Ms. Wolf is offering a nonfiction book proposal writing class that will offer

• The elements of clear nonfiction and advocacy writing
• How to turn a good idea into a strong, attractive proposal
• How to master the publishing, media and blogging cycle to get your message out
• How to make a long-term real life as a working advocacy or nonfiction writer

In a fun, supportive but substantive class environment, students will work one on one with Ms. Wolf, and collaboratively with each other, to hone their writing into its most publishable format and make their language and ideas shine.

• Class One: April 12 2010, 6:30 pm to 9 pm
  Basics of good nonfiction writing; and fundamentals of an excellent book proposal
• Class Two: April 19, 6:30 pm to 9 pm
  The publishing and media cycle; and one-to-one editorial coaching
• Class Three: April 23, 6:30 pm to 9 pm
  A writer’s life; and one-to-one editorial coaching
  9-10pm: Closing class party

Location: In Good Company, 16 West 23rd Street (4th Floor), New York, NY 10010.

How to sign up

Applicants should submit a nonfiction writing sample to Rashmi Sharma at rshar@optonline.net. Please state in the subject line of the email which class you wish to attend. Total fee for the three classes: $450. Fee per individual class: $175. Some scholarships are available; please add a paragraph explaining why you require financial aid, if you wish to apply for it.

Questions? Contact Rashmi Sharma at rshar@optonline.net

Friends, I want to ask you to educate us a bit more when you have the time and inclination. There are really substantive issues coming up on the Facebook discussion such as net neutrality. I have heard comments supporting both sides of this issue and people have posted some links but what we have to get in the habit of doing is writing brief but informative summaries of WHY — why we should support or not support net neutrality (I don;t mean to single that out, it is a general request.) It’s great to hear you say your brief views but please educate us! Links are good but a summary in the voice of a fellow citizen is even better — better practice for us, better educating. Don’t just tell me to do my homework re this or any other issue — you are the teachers! You write the lesson plan! Same with Prop 8 — pls post the websites you want me to highlight and write an op ed (750 wd) summary of your argument if you want me to seed it into whatever other media I can…i will gladly do so.

Thanks so much all….it is very very cold in NYC today and I am missing that tropical wind…xxx naomi

We got a hundred new community members in the past week…welcome all.

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in: Vol 43, No 1, March 2007, Journal of Sociology, by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. (© 2007 The Australian Sociological Association)

Download “The resistible rise of Islamophobia Anti-Muslim racism in the UK and  Australia before 11 September 2001″ by Scott Poynting and Victoria Mason

There she is on the cover of Newsweek, in short shorts and running shoes, smiling coquettishly; there she is on her Facebook page, denouncing the Newsweek cover (from an image shot for Runner’s World) as being taken “out of context” and as sexist. Here’s her alternatively charming and whiny Oprah interview; there’s the book cover itself, stacked at Barnes & Noble at the top of the bestseller list, showing her in Gainsborough-type heroic portraiture convention, positioned before a glowing blue sky. When I went to my local chain bookstore, I asked the manager how the book has been received. It was attracting crowds, he said, but they were “the gigglers”, not buyers. “It’s the West Village,” he noted dryly. He said with a half-wink that he was planning to release the book in a package with the forthcoming Playgirl issue that features revealing pictures of Levi Johnston, the former boyfriend of Palin’s daughter, Bristol, and therefore the father of Palin’s grandchild. “Levi did an interview with Michael Musto,” he said, mentioning a campy gay journalist.

“That’s an odd choice,” I said foolishly.

“Is it?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

She is like an itch that the nation needs to scratch, and I have watched popular culture long enough to know that, when a country can’t get enough of reviling or scrutinizing or sexualizing or exalting a woman, something is going on that has less to do with her and more to do with the way our collective unconscious projects on to certain women contemporary fears, hopes and anxieties from deep within.

Going Rogue is an illumination — but of issues that the critics have totally wrong. I have long had strong feelings about Sarah Palin. When the campaign rolled her out — audaciously having her address her daughter’s pregnancy in People magazine — I thought: “We are in trouble.” The choice seemed at first to have hallmarks of brilliance. We were all excited about a black candidate: “Well,” I could imagine McCain saying to himself, “I’ve got a woman!” She was indeed telegenic and down-to-earth in that Ronald Reagan, approachable style.

Most of all, I recognized the power of two elements of her persona: she was a working-class woman. Her husband is a fisherman. She was not educated in the Ivy League, but at Idaho State. Even though women had made inroads into national politics, from Anita Hill to Michelle Obama to Hillary Clinton, they were all Ivy League-educated, and therefore now upper-middle-class. There was a demographically and emotionally powerful symbol here — that a working-class woman could embody the highest aspirations of the millions of American women who did not write law briefs and hire nannies but who wiped up coffee in diners and punched time clocks. Her candidacy would represent a real fissure in the class edifice of the nation’s leaders.

I now understand better where she got both her courage to be herself in the face of the US Establishment, and her cluelessness about the Eastern elite. The first 200 pages of the book are a coma-inducing litany of bucolic scenes of growing up in frontier small towns — fishing and proms, neighbors joining together to help each other out. The tactic of the first half of the book is to compel you to like Sarah Palin through sheer force of her cheery banality. You need to wade through sentences such as: “We were all expected to participate in most everything offered in our hometown: of course we’d be in 4-H, and Campfire Girls, and Scouts and ballet and band . . . The 1970s also ushered in the running craze across America, and my family was hooked.”

The numbingly pleasing power of this half of the book is testimony to her ghostwriter, who has edited out her natural whiny plaintiveness and left in the good cheer and grit. If you get through this, you understand — especially if you grew up in the West yourself — that Palin is actually a type from the 19th-century Manifest Destiny movement: an energetic, believing-in-oneself daughter of settlers, who is not intimidated by the “Eastern elite” and who drives them crazy for that reason. That strain could have been salutary — had she herself not betrayed it.

Second, I recognized something that I have been warning my feminist colleagues about for two decades. Feminism in the US and the UK has been largely defined by issues on the Left and spokeswomen on the Left, so much so that feminism is often taken as a subset of liberalism, and assumed to be pro-choice by definition, big-government and secular. But there is a conservative feminism, a pro-life, religious, small-government feminism, and the first candidate who comes along espousing that philosophy will be formidable.

Her summary of this position in feminism is not mine, but it is not unpersuasive: “I didn’t subscribe to all the radical mantras of that early feminist era, but reasoned arguments for equal opportunity definitely resonated with me. It was not a matter of ideology but of simple fairness.” She quotes a libertarian feminist writer approvingly, that “instead of reflecting and, indeed, reveling in our expanded horizons, the feminists of the National Organization for Women and other so-called ‘women’s groups’ … depict women as passive victims rather than the makers of their own destinies, and overlooks our individuality in favor of a collective political identity that many of us find restrictive.”  I couldn’t agree with this sentence more. She could have been a true force for women’s empowerment: a strong voice on the other side for gender equality. Instead, as we will see, she not only played into the hands of those who sought to silence and use her in standard degrading ways, but she yields her power again and again and plays standard feminine games.

Last fall, I had noticed something scary: she had begun to espouse positions that were not John McCain’s — but those of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Her soundbites were Bush soundbites; her position and language on torture, for instance, was not that of McCain, a former PoW who had been tortured. Same for other issues.

I wrote a piece that was widely picked up, which argued that history often showed that when a democracy is weakening the cabal in power will select a telegenic, charismatic, often populist “leader” with no power base of her or his own — an Evita type — as a front person for the same old policies and power relationships. I argued that someone with McCain’s age and melanoma condition had a seven-year life expectancy, and that it was possible that the people in power during the Bush era — including Rove, who handpicked the incurious, telegenic George Bush out of relative obscurity — were counting on an eventual Palin presidency with an airheaded, easily manipulated puppet figure.

At the time, and to this day, my assertion that she was being groomed as a puppet has been met on the Right with howls. But I was more right than I knew: Palin’s book confirms it. She willingly became a puppet to a group of professionals, many of whom were the same team that had redrafted, speechwritten, styled and messaged the Bush-Cheney years.

When the McCain campaign professionals finally step forward in the second half of the book, they treat her like a Stepford vice-presidential candidate. They buy her beautiful clothes and have her turn in front of the mirrors while they style her: but they hand her a copy of a statement they’ve crafted about her daughter’s pregnancy — putting feelings in words she doesn’t share — and when she tries to edit them, they’ve already released their version to the national media. They keep her from calling her press contacts. They stop her from staying near supporters on the rope lines; they hustle her away from the special-needs children in wheelchairs into the private plane. They make her wear $70 pantyhose. They try to tell her what she can and cannot eat. This is not a vice-presidential campaign — and I say that as someone who has worked for the Vice-President in such a campaign in 2000. It is the high-level grooming of a political geisha.

Unfortunately, more exposure to the “Eastern elite” and their ways would have served her well: again and again in Palin’s narrative, the McCain team’s handlers are grooming, silencing and turning her out in all the wrong ways — and those are exactly those moments in a campaign that the candidate is supposed to fight with the consultants: no, I won’t give this speech; no, you f***ed me by releasing it to the media without my consent; no, that’s the wrong media strategy.

Her fatal flaw as a candidate and a potential feminist heroine is that she colluded with her own geisha-ization; again and again, presumably because she was thrilled at the high-level “marriage,” she silenced herself. A classic moment is when she addresses the clothes scandal. (After the campaign, she was accused of taking $150,000 of expensive suits and jewelery.) She portrays herself as a bemused Cinderella figure as the mysterious “stylists” heap her with designer jackets and ply her children with pearl necklaces. She reports that her daughter asks who is paying for all this, and that her daughter is told that it is standard and that the campaign takes care of it. Palin reports this as if the scandal were utterly unjust. Well, Nancy Reagan was blasted for accepting expensive clothing. Hillary Clinton was attacked for accepting furniture. It’s illegal, it’s called graft, and any adult woman who expects to be considered for any responsible job, let alone to be a heartbeat away from the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth, doesn’t let her teenager ask who is paying and if it’s kosher to accept costly gifts. She deals with it herself.

Now that I have read Going Rogue, I see her in more dimensions but I am just as scared of her. She is going to be around, and she is going to be a force. She will be picked up by the hard Right and will, as she grows in sophistication, make her peace with them. So she will be one of the great demagogues. All it takes to make her credible for a 2012 run is a solid vice-president who can whisper in her ear about national security or climate change. What scares me about Palinmania is that it is playing out on a stage in which, in the US, no one even expects candidates to have gravitas, to know the issues or to be accountable for their positions.

“We rolled her out in the wrong venue,” was the jaded comment by the McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer on Larry King Live this week, referring to the infamous Katie Couric interview in which Palin could not name a single newspaper or magazine she regularly read. It doesn’t matter. My readers are telling me that people are lying out in sleeping bags overnight in Michigan to hear her speak. She has touched a nerve with exhausted, underpaid populists who are sick of “business as usual” in Washington, and they won’t care that much that the same special interests will be sponsoring her; by now, any candidacy is just about how she — and others — make us “feel.”

For what it’s worth, I call on Sarah Palin to remain on the scene as a messenger for her issues but to spare her nation, and keep herself free to speak for herself, by growing up as a serious woman — and by avoiding public office.

I wrote that many women activists in Muslim countries tend to emphasize issues such as honor killings, legal inequality, and lack of access to education, and that they express frustration that the obsession among Westerners with Muslim women’s clothing can come at the expense of these concerns. I also pointed out that many Muslim feminists defend their dress in terms of nationalism, anti-imperialism, or as a matter of faith.

This provoked a small firestorm of distortion in the West: “Wolf Wants to Institutionalize the Burka,” etc. It was depressing to see a simple appeal for Westerners to listen to Muslim women deliberately distorted into a representation of all Muslim women as meek, will-less beings in need of rescue.

I was so sure that Muslim women should be allowed to speak for themselves because of the faces of Muslim feminism I encountered in recent travels – notably in Jordan, a country fascinatingly poised between tradition and innovation, developing under a forward-looking monarchy that is seeking to modernize and, to an extent, democratize.  For those Westerners who worry about Islamic fundamentalism in the Arab world, surely Jordan is a worthy model to understand, support, and engage.

The women leaders I met in Amman were not saying, “Please tell the West to save us.” They were too busy making egalitarian, modernist new worlds of their own, with an Arab, and often Islamic, imprimatur.

Princess Rym Ali, sister-in-law of Queen Rania – the Chanel-wearing media star who is rebranding a more contemporary Jordan – is one vivid example; Princess Rym is making immense progress in a more behind-the-scenes way. She met me in a leafy Amman suburb, in the palace that she shares with Prince Ali and their small children. A former CNN journalist, her quiet bearing and diplomatic manner belie her courage: she captured her husband’s heart as she was reporting from Baghdad on the eve of “shock and awe,” standing firm before the cameras even as the bombs were falling.

Princess Rym and Prince Ali have supported a new film institute, the Red Sea Institute of Cinematic Arts, a joint production with the University of Southern California that is bringing together bright young people from all over the Middle East to learn contemporary filmmaking, apprentice with international film productions, and get the region’s stories out. Though she can no longer practice journalism directly, Princess Rym is also co-founding new Jordanian journalism school. Her aim is to replace journalists’ acceptance of the “party line” – even if the party is her own extended family – with a more critical perspective.

She directed my attention to Jordanian-made films about the subordination of women inside the home, and to Rana Husseini’s powerful book on honor killings, Murder in the Name of Honor . But her implicit message was that these critical examinations of women’s inequality in the Arab world are most enlightening when they are created by women’s advocates from within that culture, rather than sensationalized or superficial versions of the problem created in the West.

Mary Nazzal, owner, with her family, of a chic and bustling boutique hotel, is another dynamo who looks as if she stepped out of a fashion shoot. But it would be a mistake to underestimate her seriousness. I call her “Martha Stewart meets Che Guevara,” because, when not renovating the elegant public spaces of her hotel, she is suing Israeli generals for war crimes that she claims were committed against civilians in Gaza.

Nazzal was trained as a British barrister, and chairs the board of the Human Rights Legal Aid Fund. Her organization is intent on using international law to hold accountable members of the Israeli military who put civilians in harm’s way during the invasion of Gaza – events that the recent Goldstone Report confirms. She is passionate about the Palestinian cause, mixing her cutting-edge legal advocacy with a willingness to listen to decent people from all sides of the conflict, and a fierce attachment to peace in the region based on due process and justice.

Finally there is Rana Husseini herself – a role model for investigative reporters everywhere who began documenting and investigating honor killings in her newspaper, The Jordan Times . Honor killings claim an estimated 5,000 women every year, and are increasingly common in immigrant communities abroad. According to her account, a woman can be killed for “laughing at a joke in the street, wearing makeup or a short skirt…or being raped by a brother.”

After she began her series of reports, Husseini received death threats at her office almost daily – as well as hundreds of letters of support from readers. As a result of her brave investigations, which included interviews in prisons, many Muslim countries are revising their criminal codes, and the issue has taken center stage internationally.

These women are exactly the kind of leaders that everyone should be cultivating and supporting, rather than overlooking because of a belief that they cannot exist in the Middle East. We would do better to find out more about them than to waste our time on superficial debates about how they – and many others who are just as accomplished – should dress.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org

My view is that the lack of a certificate — even, as Brianne notes, a certificate of still birth — is probably, if unconsciously, part of the need of the medical establishment to resist acknowledging the being-ness of stillborn babies because of the related unconscious need to resist the beingness of terminated babies. (This is my view — I am speaking for myself here – not for anyone else mentioned in this post.)

Those of you who follow my work know that I am strongly pro-choice — for the first trimester — but that I object to the pro-choice movement’s (and the medical profession’s) tendency to deal with political and legal needs by depersonalizing the fetus and the in utero baby.  I do believe all are on the spectrum of humanity and deserve recognition. You should look at my 1995 piece “Our Bodies, Our Souls” (the only place I could find a complete copy is here) for the full teasing-out of my position, which is nuanced. But Brianne’s story is powerful in its own right — apart from any other issues — and many parents have shared her experience, and I am impressed with the way a group of citizens — I believe led by bereaved moms — with no legal or legislative specialized training took it upon themselves to ask for a change from Albany….

“So….let me start off by telling my story as it happened.

In August of last year Bill and I found out that we were expecting our fourth child. We were very much surprised! I knew in my heart though, that there was something not quite right with the pregnancy from day one. Because of a change in insurance I could not attend my regular OBGYN and had to go to a completely new hospital. The first few months of pregnancy were a living hell for me. Having had three children before I thought I knew what I was in for with the typical pregnancy symptoms. This time I was completely and totally drained constantly. I have never felt so bad for so long. There were days that it took all I had just to get out of bed.

Our first ultrasound was in the office at about 8 weeks. The second was a month or so later in Albany. I was supposed to have the triple screening done that day, where you have an ultrasound to verify gestational age and then a blood draw. The 2nd ultrasound showed that we had missed the window of opportunity for that and that the dates were wrong somehow from the 1st ultrasound. In December we went for a 20 week ultrasound and found out we were having a girl. That ultrasound also showed the baby’s growth rate was off again and I was told that was nothing wrong. I went as instructed to all of my Doctor appointments and would tell them that the baby was not moving like she should be. I asked if the placenta was in the front of the uterus and that was the reason why I didn’t feel her. I asked every question I could think of and was told everything was fine.

On Thursday January 22nd I noticed no movement from the baby at all. I was just about 25 weeks pregnant and had just gotten back from picking out some things for her arrival at the mall. I talked myself into believing the doctors and thought that she had turned so I could not feel her. From that point denial set in even though my heart knew so I bought her a christening dress. On Friday night Bill and I had the discussion on what we were going to do if there was a major problem. I told him that the next morning I was going to the hospital. I asked him to watch the children and tried to assure him as well as myself that I would be back after a couple of hours. After all, your supposed to be “safe” after the 1st trimester.

When I got to the hospital they decided to use the Doppler on me. The noise of that thing still echoes in my head as they searched for what seemed like forever for the baby’s heartbeat. All they found was mine. The nurses tried to be kind in telling me that sometimes babies of this age are hard to find. I knew better. My heart was beating so fast that they kept mistaking mine for hers. All the nurses left and after about an hour they took me down for an ultrasound to radiology. The doctor was supposed to do it herself in my room but was apparently too busy. The tech would not let me see the screen. After words we went back up to maternity and after another 1/2 hour I am asked to go back to radiology for another ultrasound. I still was not allowed to see the screen even after I asked. So I sit in my room alone and scared.

It was a long time before the doctor came in. She was not particularly nice or warm in telling me that my daughter had died. I called Bill and asked him to come up to the hospital right away. My Mom and Dad had come to watch the kids and he came. I was admitted and really had no confidence at all in the hospital at this point. A nice grief nurse came in to talk to me on what I wanted to do in the late afternoon. Her name was Tina. I told her about how I was not allowed to see my own ultrasound and how distraught I was. She asked the Dr to (FINALLY) come in and give me an ultrasound so that I could be absolutely certain that they were right. The last piece of my heart broke when the Dr showed me that my daughter had no heartbeat.

The Dr. told me that she would be VERY small, less than a pound. She also told me that she had been dead for over a week. I knew better than that. And with that I was induced to vaginally deliver my dead daughter. The induction took about 24 hours. Shift had changed and (thank god) we had a different doctor to deliver for us. Her name is Dr. Mays. She cried as I pushed. It was very sad that the new nurse had not even set up the cart for my delivery and was out of the room doing that as I pushed. I wailed for God to please help me. My daughter was born at 4:52pm on January 26th 2009. We named her Alyssa Kaitlyn.

She had her brothers nose and her sisters mouth and blonde sprigs just starting to grow. She was perfect. They bundled her up and put her in the bassinet across the room. And then everyone just….left. They took the baby with them to go and do the tests I had requested. I finally buzzed to see her and got to say my hello and goodbye. They took her to the morgue and the next morning I checked out. It took every once of self control I had not to grab my baby and run so that she would not have to be cold and alone.

When we got home we had to talk to the undertaker about the arrangements for Alyssa. When you have a stillbirth you are required by law to have the body properly taken care of and you can get a death certificate. You are not allowed to have a birth certificate. The hospital had sent us home with a memory box instead of a baby and I was in a daze. I had to tell a 8, 5, and 2 year old that their sister had died. The day after I got home I realized that I did not know how long my baby was. They had told me she was 1lb 7oz but never her length. I called the hospital and they do not keep records on babies that are not born alive. They did not know.

Many of my friends did not call or bother with me at all and I sank into a very deep depression that was exacerbated when my milk came in. Alyssa was cremated and brought home. As I was wandering around the web one day looking for information on stillbirth I came across a site called Still Parents NY. They were talking about a bill that would allow parents such as myself, to receive a certificate of birth for their child. I was in touch with Paige Ricci and asked what I could do to help. She asked me to call the my county’s elected officials and tell my story. So I did.

Isn’t it bad enough that I did not get to bring home my baby? Or worse yet that I had to incur the expenses of burying her with out her being considered a real baby. It is my opinion that the way stillbirth is looked at now is akin to Cancer. I was the host and she was a bunch of cells that did not survive outside of my body. But I would encourage those who think that way to take another look from the mothers perspective. My heart has been smashed into a billion pieces and one of them is lost. There is a hole in me that will never be repaired. Would it be so much to ask that I receive a certificate from the state just recognizing all that I had gone through? Even if it was only that she was born dead?

Still birth is 10x more common than SIDS and yet there is very little research on the specifics of why it takes place. Often times mothers walk away never knowing what happened to their child. It has been 8 months since my daughter was born still. I still cry for her. There are mothers I have spoken to that many years later are still grieving. Isn’t it time to recognize those families that never were able to hear a first cry or see a first breath?

Brianne

I confess, I love this nation and its eccentric, in-your-face, dreamy, cynical people. We were invited to present — I with a speech, my producer (and, disclosure, significant other) Avram Ludwig with a screening of the film of The End of America — at the Zagrebi! Festival, a four-day celebration of liberty — artistic, political and civil. The mastermind of the event and our mischievous and brilliant host was Emil Matesic, a master provocateur, a choreographer, and someone who revived our own sense of hope by his insistence on bringing together events and discussions that could push the envelope toward more real democracy (and free speech) in Croatia — even as he, like his fellows, view the hurdles with utmost clearhededness.

We arrived in the midst of a political crisis: the Prime Minister, who was reasonably well regarded, abruptly stepped down — with no explanation to the people, or to Parliament, whatsoever. Rumors are flying: corruption? Threats? Scandal? His second-in-command, a woman, was appointed in the interim and is doing, apparently, adequately. But the breathtaking reality — that a head of state simply LEFT with no accountability to his people or to the process — shows glaringly how unstable and sort of hopeless daily life can be in a weak democracy in which civil ociety institutions are at the whim of leaders and at the mercy, it became clear, of the extremely corrupt interests that have a direct hand in governance.

This was a general impression, not one proven in any way by the Prime Ministerial abdication: jorunalists we met, civil society leaders such as the pioneering Second Wave feminists at the women’s organization Babe, human rights lawyers, and artists all confirmed that the corruption in Croatia is so intense that it is not a matter of politicians beholden to special interests — politicians are actually being pushed around by a nexus of corporate interest and frank criminality. This is a lesson for us in the US since Croatia, really, is our future if we keep going down the path of lawlessness, weakening civil society institutions and deregulation: all the structures are there, but they are not powerful. Judges pass rulings — but a case can take ten to fifteen YEARS to get through the courts. Journalists are publishing in many media — but they face corporate pressures not to look too deeply into corporate control of the legislature (multinationals are buying up public utilities, urban space, etc with an assist from corrupted politicians) — and they even face physical violence.

We were introduced to the heroic Hrvoje Appelt, a crazy-brave journalist (and former ice hockey star) who had gotten scoop after scoop about corruption — running an expose that showed 108 students and professors engaged in buying and selling grades, for instance, that resulted in arrests — but when he did a major scoop on corruption in government — he was rewarded by the loss of his job — he can’t get another job, because all employers are afraid to hire him — and he now needs 24 hour police protection. We met his police guards — big tough guys who kept a sharp eye on the doors and windows in the bar where we were drinking at the Festival, and who carried their pistols in casual student-y pouches. They sweep the bottom of every car Apelt gets into; they watch his window while he is sleeping. They go everywhere with him. Appelt is a handsome, wild-eyed young man, aglitter with recklessness; rather than retreat now that he has received many death threats (and a week into the threats’ arriving, the police force, because of political pressure, actually tried to withdraw his protection) — rather than backing down he is ramping UP: he is holding a massive free concert in the biggest stadium in Zagreb, asking rappers to perform for free — to raise money and awareness for independent journalism and for journalists who have been hurt or threatened. He showed me terrifying photos on his website of other journalists who were suddenly beaten by unnamed assailants (link to come). And he has a photo exhibit of such journalists — from around the Balkans. And his organization invites Balkan journalists to register threats to them or to others — gaining strength in numbers and visibility (these are journalists working together from nations that were violently at war recently). I was awed at what he was doing. I wish him safety and money. Please ask your community to invite him and his exhibit to create a show in your town and to do fundraising for independent journalism in the Balkans.

Apart from that riveting meeting — and another exciting conversation/round table with Vesna Pusic, a progressive Parliamentarian who is the first woman in Croatia to run for the Presidency — the election is in November, and she took is courageously taking on the issue of corruption as part of her platform — Emil put together a mind-bending celebration of artistic freedom. It did not always look comfortable — I must say I was sometimes shocked, as with the performance artist, Marko, who sat at a formal dining table, awaited the entry of a young female nurse who cut a small piece of flesh out of his arm and put it on the plate, and who then ingested it — as a metaphor for the self-consuming nature of contemporary angst; I was also provoked, as with the performance of a lovely young Western woman who trained in Japan for ten years as a geisha, and whose performance art involved the ancient Japanese art of erotic bondage (as well as calligraphy, dance and surrealist video). But with the shock and the provocation came a great deal of respect for Emil and his colleagues, since we were among people who had a recent historical memory of real artistic silencing, and who were taking extremely seriously the notion of freedom of expression. It didn’t feel like empty gestures, as “shocking” performance art so often does in the West: it felt like a battle for something truly alive.

My talk was humbling too: the audience’s first response was absolute cynicism that citizen action could make any kind of difference in Croatia; then two young female students, who had helped to lead a year-long student protest against high college fees, stood up and slowly realized what they had learned and accomplished — though their stated goals were not met; en a Parliamentarian stood up and confessed that their protests HAD made a difference, HAD been discussed re what to do at the level of Parliament; then others engaged with their own goals… we organized… it turned into a fantastic, spontaneous session of citizen leadership in the organizing stage. And we are meeting again in a year for an intensive citizen democracy training workshop — right on, beautiful, edgy Croatia. Croatia at its worst is where we are going if we don’t defend our liberty and rule of law… the citizens of Zagreb, who showed me Croatia at its best,  are where we are going if we treat freedom as a living thing.

The piece, as you see here, makes the case that when you travel throughout the Muslim world, listening to women there, you often hear FROM WOMEN THEMSELVES more nuanced views of the headscarf, and of modest clothing, than you hear in the West; and — a point I cannot make often enough — when you actually listen to Muslim feminist or women’s leaders, many of them wish the West, with all its resources and potential for positive dialogue with the Muslim world, would focus its attention more on the life-and-death or survival-level challenges women and girls often face in Muslim countries -  and in the developing world generally — from bride killings to legal subjugaton to lack of access to clean water and safety for their kids – than on what women are wearing, as if that is the only possible measure of their wellbeing. I don’t support women being forced to wear anything they do not wish to, of course — in any society, in the Muslim world or in ours. Duh.

The point I made is that many women I have heard from who actually have a choice, chose to wear a headscarf and modest clothing and that instead of assuming we know what this means to them, we should be willing to actually listen; these women are not zombies — they include such articulate and well-educated young women as the (relatively privileged) current head of the debating society at Oxford — a very prestigious, demanding position — and the (much less privileged) support staffer, courageous single mom, social critic and outspoken feminist I met in Amman in June  — who chooses with great insistence to wear a headscarf, as many bright young women do, in a relatively casual, loose, Westernized capital city, and who works for in the office of Mary Nazzal, the prominent human rights attorney, who does not wear a headscarf — who actually looks like she stepped out of a fashion shoot for Marie Claire. These women are colleagues and their clothing differences are less than secondary to them.

To the former young woman, at Oxford, the headscarf symbolized an assertion of her commitment to her ethnic identity in a fairly hegemonic Britain. To the latter, it symbolized her pride in her Jordanian heritage, her commitment to her faith and a strong rejection of Western values that she identifies with the suffering of, among others, Palestinians. I am not endorsing these views by listening to them and reporting on them as if these women were worthy of respect. I am standing by my own longterm commitment as a feminist  to a core principle that has always ultimately served me well: WHEN IN DOUBT LISTEN TO WOMEN. Do I want to emulate these women’s choices? No. Do I want to understand them, to seek insight? Yes.
When I travelled in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, I met women in headscarfs and wearing modest clothing who were running aid organizations; getting supplies to war-ravaged communities; fighting for legal rights for women; and so on. I also met any number of flat-out Muslim feminists who wore Western clothing — but when I asked about issues like the hijab, knowing my editors would want me to focus on that, they looked at me with fatigue and sometimes simply snapped something along the lines of, why is the West so obsessed with what we wear instead of what our real problems are? Why don’t you focus on the amazing things Muslim women are doing – and let them speak for themselves? Pretty much universally, they let me know that bride burnings, illiteracy, domestic violence, and legal oppression were at the top of their lists of priorities, and that they saw the West’s preoccupation with the hijab as somewhat tiresome and beside the point given these life-and-death concerns.

Sadly for the wellbeing of real American discourse and debate, this piece is being twisted by those who know better — “Wolf wants to institutionalize the Burka.”  There is nothing further to be said in response this sort of nonsense — I am just sorry that much of it is being spewed by organizations underwritten by the Israel lobby, who should abide by the core Jewish values of telling the truth, and promoting peace and mutual understanding, and instead are stooping to telling falsehoods and demonizing the “other” instead of seeking real dialogue.

Because my commercial flight was canceled, I got a ride back to the United States on a military transport. I happened to be seated next to a military physician who had been flown in to do the autopsy on al-Hanashi. When would there be an investigation of the death, I asked him? “That was the investigation,” he replied. The military had investigated the military.

This “apparent suicide” seemed immediately suspicious to me. I had just toured those cells: it is literally impossible to kill yourself in them. Their interiors resemble the inside of a smooth plastic jar; there are no hard edges; hooks fold down; there is no bedding that one can use to strangle oneself. Can you bang your head against the wall until you die, theoretically, I asked the doctor? “They check on prisoners every three minutes,” he said. You’d have to be fast.

The story smelled even worse after a bit of digging. Al-Hanashi, it turned out, had been elected by the detainees to serve as their representative. (The Geneva Conventions call for this process but the US did not give it any formal recognition). As their designated representative, al-Hanashi knew which prisoners had claimed to have been tortured or abused, and by whom.

On January 17, al-Hanashi, according to his fellow prisoner Binyam Mohamed (who has since been released), was summoned to a meeting with the Admiral of Guantánamo and the head of the Guard Force there. He never returned to his cell. He was taken to the psychiatric ward, where, according to another prisoner who had been there, he was kept until he died.

Can you kill yourself in the psych ward? According to Cortney Busch of Reprieve, a British organization that represents Guantánamo detainees, there is video running on prisoners in the psychiatric ward at all times, and there is a guard posted there continually, too.

The day after al-Hanashi died, the nurse and psychologist had shown a group of journalists of which I was a part an oddly defensive display of how hunger-striking prisoners are bound in restraint chairs when being “enterally fed” (that is, force-fed). Al Hanashi, the press office at Guantánamo noted, had formerly been a hunger striker.

It is worth considering how easy it would be to do away with a troublesome prisoner being force-fed by merely adjusting the calorie level. If it is too low, the prisoner will starve, but too high a level can also kill, since deliberate liquid overfeeding by tube, to which Guantánamo prisoners have reported being subjected, causes vomiting, diarrhea, and deadly dehydration that can stop one’s heart.

I have been putting questions to Lt. Commander Brook DeWalt, the head spokesman for the Guantánamo press office, about how al-Hanashi died, for eight weeks now. According to the Yemeni embassy in Washington, al-Hanashi’s body was repatriated in mid-August.

Al Jazeera has reported that the Yemeni government announced only what the US had – that al-Hanashi had died from “asphyxiation.” When I noted to DeWalt that self-strangulation was impossible, he said he would get back to me when the inquiry – now including a Naval criminal investigation – was completed. I have yet to receive an answer. The Yemeni government, too, notes that they have yet to receive the coroner’s report from the US.

An investigation by the military of the death of its own prisoners violates the Geneva Conventions, which demand that illness, transfer, and death of prisoners be registered independently with a neutral authority (such as the ICRC), and that deaths be investigated independently. If governments let no outside entity investigate the circumstances of such deaths, what will keep them from “disappearing” whomever they take into custody, for whatever reason?

I sent DeWalt a copy of the relevant section of the Geneva Conventions and asked how the US military’s handling of al-Hanashi’s death conforms to it. Actually, I sent it twice. Again, no answer.

Was al-Hanashi suicidal? Binyam Mohamed told the Associated Press that al-Hanashi was a positive person (and, one can assume, a natural leader) who would never consider suicide. He had been in custody for seven years without a lawyer, and killed himself just two weeks after having finally been assigned one? That lawyer, Elizabeth Gilson, probably knows al-Hanashi’s state of mind before he died, but the US government will not allow her to talk about it.

What happened to Mohamed al-Hanashi, and why? The fact that no one can answer this question yet means that even in Barack Obama’s America, as in Stalin’s Russia or Ahmadinejad’s Iran, people can simply be disappeared without trial.

The world’s law-abiding governments and ordinary citizens should call and email DeWalt, the Pentagon, and the White House press office to demand answers. A young man with a great deal of potentially compromising information died under suspicious circumstances in US custody. The facts concerning his case must be independently verified.

Originally published at Burma Digest

That boat is really changing my life in unexpected ways. The more time I spend on that thing the more I like it, to my amazement — I just don’t feel that facing into the wind and doing things like “keeling” and “jibbing” is in the urban Jewish DNA — but it is becoming an acquired passion (I don’t actually do anything as rigorous as “sail.” My job is strictly as passenger.) There is something very soothing about having to pay attention to which way the wind is coming from — or to really listen to the weather report, which on the nautical bulletin is somehow so much more serious and poetic than the everyday TV or radio weather report — something incredibly uplifting about what happens when the key to the motor is turned off and the wind lifts the sail out and somehow you are on the primeval momentum — the same speed, same technique that people have used on the water for millennia. The last day we were out on the water we sailed into harbor after dark, and literally minutes before the last big storm front opened the heavens upon us; and there is something kind of infuriating and humbling at the same time about having to dinghy out to the dock wearing slickers, huddled under a downpour — it is both good and maddening to be reminded, through the bubble of artifice that one tends to live in, artificial light and climate, that nature always has other plans than one’s own.

It feels good to approach a new town from the water. I feel like I could do this for the rest of my life, and not be tired of it.  You tie up the dinghy and make your way through through industrial buildings, or marine yards, or pass tumbledown bars that have been there forever, as in New Bedford; or you step into a nineteenth-century whaling neighborhood — lost, looking for food and ice — as in South Dartmouth. It’s like seeing the underside or the backstage of a town; a town can’t bullshit you from the water.

On the Vineyard, the Obamas, of course, were vacationing; we just missed seeing them a couple of times — when we sailed into Oak Bluffs, there were crowds around Nancy’s, an outdoor-seating casual restaurant, where he and his family had just been — and there, facing us, unsmiling, out on a pier, was a casually-dressed secret service guy, blond, dark glasses, black polo shirts and khakis, arms folded, scowling. He did not wave back when we waved, and I actually felt rather relieved. (I heard from the peace activists on the island that other secret service members were also casually dressed, which is a definite departure in propotcol — one table of female secret service, at a more formal restaurant, had appeared in black cocktail dresses and pearls, doubtless armed — a look that sounded kind of sexy.)

Matthis Chireaux, the 25-year-old antiwar activist who is with IVAW and is a veteran of Afghanistan — the young man who tokd Congress he could not obey illegal orders to redeploy to an illegal war, so if they were going to arrest him, “I’ll be in Brooklyn”  — came up to the Vineyard to join an antiwar encampment on a piece of land near where the Obamas were staying — the idea was to reproduce the peace camp that had set itself up outside of Crawford, Texas. We handed Mattis over from one boat to another as his colleagues in the peace movement took him to the encampment. The idea of it — the thought that young people could have a destination again that idealistic, and that spontaneous — made me happy.
Not so happy was the turnout; the organizers had hoped for thousands, and far fewer showed up. Is the left reluctant to criticize “their own” President? I very much hope not but it is difficult to avoid that conclusion. The warsin the Middle East are in some ways worsening.

The last day of our trip, an antiwar activist, Nick, hosted a brunch for Cindy Sheehan at his beautiful cottage facing the sound. Nick turned out to be the guy who had taught my guy to sail — giving the whole gathering the feeling of extended family. I greeted Ms Sheehan, who had been determinedly getting the antiwar message out; we’d met briefly once before. I was startled and upset to hear from her spokesperson that Sheehan’s entire antiwar listserv — which now included my own email address — had been `frozen’ by Verizon and made inaccessible for the duration of most of the time they were on the island, trying to organize a nationwide protest (I am not techie enough to understand the process, but I understood the effects.) She suggested that I should consider that email address corrupted. A chilling conversation in an otherwise serene setting; an otherwise bucolic American day.

This week — back in the city. I reached out to a contact who works for a TV station reporting on Gaza, and asked him if I could go live with a Gazan family for a week over Christmas. I received a very warm, welcoming response. Don’t worry about contacts, he wrote — we have 1.5 million of them. I will have to start right away with my conversational Arabic study — I want to be able to have a minimal exchange of pleasantries by the time I go.
Holder appointing a special prosecutor, likely, from news reports, makes me feels heartened and queasy at the same time Heartened because of how far we have come when the AFC and a few oter voices were calling three years ago for prosecutions — at a time when that seemed like a marginal position. Queasy because once again they are going for the low-hanging fruit — those lower on the food chain who overzealously carried out torture beyond the “legally mandated” torture — as all implementers of torture do — while leaving the architects of the torture — yes, you, Mr. Cheney — to swan around, free men, on the weekend talk shows, trying to rebrand sadism.

When Cheney makes the case that torture kept america safe — I hope his interlocutors bring up the routine photography of nude, shaved, blinded prisoners that the newly released ACLU documents confirm was protocol. And why, if it was just instrumental, threaten the prisoners with rape and sexual assault of their family members — rather than just the plain old asexual drill bit? There is nothing instrumental about the sexual sadism that runs through and through these directives, and I hope we will not be dragged, disoriented, into a morass of Nazi-era apologetics and will keep that in mind; ain’t no rebranding torture, sexually perverse or otherwise — plain old morally perverse.

My piece on Mohamed al-Hanashi’s death in custody came out today (“What Happened to Mohamed al-Hanashi?“] — and will probably, because I wrote it for a global syndicate, be picked up in countries around the world, but probably will not be covered widely in the US. We are still awaiting the results of the autopsy report — of almost three months ago! Ask your representative to ask the Pentagon what happened to this young Yemenite man — the detainee’s elected representative – who “committed suicide” suspiciously at Guantanamo?

And keep asking…