Debate about Palestine is often shrouded in the fog of individuals’ preferences. There is always a prior commitment to one side or the other and every piece of evidence is used merely to reinforce one’s own argument or debunk the other’s.
One of the tragedies of the Muslim situation today is the extent to which we have to rely on non-Muslim sources of information to understand our own world and movements...
METAL OF DISHONOR: DEPLETED URANIUM - HOW THE PENTAGON RADIATES SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS WITH DU WEAPONS. By the Depleted Uranium Education Project. International Action Center, New York, US. 1997. pp. 238. Pbk: US$12.95.
Since the signing of the peace accords between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel four years ago in Washington, a whole industry has sprung up studying the peace process. There are departments, organisations and think-tanks all drum-beating about it.
After nearly four of decades of cold war conflict, accompanied by apathy and acceptance of the general population, the ‘no-nukes’ movement finally arose in the early 1980s to protest the ongoing threat of nuclear conflagration.
The death of Dr Kalim Siddiqui in April 1996 deprived the Islamic movement of an intellectual and a leader whose loss has been sorely felt. His last book, Stages of Islamic Revolution, was published just days before his death. Now, over two years later, his final paper, Political Dimensions of the Seerah, has been published for the first time.
Steven Barboza’s book, American Jihad, is an inversion of the message of Emerson’s ‘Jihad in America’. Barboza uses the idea of jihad and the life of Malcolm X - a combination guaranteed to get most Americans’ attention - as starting-points for a discussion of the different ways American Muslims practise jihad.
The Palestinian question dominates the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli struggle, preoccupying the world since the early 1920s when the judaization of a predominantly Arab country began.
The writer, V S Naipaul, like the apostate Salman Rushdie, is much revered in the west. Both are of Indian origin although Naipaul was born in Trinidad where his forefathers were taken as indentured labourers.
China is an emerging superpower. For decades, the west viewed it as an enemy because of its radical ideology. Many American cold warriors still consider it so despite far reaching changes in China. These have of necessity affected its foreign policy preferences as well. Within China, old ideas have had to be discarded and new realities taken into account.
Let us first get a simple point out of the way: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was declared in 1932. The Al-e Saud’s rise to power did not begin until their alliance with the British in the first world war.
Whenever India’s independence from Britain is mentioned, two names connected with the event dominate: ‘Mahatma’ Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Meanwhile, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, is either mentioned only in passing, usually as villain of the piece, or totally ignored.
Anyone who has watched old American westerns - movies about Cowboys and Indians - will recall the popular phrase uttered by many an Indian, ‘pale face speak with forked tongue.’ Along with several other Indianisms, this one entered into American popular culture to such a degree that it lost its original rhetorical strength.
The first point any informed reader will note about this book is that Malcolm uses the Serbian form ‘Kosovo’ throughout in preference to the Albanian form ‘Kosova’, used by Kosovars themselves. As in the Bosnian case, the use of terminology in discussing Kosova is politically sensitive.
Moore’s recent book, Downsize This!, takes its title from the corporate euphemism for firing workers. Originally published in 1996, and updated for the paperback edition a year later, Moore’s latest assault on corporate America is a biting satire of all that is wrong with an America under ever increasing control of business interests, ranging from the national corporate media to multinational and transnational corporations.
In western mythology, Lebanon is generally identified with mayhem, warfare, hostage-takers and hijackers. Similarly, the name Hizbullah conjures up images of gun-toting Muslim zealots out to get ‘peaceful’ westerners.
THE AGONY OF ALGERIA By Martin Stone. Published by Columbia University Press, New York, NY, US. 1997. pp. 274. Pbk: US$16.50.
In his writings about technology, Jerry Mander, an ecologist and former advertising executive, is on to something when he suggests that television is a training mechanism for some subtle yet invasive forms of social control.
In his autobiography, the American industrialist Henry Ford wrote, ‘Repetitive labor... is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind... but to other minds, perhaps I might say the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors.’
Conventional wisdom views childhood as a set stage of life through which all human beings pass on their way to adulthood. In the west, psychology since the 19th century has attempted to discern and delimit the various stages of child development.
