and Y. Carmon puncture the myth that the Taliban is negotiating, or preparing to negotiate, with the United States. (MEMRI is the Middle East Media Research Institute.) Even more of a revelation — at least to me –they report that Pakistan mounted a series of military attacks on Afghanistan this year. Here’s a sample:
Read More

Malaysia’s Relationship With Israel Gets Frostier

The ongoing crisis in Gaza has pushed the Malaysia-Israel relationship to the point of no return.

By Wan Ahmad Fayhsal, August 21, 2014

The popular boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against companies that profit from the Israeli occupation is popular in Malaysia. (Photo: Kate Ausburn / Flickr)

The popular boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against companies that profit from the Israeli occupation is popular in Malaysia. (Photo: Kate Ausburn / Flickr)

The Israel Security Agency, better known as Shin Bet, recently claimed that Malaysia, a far-away majority-Muslim country in Southeast Asia, provided elite Hamas commandoes with paragliding training.

Reported by almost all major Israeli media outlets, such as The Jerusalem Post and Haaretz, Israel made the allegation after its security forces captured a senior Hamas commander who allegedly confessed to having been sent to Malaysia to receive paragliding training to conduct “terror attacks” in Israel.

Malaysia’s Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar issued an official statement denying the report, calling it a “baseless” effort “to tarnish Malaysia’s good name.” Many Malaysians regard Israel’s unsubstantiated allegation as a knee-jerk reaction, perhaps even an indirect response to Malaysia’s support for the Palestinian cause and its strong condemnation of Israel’s current aggressions in Gaza.
Read More

Nuclear Disarmament and Ronald Reagan: “Trust, But Verify”

To hawks, verification is another hammer with which to bludgeon disarmament.

By Russ Wellen, August 20, 2014

 

Reagan Wikimedia Commons

The smaller a state’s nuclear weapons program, the less that needs to be verified. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

 

While on vacation, the editor is re-running old posts that have retained their timeliness.

David Kay has “very bad news for you.” You may recall that he’s the man who led two teams to Iraq: one, after the Gulf War, determined that Iraq had a nuclear program; the other, before the Iraq War, that it then had no WMD program. Despite supporting the Iraq War anyway, Kay remains a credible voice on nuclear weapons.

His bad news, though, is about Iran, where, he recently wrote in the National Interest, “a weapons-inspection regime. . . will not work. Inspections themselves are most effective when both the state being inspected and the inspecting countries are fully on board — and even then there are limits.” For example, the “number of inspectors and level of intrusiveness necessary to ensure that [there are no nuclear weapons] in a country Iran’s size is far greater than anything that can be contemplated.”
Read More

“In Deep Atrophy”: America’s Nukes — or Conservatives’ Brains?

How the modernization of nuclear weapons can lead to testing them.

By Russ Wellen, August 19, 2014

 

NuclearWarhead

Today “the Bomb” is only one of a number of existential threats. (Photo: Wikimedia)

While on vacation, the editor is re-running old posts that have retained their timeliness.

Nuclear weapons may be the one issue on which the goal posts haven’t been moved back for progressives. Usually, since the Reagan administration, with boosts from the Gingrich revolution and the Neocon takeover of the Bush administration, conservative construction crews have been uprooting them on a regular basis. They then proceed to replant them further and further from the end zone.

But, when it comes to nuclear weapons, both policy and public opinion have been listing to the left — or peace-ward — for decades. In fact, it wasn’t long after their use by the United States in World War II that nuclear weapons developed a bad rep. Soon, President John F. Kennedy helped secure the passage of the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Twenty years later, even Reagan himself displayed a visceral distaste for these instruments of extermination. President Obama simply resuscitated existing sentiment stifled by the Bush administration.
Read More

Buddhism and Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar

Buddhist monks in Myanmar rival Islamist extremists in their intolerance.

By Sufyan bin Uzayr, August 19, 2014

Rohingya Muslims: object of Myanmar Buddhists’ enmity. (Photo: EU-ECHO / Flickr)

Rohingya Muslims: object of Myanmar Buddhists’ enmity. (Photo: EU-ECHO / Flickr)

Myanmar is undergoing a state of upheaval and transformation. As of now, the country is experiencing changes on the political, economic and social frontiers.

Amidst such transitions, Myanmar is also witnessing increased cases of religious intolerance. In spite of its rich cultural heritage and legacy of socio-religious harmony, present-day Myanmar is surely not the best place for its religious minorities.

Recently, the government of Myanmar proposed a law that seeks to impose a virtual ban on religious conversions (any case of religious conversion will need prior approval of the state). This proposed law is just one of the many recent ones that are being put into effect to target the country’s religious minorities: there are plans to outlaw interfaith marriages, and also to limit the birth rate among non-Buddhist families residing in Myanmar.
Read More

We All Have Nuclear Stories of Our Own

The Bomb has been taken down a peg from its status as the existential threat to sharing that title with climate change and the economy.

By Russ Wellen, August 18, 2014

 

Nuclear Test for FPIF

Today “the Bomb” is only one of a number of existential threats. (Photo: Public domain)

While on vacation, the editor is re-running old posts that have retained their timeliness.

“Nuclear war must be the most carefully avoided topic of general significance in the contemporary world. People are not curious about the details. … almost everyone seems to feel adequately informed by reading one book about nuclear war.”
– Paul Brians, chronicler of nuclear imagery in literature and pop culture

Some of us are oblivious to the threat of nuclear war; others shrink from it in fear. Many operate under the assumption that there’s no longer anything to worry about because we survived the Cold War intact. Besides, there’s always deterrence. Like a trusty old shotgun in the corner, we try to reassure ourselves, it’s served us well for 50 years.
Read More

The Hungarian Horseradish

Hungarians take pride in the often hermetic nature of their culture, but can be prone to slighting outside influences.

By John Feffer, August 15, 2014

 

According to Bob Foster, to Hungarians who live in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish. (Dennis Jarvis / Flickr)

According to Bob Foster, to Hungarians who live in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish. (Photo: Dennis Jarvis / Flickr)

Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com.

In East-Central Europe, the Hungarians are something of an anomaly. They are not Slavic. They don’t speak a Slavic language. Even their origins are hotly contested, as some Hungarian nationalists have challenged the conventional “Finno-Ugric” explanation that present day Hungarians and Finns both derive from older Eurasian tribes. Instead, they argue that the Magyars derive from the ancient Scythians or even the more ancient Sumerians.

The physicists on the Manhattan project had an equally unlikely theory: Hungarians came from Mars. The sheer number of Hungarian scientists with otherworldly capacities – Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, John von Neumann – perplexed the envious non-Hungarians. That they found the Hungarian language impenetrable only reinforced their belief in heavenly origins. Even more strangely, this particular argument reappeared in a 2000 statement of a leading member of the current ruling party in Hungary when he said that “While human DNA has two or three spirals within a given length, the DNA of the Hungarian race has nine … which is identical to the number of rotations of light from the planet Sirius when it reaches the Earth. The cosmic origin of Hungarian intelligence, the Hungarian soul and the Hungarian minds is a result of this fact.”
Read More

Rise of ISIS Downfall of Maliki

Iraq Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has driven Sunnis into the arms of ISIS.

By Russ Wellen, August 14, 2014

Maliki: just another ruler done in by paranoia and corruption. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Maliki: just another ruler done in by paranoia and corruption. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Looks like we’ll finally see the back of Nuri al-Maliki — One of the Wrongest Horses the U.S. Ever Backed. Haider al-Abadi may replace him if he can win a majority vote in Iraq’s parliament. At Politico Magazine, James Jeffrey, U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2012, writes:

This is an extraordinary turn of events for a leader who did better than ever in the March 2014 elections, garnering a personal vote tally of 700,000, far more than any rival.

Read More

Page 12 of 190« First...1011121314...203040...Last »