In case you haven’t been paying attention to international affairs, there is a major protest (estimates of 100,000 people) against the military dictatorship in Burma,which is now called Myanmar. The protest, lead by Buddhist monks, has been peaceful, but tension is rising, and as I writing this post I just found out that 4 monks have been killed by the military.

This dictatorship has been in place for 20 years, and the last major protest ended with the military killing thousands of protesters. You can learn more about the history of Burma/Myanmar in this article.

Here’s a photo of the protest from the AFP.

Caption: “Buddhist monks protest by marching with a banner that reads, “We shall replace (crackdown) unjustice with justice” before police conduct a crackdown in downtown Yangon. Myanmar security forces used batons, tear gas and live rounds Wednesday in a violent crackdown on mass protests against the military junta, killing at least four people including three Buddhist monks.(AFP)”You can also find more info. at Women of Color Blog.

The right-wing Washington Times, reporting on Bush’s speech at the UN, reports:

At the United Nations, Mr. Bush avoided talk of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, bringing up Iran only as one of several briefly listed countries that squelch freedoms.

Outside, about a dozen people were arrested during a peaceful demonstration of about 400 opposed to the Iraq war and the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

Via Ezra.

From Dani Rodrik:

The slave trade, whereby able-bodied Africans were shipped to other parts of the world and sold into slavery, was a despicable economic institution for sure. But did it also have long-run effects on the economic development of African countries? Yes, is the surprising answer of Nathan Nunn (pdf link):

I construct measures of the number of slaves exported from each country in Africa, in each century between 1400 and 1900. The estimates are constructed by combining data from ship records on the number of slaves shipped from each African port or region with data from a variety of historical documents that report the ethnic identities of slaves that were shipped from Africa. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from each country and subsequent economic performance. The African countries that are the poorest today are the ones from which the most slaves were taken.

Nunn is careful to try to rule out reverse causation: he finds that the regions from which slaves were taken were, if anything, the more developed parts of Africa at the time.

The most likely explanation for the result? “[The] procurement of slaves through internal warfare, raiding, and kidnapping resulted in subsequent state collapse and ethnic fractionalization.”

There’s some interesting discussion in the comments there, too.

From a review of World War IV, the new book defending Bush’s Iraq policy, by Norman Podhoretz:

The most astonishing part of “World War IV” is Podhoretz’s incessant use of violent imagery to describe American politics. Critics of the Iraq war represent a “domestic insurgency” with a “life-and-death stake” in America’s defeat. And their dispute with the president’s supporters represents “a war of ideas on the home front.” “In its own way,” Podhoretz declares, “this war of ideas is no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East.”

I’ve written in the past about European countries being forced to confront racism and xenophobia, which is especially the case in nations where large scale immigration is making the countries more ethnically and racially diverse. One of the latest countries confronting discrimination is Ireland. Unlike many other Western European countries, Ireland was never colonial power. In places, like France, Spain, and Britain many immigrants are coming from former colonies, but since Ireland didn’t have colonies, Irish immigration is a little less predictable. Nevertheless, Ireland is facing some of the same problems as other European countries. Many Irish people do not accept the new immigrants, and this is especially true for Black immigrants, who come mostly from West African countries like Nigeria.

Traditionally, Ireland has been a country of emigrants.¹ Given this fact, it should be no surprise that there are more people of Irish descent in the US alone than there are in Ireland, but in a surprising twist of fate, the trend is beginning to reverse.² With Irish birth rates above replacement level and a new wave of immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe, Ireland is actually gaining more people than it is losing. Some hope that this will contribute to growth in the Irish economy, which has been one of the weakest economies in western Europe.

Right now, there is little research on this trend, and the manifestations of anti-immigrant attitudes and racism come to light with stories this one. The gist of the story is that in a suburb of Dublin nearly all of the approximately 90 children who couldn’t find a school to attend were black kids.

The children will attend a new, all-black school, a prospect that educators called disheartening.

About 90 children could not find school places in the north Dublin suburb of Balbriggan , a town of more than 10,000 people with two elementary schools. Local educators called a meeting over the weekend for parents struggling to find places and said they were shocked to see only black children.

“That overwhelmed me. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. I just find it extremely concerning,” said Gerard Kelly, principal of a school with a mixture of black and white students in the nearby town of Swords.

The parents at Saturday’s meeting in a Balbriggan hotel said they had tried to get their children into local schools but were told that all places had to be reserved by February.

Almost all of the children are Irish-born and thus Irish citizens, under a law that existed until 2004.

There is no way this is merely a coincidence, especially when a neighboring town has mixed schools. It should be noted that they are not starting a school that only admits black pupils, like this poorly worded headline from The Times Online suggests. The school is made up overwhelmingly of black children because those children “mysteriously” were not allowed to enter many of the local schools.

Part of the problem is that the Irish government allows schools to discriminate on the basis of religion, which ends up being a form of indirect institutional racism.

About 98 percent of schools are run by the Roman Catholic Church, and the law permits them to discriminate on the basis of whether a prospective student has a certificate confirming they were baptized into the faith. Some of the African applicants were Muslim, members of evangelical Protestant denominations or of no religious creed.

Since many immigrants are not Catholic, these schools were allowed to not accept them without a Catholic baptism certificate. It is difficult to know how many black children who were Catholic were also excluded. I know many of the African children are Nigerian, and many Christian Nigerians are Catholic, so I’d be curious to see how much religious discrimination and racial discrimination overlapped in this case. Clearly, this is a great case for the separation of church and state, and this is an issue that the Irish will have to confront as they become a multicultural nation.

I suspect that the 2004 referendum changing laws that allow parents of Irish citizen children to also become citizens is part of an anti-immigrant backlash. It will also be interesting to see how the role of the Catholic church changes because of immigration. They may lose some power. Ireland can’t call itself democratic when 98% of their schools are run in an openly discriminatory fashion.

Over the next few years, I expect to see more stories on discrimination like the case in Balbriggan. Hopefully, we will see more pro-immigrant organizations developing from ethnic Irish and immigrants.

1. Emigration with an “e” refers to people exiting the country. This is how I teach the words in class: Immigration with an “i” means into and emigration “e” means exit. (back)
2. Unfortunately, this article is now a paying article, but I was able to read in my New York Times home delivery. (back)

I’m going to organize this as bullet points for each episode. 

Gods Jewish Warriors

• I thought this was the best one of the series. 
• It was balanced in showing both the extremist settlers, and the more mainstream Jews who were opposed to the extremists.
• They gave ultra-orthodox Jews a free pass on the sexism issue, which was unfair.  They noted the treatment of women by Muslim and Christian fundamentalists, but mentioned nothing that I recollect.
• I was also impressed with how they discussed the international dimensions of the settler movement, and the fundamentalist Christians and right wing Jews who provided money and support to the settler movement.
• They also discussed the changes throughout history and covering the various peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors.  One of the most disturbing parts of the special was the discussion of the killing of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.  If you don’t know the story, you can click on the link.

God’s Muslim Warriors

• I felt like this one was a little more predictable because we are quite accustomed to critiques of Muslim fundamentalists–people promoting violence, Jihad, etc.  I do wish they would have highlighted more of the moderate leaders, and more people opposed to Islamic fundamentalism.  They did interview a few people who left extremist groups, which was interesting, but I wish they would have talked with people who were fighting these extremists all along.
• I thought the scenes of the Iranian women protesting were the most moving.  Heart has several postings on the women’s movement in Iran; you can find them here.  Many of the Muslim countries in the Middle East have draconian anti-women policies, and these policies are often justified in the name of religion.  By far one of the most consistent trends with Muslim, Christian, and Jewish extremists is their disdain for the rights of women.
• They did very good at focusing on the international dimensions of the movement; in particular the growing movement in Europe.  What I also found interesting was how both the Christian and Muslim fundamentalists were obsessed with the “cultural decay” in the West, focusing mostly on the decline in traditional definitions of family, materialism, and hedonistic popular culture. 

God’s Christian Warriors

• This was by far the worst of the three.  First, they didn’t show any of the Christian fundamentalists who advocate murder and violence.  There was a brief mention of bombing abortion clinics, but I wish they would have had an in-depth interview with someone like American terrorist Eric Rudolph or any of these people who have engaged in violence at abortion clinics. What about the Christian Identity movement?  What about Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and his family?  They did talk with Christian fundamentalists, but they didn’t talk to the ones who engage in or promote violence like they did in the first two parts of the series.
• I was happy to see them discuss gender, and the treatment of women, especially when Christiane Amanpour told the one minister that the Taliban said the same thing as him. That was classic.  But they didnt get into the depth that they could have– discussing churches who barred women from being ministers.
• There were not enough interviews with people opposing Christian fundamentalism.  They had two ministers who stepped away from some parts of the movement.  I liked the Minnesota minister, who couldn’t figure out why these groups were so obsessed with homosexuality as a sin, but not materialism, greed, or gluttony.
• There was no coverage of the international nature of Christian fundamentalism.  You would think it is only in the US, but there are places like.  Several of the countries in the pink on this map prohibit abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, and Christian fundamentalists are responsible for promoting this in many countrries.  This list also includes some of the various Christian based terrorist groups around the world.

What do you think?

CNN is airing a special on relgious fundamentalism; it is a 3 part series.  Tonight is God’s Jewish Warriors, and in the next two days they will cover God’s Christian Warriors and God’s Muslim Warriors.  If you are watching, what do you think?

Read the rest of this entry »

My favourite blog at the moment is Lenin’s Tomb. Lenin has a great breadth of coverage - I’m always marking his posts saying to myself “I should write about strikes in South Africa” and then I never do.

So I was delighted to see that Lenin’s Tomb had responded to Katha Pollitt who was in turn responding to Alexander Cockburn.*

Alexander Cockburn started by quoting Lawrence McGuire:

“I was reading a recent piece by Phyllis Bennis recently. She talked about the ‘US military casualties’ and the ‘Iraqi civilian victims’ and it struck me that the grand taboo of the antiwar movement is to show the slightest empathy for the resistance fighters in Iraq. They are never mentioned as people for whom we should show concern, much less admiration.

“But of course, if you are going to sympathize with the US soldiers, who are fighting a war of aggression, than surely you should also sympathize with the soldiers who are fighting for their homeland. Perhaps not until the antiwar movement starts to some degree recognizing that they should include ‘the Iraqi resistance fighters’ in their pantheon of victims (in addition to US soldiers and Iraqi civilians) will there be the necessary critical mass to have a real movement.”

I probably disagree with this argument - but mostly because I think the American anti-war movement has far bigger problems (they rhyme with Pemocratic Darty). But Katha Pollitt almost made me change my mind:

So, okay, call me ignorant: The Iraqi resistance isn’t dominated by theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs?

What made me so angry was the way Katha Pollitt dismissed the Iraqi armed resistance out of hand, as if the idea of supporting people fighting in self-defence was too ridiculous to take seriously.**

I wanted to respond, but got distracted in the face of research that would prove that Iraqis who want self-determination aren’t just: “theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs?” Luckily Lenin has done it all for me. He’s responded to Katha Pollitt, and then put together information about what the armed resistance is actually like.

My position is a little different from Lenin’s.*** In order to actively support any sort of resistance group I want to know how they treat their own people, and what sort of world they want to build. But it’s an academic question, because I have nothing the Iraqi resistance needs. As Lenin (the blogger) said:

A little humility would compel her to recognise that the Iraqi resistance is doing far more to frustrate American imperialism than then American left is. The resistance is supporting us. It is their courageous insistence on combating an enemy with immense death-dealing power, confronting them in the streets despite years of savage murder, despite the prospect of incineration and shredding, that is causing Bush’s unpopularity.

The fact that I’m not prepared to support any particular Iraqi resistance group shouldn’t obscure the most basic point - I want the Iraqi resistance to win. I want the US to get the hell out of Iraq, and not to be capable of leaving a puppet government behind us. Any other outcome will give the people who rule America more power and the people who are fighting them less.

* I’ll be the first to acknowledge that not all Alexander Cockburn’s arguments are worth thinking about seriously - particularly not his climate change arguments, which I haven’t paid enough attention to accurately summarise, but have paid enough attention to to know they’re stupid.

** I take these discussions so seriously I once started a pool at what the ratio of male/female speakers would be at a meeting on our attitudes towards the Iraqi armed resistance.

*** That’s Lenin the blogger, although I’m guessing my position is also different from Lenin the Revolutionary leader.

Following up on Mandolin’s recent posts here on “Alas,” here are a few more discussions of the complexities of Female Genital Cutting (aka Female Genital Mutilation and Female Genital Surgery):

Official Shrub dot com: Why I Cringe When Western Feminists Discuss FGC

This is not to say that Western feminists ought to ignore FGC, or never examine patriarchal tendencies in societies outside of our own. This is not to say that all examinations of FGC by Western feminists are innately imperialist. What I am saying is that we ought to be very careful of the judgments we make in the name of feminism, when that feminism can be used to obscure our own complicity in imperialism.

To return once again to Razack, she quotes from Isabelle Gunning to list some basic necessities for feminist analyses of international human rights: “1) seeing oneself in historical context; 2) seeing oneself as the “other” might see you; and 3) seeing the “other” within her own cultural context” (97). These steps do not give us a complete guide on how to avoid perpetuating imperialism through our feminism - but they’re a start.

ThinkNaughty: Female Genital Cutting, Sexuality, and Anti-FGC Advocacy

Interesting post from last year pointing out that many women who have had FGC don’t consider themselves “victims.” As I wrote in ThinkNaughty’s comments last year, though, I think this post, in trying to point out that the issue is more multifaceted than Western critics acknowledge, goes too far in the opposite direction by not quoting local female activists who oppose FGC.

How Pledge Associations Can End Female Genital Cutting

This essay by academic Gerry Mackie describes “pledge associations,” a strategy that historically worked to end footbinding in China — and is working to end FGC in some communities today. Mackie’s argument is that FGC, like foot-binding, is to a great extent perpetuated by the need for marriageability; the practice continues because parents and daughters fear that an uncut daughter will not be able to get married. Even parents who don’t themselves approve of FGC often still practice FGC, because to do otherwise is to risk ruining their daughters’ chances of marriage. But when a critical mass of people in a community jointly pledge to end FGC, that allows people to quit practicing FGC with reassurance that their daughters will remain marriageable.

If Mackie is to be believed, pledge associations — group, public declarations that a practice will be ended — were critical to ending Chinese footbinding, and are now working to end FGC.

Here’s a brief quote from Mackie’s essay that I’m including mainly because it dovetails with Mandolin’s posts:

Nondirective education works. Harsh propaganda backfires. The example of footbinding suggests, however, that it is appropriate in some circumstances for outsiders to state their opposition to FGC, but only if such opposition is factual, understanding, and respectful.

Suppose that a law professor is charged with the task of eliminating automobile usage in Los Angeles, and proposes this strategy: legal prohibition enforced by serious penalty. Because the professor has provided no alternative method of transportation, no one can stop driving. Because no one is able to stop driving, police and prosecutors will not waste their time picking out some poor Joe Blow for punishment. But there will black marks on a white page to satisfy the irate Oregonians and Bangladeshi who demand that the Angelenos stop their destructive driving habits. Criminal law works because thieves and murderers are a minority of the population that the state can afford to pursue with the cooperation of the majority of the population. It is not possible to criminalize the entirety of the population, or the entirety of a discrete and insular minority of the population, without the methods of mass terror. Reactance complicates the problem. The example of footbinding shows that legal prohibition comes at the end of the process of abandonment, not at its beginning. Legal prohibition that is not the expression of local popular will on the subject is ineffective if not undemocratic. Europe and America have every right to prohibit FGC among their inhabitants, however, because FGC is a mistaken practice, and also because the children of the immigrants aspire to participate in their uncut host societies…

Larvatus Provodeo: Putting Her Money Where Her Mouth Is

Kim at Larvatus Provodeo is looking for a few good comments on FGC — and she’s willing to pay for them.

For every comment on this post which discusses the issue seriously without turning it into a political football, attributing motives to bloggers or indulging in disputation about religion, politics, culture wars, or clashes of or within civilisations, I will donate two dollars to The Foundation for Women’s Health, Research and Development up to a maximum of two hundred dollars.

As far as I can tell, Kim hasn’t reached her limit and her offer hasn’t been closed, so go leave a comment.

The point of these discussions, in my opinion, is not to say that there’s nothing we can do to bring about a major reduction in FGC. Rather, the point is that what’s most effective may be different from what seems most uncompromising and hardcore. It’s right that Western feminists feel anger and horror at FGC, but we have to be careful that our approach to FGC remains effective, aware of the problems of colonialism and racism, and serves women — rather than serving our own need to feel like we’re doing something.

As I wrote in comments of Mandolin’s post, it’s mistaken for Americans to think that we have the ability to change whatever we want about other cultures, if only we’re determined enough. (See: Iraq.) Very often there is no beneficial solution the US has the ability to implement. Even in cases where US motives are not imperialistic, we still have only limited power to make real improvements.

When it comes to FGC, if there’s any alternative in which we can prevent untold numbers of girls being mutilated and dying, then obviously that is what we must favor. But I don’t see any sign that such an alternative exists; and as Mandolin argued, there’s good reason to think that western pressure on the Egyptian and other governments to institute bans makes things worse, leading to more mutilation and death.

Curtsies to Katie and to The Rook’s Not To Blame for the links.

A Maori party representative has taken a stand for accurate analysis:

“All Howard has done is generate more anger and bitterness in the Aboriginal community, a lot of which is going to be internalised,” Mr Harawira said.

“I said John Howard is … trying to impose racist policies on a people who can’t fight back,”

The Stuff article on this has the word racist in scare quotes: “Aussie PM ‘racist’ Maori Party MP claims.” A policy that reduces benefit entitlements only to indigenous Australians, steals land, and invades communities is racist, we don’t need MPs to point that out.

But naming racism is not enough, in days like these. If you live in Australia you must go to your local solidarity demonstration on July 14 (Melbourne details here and other cities here.

In Wellington there are going to be two demostrations one on Friday 13th from 12.30pm to 1.30pm outside the Australian embassy. The second will be a march meeting at Midland park at 12pm, and ending at Te Aro park.

*A friend of mine, I’ll call him Manuel, was once on the megaphone at an anti-roading demo and started “We’re here today in solidarity with the people of Iraq..” he realised what he said and said “Oh shit, oh well it’s all connected anyway.” Which is true enough, but I’ve never let him forget it.

Edited: Apparently Truthiness doesn’t mean what I think it means - I had a vague feeling I was quoting Buffy, apparently not.

I wanted to include this information in yesterday’s post on Female Genital Surgeries, but my googling failed to provide the source. Enormous thanks to Ampersand for turning it up, based on my vague description.

*

Recently, I wrote about the many ways in which western intervention on the topic of female genital surgeries has backfired. Circumcision has been practiced on younger and younger girls. It has been forced into ever more covert circumstances, increasing the risk of fatal bleeding and HIV infection. Female genital surgeries have become, in some places, a badge of African pride, a defining part of African identity — and this is clearly traceable to ham-fisted Western efforts to eradicate it. Groups which never practiced female circumcision have taken it up, putting thousands more girls and women at risk.

On the surface, the Egyptian ban looks different. After all, the ban isn’t being imposed by colonial forces. It’s been internally generated.

Sort of.

First off, the ban is not what it has been advertised as. It is not a ban on “female genital mutilation.” It is not illegal for parents to seek their daughters’ circumcision. What has been made illegal is for FGS to be practed by doctors, in public or private hospitals.

The original form of this ban was conceived in 1996, after an incident two years earlier in which CNN showed footage of a thirteen-year-old screaming as her clitoris was cut out by a barber. Egypt was embarrassed by the footage, which outraged westerners, who in turn threatened to withdraw foreign aid.

In its original form, the ban would have forced physicians to educate any family that came to them with a request for female genital surgeries. Doctors were to apprise families of the health risks that make such procedures an enormously bad idea. If families insisted on carrying out the procedure, they would be taken to a hospital where the girls would be given proper anasthetic and surgical care, managing the enormous pain of having one’s external genitals removed and also helping to prevent the high rates of infection and death that result from amateur surgeons wielding non-sterile equipment.

American groups such as Equality Now rebelled against what they called the “medicalization” of clitoridecomy, and said they would give no foreign aid to hosptials where hte procedure was performed.

This led to a reconception of the ban, which prohibited clitorodectomy in public hosptials, although it was still permitted in private ones. Eventually, the ban was extended to include all licensed medical practitioners, although it left an out for “extreme circumstances.” This ban enabled Egyptian hospitals to retain foreign aid, at the expense of Egyptian girls’ health. Remember: this is a country in which 97% of women are cut. Even among the educated upper and middle classes where the incidence of FGS is reduced, the men who authored the ban almost certainly have modified daughters, wives, and sisters; the women were likely to have been cut themselves. They were aware that demand for the procedure was unlikely to lessen, a fact which they had attempted to address by building in educational and safety measures into the original form of the ban.

In 1997, this ban was challenged in a religious court which landed it back in the news. (All the scholars I’ve read agree that FGS is not required by Islam. However, there remain interpretations that suggest that FGS is part of a decent, observant Islamic lifestyle.) The ban managed to stand.

The newest form of the ban, the report of which on Pandagon and Feministe is what triggered this conversation, came recently in response to the death of a 12-year-old girl whose death (according to the Yahoo article) may have been linked to misuse of anasthetic. The new ban eliminates the “extreme circumstances” provision that remained in the previous ban. I do not have enough information to say whether that specific change will put more girls at risk.

This ban is not an internal attempt by Egyptians to try to change their own culture. It does not appear to be a response to a changing sentiment in which feelings about female genital surgeries have changed. Instead, it appears to be a ban made in the mold of the earlier colonial bans, in which westerners attempt to impose their feelings about female genital surgeries on a population over which they have (economic) power, without first examining the consequences of that ban.

Egytptians themselves first tried to implement a solution which is closer to the solutions that the activists who are involved in actually trying to change conditions on African soil have discovered to have a real, measurable effect on the practice. However, westerners prevented them from enacting legislation that would have ameliorated real world conditions, in favor of demanding an impressive, symbollic ban.

In demanding an immediate and complete solution, instead of acknowledging the reality that will involve years of hard work and moral ambiguity, westerners have unwittingly played into the hands of those who wish to continue female genital surgeries. The current iteration of the ban was never intended to actually eliminate female genital surgeries. It does not ban the common procedures wherein barbers wield razor blades on girls who lie prone, without anasthetic — even though it was a barber who conducted the mutilation that shocked the west when it was caught on video in 1994.

No, the current ban is intended to appease westerners, and is remarkably effective at doing so. A ban sounds like it’s accomplishing something. It sounds good when it is on the headline of a newspaper, or coming from the lips of a TV news reporter. It sounds decisive and impressive. It makes a good blog link. It creates a feeling of progress. We can say FGM is banned, and we can feel hope about the situation in Egypt. Enthusiastically, westerners continue to provide foreign aid because we feel that our activism has accomplished something.

Meanwhile, 97 out of 100 Egyptian girls will have their clitorises cut out. Most of these procedures will happen in unsanitary conditions, without anasthesia, with equipment wielded by unpracticed hands. The imposition of this ban, instead of the earlier form favored by the Egyptian government, ensures that those surgeries will be brutal and dangerous.

On this side of the ocean, one of the most pernicious side effects of this ban is that it creates a sense of accomplishment in armchair western activists, because it gives off the air of a job well done. FGS is banned in Egypt — keep giving them money. Don’t look at the ways in which this ban fails to stop any female genital surgeries, and in facts makes the actual surgeries worse. Only look at the big, symbollic law.

This ban gets in the way of effective activism, because it appears to be doing something while doing nothing. It offers us a black and white solution, while conveniently hiding away the shades of grey that we we would have been required to face if the initial Egyptian proposals had been enacted. Westerners — perhaps all people — have a great liking for black and white thinking. We enjoy symbols. This is the kind of thinking that makes us think we can pound terrorists into submission with bombs. Drop bombs on them and they won’t dare to resist us! But of course we know that’s not the way things work. When you pound people with bombs, even the ones who were sympathetic to you become terrorists. You make the situation worse. This is true even when the goal is more feminist — you don’t get people to stop using burkhas by dropping bombs on them either. Instead, you end up with a lot of women who are wearing burkhas and terrified for their lives and their families. And you also end up with women who are veiling to show their solidarity to the women who are being bombed, just as you end up with women who practice female genital surgeries to show that they defy colonialist power. Via colonialism, the western world has treated Africa really shittily. They are understandably wary when we tell them something is “for their own good.” Why should they believe us if we’re willing to threaten to defund their hospitals and treat them like moral infants, instead of treating them like rational actors who we need to convince?

As liberals, we are supposed to be better trained in detecting these fallacies. After all, there have been studies showing that liberals are better able to conceive of ambiguities. We know enough about our culture to pick them up when they’re happening in our society. What makes us look at a foreign culture and suddenly see in two dimensions? It’s a bad habit, supported by racism and colonialism.

Using the threat of withdrawing foreign moneys can be an effective tool, as famously exemplified in divestment from South Africa. I’m not sure that it’s as reasonable to threaten to withdraw charity money as it is to withdraw business investments, but leaving that aside for the moment — probably there is a way to deal with our financial involvement in Egypt ethically, and to try to pressure their government to do something about female genital surgeries.

But we have to be smart about it, not act like big stupid bullies. Demanding that they do things exactly our way, instead of listening to their more knowledgeable ideas about how to change their culture — that’s stupid. Demanding that they change everything immediately and accepting no intermediate steps, thus putting them in a situation where it’s impossible to actually make productive change — that’s stupid. Dictating an end point instead of convincing people of your point of view — that’s stupid, too. And all of these things just complicate the post-colonial relationship between America and Egypt, and make it less likely that our word is going to count for anything. “STOP PERFORMING FGM!” means less than a statistic that shows clitoridectomy kills 15% more mothers and infants than intact childbirth. If we really want to accomplish our goals of worldwide health and prosperity for women, rather than just congratulate ourselves on meaningless and shiny symbols, then we’re going to have to stow away our arrogance for a while and actually look for practical, efficacious measures.

On Pandagon, Amanda relates what she calls some good news: Egypt has outlawed FGM.

From the article:

Officially the practice, which affects both Muslim and Christian women in Egypt and goes back to the time of the pharoahs, was banned in 1997 but doctors were allowed to operate “in exceptional cases”.

On Thursday, Health Minister Hatem al-Gabali decided to ban every doctor and member of the medical profession, in public or private establishments, from carrying out a clitoridectomy, a ministry press official told AFP.

On the Pandagon thread, a commenter called Dan writes: “Obviously, banning FGM is always a step in the right direction…”

I am not convinced that this is obvious. Nor am I necessarily convinced that this outcome is good news.

Some Background
One thing that one learns in the study of anthropology is that culture is a holistic entity. That means that you can’t split it up into tiny bits and interact with those bits piece by piece. You can’t hold up — say — dowry burnings and say “this is what dowry burning is, this is what it means” outside the context of the rest of the culture, anymore than you could hold up “I Love Lucy” to people who didn’t understand Western gender roles or Western materialism or a Western sense of humor and expect them to understand it.

Female genital surgeries (FGS) are the same way; they exist within a cultural context that gives them meaning. The cultural contexts are different, so the meanings are different.

Let me take a brief digression to deal with the issue of terminology. I’m going to call the procedures FGS, which is the term that an anthropologist friend of mine favors when he teaches Intro to Anth. FGS is not a perfect term. However, it is an attempt to ameliorate some of the problems with other terms. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a term that many African women, and others, object to as stifling conversation because the term itself is alienating and inflammatory. Female circumcision is inaccurate, and leads to a false equivalency between male and female circumcision since it creates an ersatz linguistic link between the two procedures.* FGS is an attempt at a middle ground.

Female genital surgeries exist in many different forms, in many different cultural contexts. Here are some of the physical manifestations of the surgery:

• Nicking of the clitoris or removing the tip of the clitoris - relatively unusual
• Clitorodectomy - the most common form of FGS, involving removal of the clitoris. Often practiced along with the removal of the labia minora. May or may not be accompanied by a procedure intended to kill the clitoral nerve, such as pressing hot needles into the affected area.
• Infibulation - the removal of the clitoris, labia minora, and labia majora. The inner walls of the vagina are scraped and then sewn together, leaving a hole as small as a woman’s pinky finger. This procedure can make menstruation and urination very difficult and lead to an increased probability of health complications like uterine prolapse. Tough, inelastic scar tissue is unyielding, making birth a dangerous process. Infibulated women must be cut open for sex and birth, and are often resewn afterward.

FGS are also done for a variety of reasons. Each culture that practices FGS will be practicing its own variation — in terms of what the surgery consists of, and why it is done. For this reason, it’s very difficult to talk about FGS as a monolith. And there’s a good reason for that. FGS are not a monolith.

For instance, it’s not uncommon to encounter feminists arguing that FGM is done to eliminate female sexual pleasure, or to prevent women from cheating. FGS are not done solely for either of these reasons, although they are some of the reasons stated by some cultures.

For the Kikuyu in Kenya, who practice clitorodectomy, FGS is practiced as a rite of passage in order to create a more visible separation between men and women. The clitoris, or masculine part, is removed to make the woman more womanly (conversely, the foreskin which is seen as being like the labia, is removed to make men more manly). Therefore, any attempts to eliminate FGS among the Kikuyu will have to react to these cultural motivations.

It would be inappropriate for the same solutions to be attempted among the Kikuyu as would be used in infibulation-practicing East African countries like Ethiopia and Somalia, countries that are very patriarchal and have clear interests in establishing inheritance laws. Unlike the FGS practiced by the Kikuyu, Ethiopian and Somalian infibulation appears to arise from an interest in protecting paternity rights (Carolyn Martin Shaw). They want to make sure that inheritance goes to genetic sons. Women - often upper-class women - bear the brunt of this (as they did in Europe with chastity belts, in the middle east with seclusion, in China with footbinding) because the patriarchy (supported by both men and women) views them as vessels for heirs. Reducing their ability to become pregnant by men who are not their husbands makes it more likely that inheritance will go to genetic heirs. Cultural practices grow around this desire. Later, these practices are fetishized.

Clitorodectomy and infibulation are both practiced by some cultures that believe the touch of a woman’s uncircumcized genitals will sap a man of his ability to hold an erection, cause hydrocephally, and/or kill any infant the woman bears. This myth is enduring. You may think that decades of interaction with white women who are uncircumcized and yet able to bear children would have shaken the myth, but this is often not the case. White women often choose not to bear children or to bear very few children, which means that white women are often seen as infertile. Thus it is possible for African women from FGS-practicing cultures to interact with uncircumcized white women and still believe that circumcision is necessary for fertility.

The point of all this is: FGS is not something that exists in isolation. It exists for particular reasons. You don’t get rid of those reasons by changing the law. All you do is create a situation in which the reasons still exist (need for a rite of passage, to ensure paternity, to ensure fertility), but the traditional method of meeting those needs has been outlawed.

Laws Against FGS Analogized to Laws Against Rape

On a Feministe thread about the ban, Jill writes in defense of the law. “I don’t think anyone is saying FGM is going to disappear,” she writes, acknowledging that the ban will not be a cure. She goes on to say, “But it is important that they’ve outlawed it, since that reflects a profound social shift, and it allows people to be prosecuted for it… Rape laws don’t get rid of rape, but I’d rather have them than not.”

I think Jill is erring in comparing FGS to rape. FGS is a culturally sanctioned, overt part of how the society functions. Rape is at best a covert part of our cultural function. While it holds up patriarchy by limiting women’s movements, it also subverts patriarchy because it is a threat to paternal property. FGS is not like that.

In my opinion, a better analogy would be to compare FGS to - say — capture marriage as its practiced in Nepal, in which a young man kidnaps a young woman and marries her by force. To western eyes, these marriages look superficially abhorrent (and they’re certainly not 100% good). But we’re missing the subtleties of the capture marriages. These marriages are often arranged before hand and approved by both families as a way of allowing a young couple to marry when they do not have the financial resources to put on a huge wedding. In many (I think most) capture marriages, the woman is not actually in danger, or experiencing surprise; she feigns both ritualistically. However, the bride is not always told of the capture marriage beforehand. Capture marriages are a culturally sanctioned process which serves particular culturally sanctioned purposes (allowing a way for the children of families who have fallen on hard times to marry), and which puts the interest of families above the interests of the woman.

It would be possible to make laws against capture marriage, in ostensible defense of the woman’s independence. However, the kinds of laws that tend to get enacted in situations like these are made with a western gaze. We see the surface effect of a capture marriage and apply it to known situations — the biblical Sabine women of Roman mythology, for instance. We aren’t looking at the reasons why capture marriages exist, or how they are rooted in the culture. Addressing the symptom by making capture marriages illegal may actually make the situation worse for women.

And this is what we have seen, time and time again, with regard to legal remedy for FGS.

A Brief Overview of Some Historical Consequences of Outlawing FGS

Missionaries who got down to Africa really didn’t like FGS. Well, I don’t either. Many of them did what seems like the logical thing to do when you are in ostensible control of a group of people who are doing something that you think is a major violation of human rights, moral decency, and God’s law. They decided to ban it.

Early bans had a number of consequences (not all of which occurred in all places).

• Circumcision began to be performed on younger and younger girls. Because it was less likely that missionaries or western colonial agents would be messing in the lives of infant or very young girls, and because infants and very young girls would be less likely to understand what was going on well enough to discuss it with missionaries or western colonial agents, it made sense to do it on younger girls. (Here, again, we reach the problem with discussing FGS as a monolith. Some cultures started out performing FGS on younger girls. But many didn’t, and many of those started performing the surgeries on younger and younger girls.)

  Why is this a problem for women? Among other things, it decreases the likelihood of sexual function. Among the Kikuyu of Kenya, circumcision rituals were proceded with kinds of genital stimulation and body play that appear to have been intended to teach women how to orgasm once they had been cut. Adolescent girls and boys would wrap their bodies in tight strips of leather and rub up on one another. This kind of all-body stimulation is likely to have been instructive in helping women adjust to the altered physical sensations of a circumcized body. When circumcisions are done at a younger age, these kinds of rituals are likely to decline or disappear altogether.

  Women are also much more likely to acheive sexual pleasure after circumcision if they have orgasmed before circumcision. This is, obviously, more likely to be the case in girls who are adolescents than girls who are toddlers or infants.

  Circumcisions and younger ages also contribute to:

• The destruction of social practices that surround circumcision, such as coming of age rituals, that provide context and meaning to the procedure. These contexts may not have anything to do with sexual pleasure (which is why I’m making this its own category), but are likely to have to do with community building and the function of a healthy culture. Destroying these rituals, but KEEPING the circumcision, is the opposite of good. The better option, of course, is to figure out how to keep the rituals while changing their object (as some activists have worked on doing).
• Circumcision was often driven underground, to be done in private, furtive spaces, which makes it difficult for the procedures to be done in clean, healthy ways that minimize risk to the girls.

Perhaps the most important effect of banning FGS is that it created a dichotomy, the effects of which activists are still dealing with today. It underlined the idea that female genital surgeries are African, and not practicing female genital surgeries is American. Not to practice female genital surgery is to capitulate to colonialists. To practice FGS is to be genuinely African.

When Western feminists insist on framing the discourse about FGS on our terms, we make this problem worse. When we emphasize statements like, “African women are being denied sexual pleasure,” as if it were the worst part of the situation, we grind home this dichotomy.

It has been repeatedly proven to be much more effective to talk about FGS in terms of women’s and children’s health. FGS kills women and children. According to a study linked by Feministe last year, women who’ve undergone infibulation are 50% more likely to die or to lose their infants than women who have not. Women who’ve undergone clitorodectomy are 15% more likely to die or to lose their infants in childbirth than women who have not.

This is the kind of information that tends to persuade women, because it is culturally situated. It addresses what they are worried about. Sexual pleasure tends to be coded as decadent and western. It is therefore not only not of concern, but can be specifically opposed. It’s therefore not always useful to talk to African women about it. Our insistence on framing the narrative in our terms can damage African women’s actual lives.

Because while sexual pleasure is a big deal, in my personal opinion, poor childbirth outcomes are probably a bigger deal. Spreading HIV through the use of dirty razor blades is a bigger deal. Injury and lameness are bigger deals. Uterine prolapse is a bigger deal. Death is a bigger deal.

There are real world harms to the ways in which westerners have typically framed debates about FGS. The dichotomy I mentioned earlier, where FGS is coded as genuine, African, and anti-colonial, gained teeth during the pan-African movement. Since that time, in some places, FGS has become a marker of cultural superiority. Cultures that did not practice FGM have taken it up, in order to emulate other cultures that are considered more prestigious. And other cultures that did not practice FGM have taken it up, specifically in order to show that they are African and anti-colonial. Our attempts to legally ban FGS have not lessened cultural attachment. They’ve increased it.

The Egyptian Ban, in Particular
Read the rest of this entry »

Three years ago Chris Hurley killed Mulrunji Doomadgee.

Chris Hurley is a police officer, who arrested Mulrunji Doomadgee for ‘Drunk and Disorderly Behaviour’ - the criminality of being drunk often depends on the colour of your skin. How you get treated when you get arrested also depends on the colour of your skin. There was Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991, but 13 years later the recommendations had been ignored and Mulrunji Doomadgee died.

In police custody, he suffered four broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and a his liver was almost split in half.

Since his death, Mulrunji Doomadgee’s family has fought for justice. The first police investigation was done by police officers who had dinner with Chris Hurley while they were ‘investigating’ the case. Last year the coroner decided that the police were responsible for Mulrunji Doomadgee’s death.

On Wednesday the jury found Chris Hurley not guilty.

Mulrunji’s death is a horrific, but it’s just one of daily crimes against indigenous Australians. His arrest, his beating - they happen every day. The theft of land is what Australia is based on.

Then, yesterday, supposedly to protect children for sexual abuse the government announced a package of direct attacks on indigenous people. Most of which, like market rents, benefits, and land thefts - are simply neo-liberal attacks on people’s basic subsistence.

I went to a reading by Khaled Hosseini last night, at the bay area Book Group Expo. Khaled read from a section of his new book A Thousand Splendid Suns, which someone described as being the history of Afghanistan viewed through the eyes of two women.

The reading was fascinating/frightening: it detailed the search of a pregnant woman and her surrogate mother for a hospital that would take them in while she gave birth. Women had been banned from all the hospitals in Afghanistan, bar one, and that one lacked water, electricity, and basic medical supplies. When the woman’s baby turned out to be in the breech position, the doctor apologized for the lack of anasthetic, and then continued to do a cesarian section anyway.

Khaled Hosseini is a physician who has worked internationally; consequently, the medical details had a frightening heft. He described the way in which the pregnant woman’s mouth stretched back and frothed with pain.

As he passed into this description, the audience, which was full, began to shift. The demographic was mostly women, but with more men than last year (I’d make a guess at 25-30%). Everyone was uncomfortable. As Hosseini described the doctor’s whispered apologies, I heard people exclaiming to each other “There isn’t going to be any anasthetic…!” Everyone appeared to find the idea shocking, unthinkable. Hosseini himself said that when he had gone into Afganistan as a physician, hoping to lend aid, he’d been shocked to hear from doctors that the sheer number of injuries that had been incurred by the war when the warlords entered Afghanistan meant that physicians were constantly running out of basic supplies. A doctor told him that it had, during the war, become expected to perform cesarian sections, and even amputations, without anasthetic. “As a doctor from the west,” said Hosseni, “the idea was wild…”
Read the rest of this entry »

Women’s deaths are a useful goad for keeping other women in line.

Discuss.

Over at The Debate Link, David, discussing the kidnapping of BBC reporter Alan Johnston, writes:

An interesting article in the UK’s Telegraph asks what the media would do had Israeli forces, rather than Palestinians, abducted a BBC crew. Suffice to say, media coverage would be rather different.

Well, the phrase “Israeli forces” usually refers to Israel’s armed forces, part of the Israeli government. I would hope that if the Israeli government kidnapped a journalist, media coverage would be rather different, compared to the coverage of an obscure terrorist splinter group kidnapping a journalist. These are two very different news stories, and they shouldn’t be treated alike.

And they aren’t treated alike — but not in the way David is implying. Judging from the article David approvingly links to, David expects that the press would pay more attention to, and be more condemning of, Israeli forces kidnapping¹ a reporter. David provides not a single fact or example to support this belief.

So what would happen? For a start, when Israeli forces kidnap a journalist, no one calls it a kidnapping: it’s called an “arrest.”

Palestinian journalist, Awad Rajoub, a reporter for Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language Web site was held by Israeli authorities for close to six months [in 2006] after being accused by the military of “threatening state security.” Rajoub was arrested on 30 November 2005, at which time his computer and mobile phone were seized. He was released on 24 May after an Israeli court ruled there was insufficient evidence to send him to trial.²
Rajoub, who also writes for the Qatari-based Al-Sharq newspaper and the Islam Online Web site, said that he was beaten during his detention.

I did a Nexis search and found that in the two months following his arrest, Rajoub was mentioned exactly twice in major newspapers; neither mention was over 150 words, and neither mention was at all disapproving of Israel’s action.³

In contrast, Nexis found 248 mentions of “Alan Johnston” in conjunction with “Gaza” in the two months following Johnston’s kidnapping. These stories are far longer and more substantive than the stories about Rajoub’s arrest, and are not written in neutral terms (nor should they have been). For example, the Washington Post’s story on April 13, 2007 bore the headline: “Hundreds Rally for Captive Reporter; International Effort Mounted for BBC Journalist Abducted a Month Ago in Gaza Strip.”

Contrary to David’s expectations, it’s clear that the press is far more interested and far more critical when a Palestinian terrorist group kidnaps a journalist than when the Israeli army does.

I’m sure that some folks will be quick to point out that there is “no moral equivalence,” as they say, between the Israeli army jailing a journalist for six months and the terrorists who are holding Alan Johnson, because with the Israelis, there is a possibility of a court looking at a case. I am happy to agree the Israeli system of kidnapping journalists is morally superior to terrorism, however, so please leave that particular strawman in peace.

More importantly, I’d argue that the moral equivalence David implies between “Palestinians” and “Israeli forces” doesn’t exist either. To quote Pendantry:

Now, remind me, exactly how many troops does the Palestinian army have? Oh yeah, none whatsoever.

There is a very simple notion in political science, one that goes back to Max Weber: A state possesses, by definition, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and it protects that monopoly. When a state is unable to protect that monopoly, it isn’t a state. There is no Palestinian state, and a non-existent state can not have a monopoly on violence.[...]

However, it seems that there are quite a few people who seem to think that “the Palestinians” are responsible for terrorism, and that making concessions to them is giving in to terrorists. This article, for example, by an author who appears to suffer from the double stigma of being both a Likudnik and a Randroid, suffers from this sort of thinking. It is just like believing that “the Jews” control the banks. This kind of thinking derives not so much from a false belief as from a confusion between ontological categories.

To explain this, I need to talk a bit about the basic theory of collectives. Margaret Thatcher once said that there is no such thing as society. She was right, although unsurprisingly for all the wrong reasons. Society does not possess the ability to have mental states, goals, intentions or to undertake cognition. Society is just a collection of people.

Any bunch of things can be a collection. Collections may not have clear definitions. They may be fuzzy or ambiguous. They need not be Aristotelian sets. The Americans are a collection. The Israelis are a collection. The Jews are a collection. I need not be able to identify precisely who is an American, an Israeli or a Jew to identify those things as collections. I just need to assert that there is more than one person or thing that is American, Israeli or Jewish.

Collections are not entities capable of cognition or coherent action. They do not plan, consider possibilities, have needs or goals, or take responsibility for things. There are, however, groups that can have needs and goals, that can plan, undertake cognition and take purposeful actions. They are called collectives.

Firms, armies, states, governments, unions, churches, clubs and many other kinds of groups are collectives. They can be identified as collectives because they can be recognised as having needs, goals, and intentions, a capacity for cognition, and the ability to undertake coherent, meaningful action. Collectives can, therefore, be responsible for the actions they undertake. Collections can not. [...]

Now, this is the key point of this whole post: The Palestinians are a collection, and are therefore incapable of being responsible for terrorism. Hamas is a collective. Fatah is a collective. Al-Qaeda is a collective. They are capable of bearing collective responsibility for terrorism. The Palestinians are not.

That is why there is no moral equivalency between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel is a collective. It is an entity capable of cognition, intentional action and responsibility. The actions of the IDF, the state of repression that prevails in the West Bank and Gaza - Israel is responsible for those things, whether justified or not. The Palestinians, because they are not a collective, are not responsible for terrorism, even when it is undertaken in their name by some collective entity.

The Palestinians are not even a member of the same category as Israel, and thus no moral equivalency is possible.

It’s tragic that a terrorist group kidnapped Johnston, but attributing the acts of a terrorist group to “Palestinians” is inaccurate, unfair and bolsters the worldview of anti-Palestinian racists. (If someone said that “the Jews were caught trying to blow up the al-Aqsa Mosque,” that would be be wrong for similar reasons; the Makhteret is a Jewish terrorist group, but it doesn’t follow that Makhteret’s acts can be fairly attributed to “Jews”).

David seems to think that “Palestinians” (his phrase)⁴ are getting off light in the press compared to “Israeli forces,” but his own chosen example shows that the reverse is true. Israel is, by and large, given a pass by the mainstream press when they kidnap arrest reporters. This is opposite of how the press should act. It’s legitimate to expect the Israeli government (or any government) to act with much greater moral decency than a terrorist group; and the press should be willing to hold governments to higher standards, and to make it a big deal when a government stoops to arresting reporters. Too many of Israel’s supporters seem to suggest that it’s wrong (or even anti-semitic) to expect Israel to act better than the scummiest governments and terrorist groups in the world. I disagree.

By the way, David also linked to a good Martha Fineman Nussbaum essay arguing “Against Academic Boycotts.” Fineman Nussbaum makes a good case that academic boycotts are both useless and morally dubious.

1. Not that kidnapping is the worst Israeli forces have ever done to a journalist; remember the British journalist James Miller, who was shot to death by Israeli forces while wearing a helmet and jacket marked “TV” and waving a white flag? (back)
2. I should note that at least in this case, the Israeli system — in which Rajoub was freed after six months due to lack of evidence — is superior to the US practice. (back)
3. Here is the complete text of The Washington Post’s coverage of the Rajoub arrest, published on December 5, 2005: “JERUSALEM — Israeli forces have arrested a reporter for the Web site of the Arabic satellite television channel al-Jazeera in the West Bank town of Hebron. An army spokeswoman said Awad Rajoub, 29, was being held ‘for security reasons.’” (back)
4. And yes, the title of my post is intentional irony. (back)

I feel almost like an anthropologist exploring unfathomable territory when I read about American electoral politics. No matters how much I read, it doesn’t make any sense to me.¹

The Democrats are considerably to the right of the Labour party, the major left wing party in New Zealand (who I would never support, because they’re too right wing) and I suspect they’re also to the right of the National party, the major right wing party in New Zealand. I read people whose analysis is to the left of the Labour party in terms of the NZ political spectrum, and yet they still support this incredibly right wing party?

How much Democrat support for the war in Iraq is too much? How many women denied access to abortion are too many? How much Homeland Security is too much? How much welfare reform is too much? How many children dying from sanctions are too many?

I can understand taking a pragmatic approach and always voting for the least bad lizard.² But for those who claim that they’re supporting something positive when they support the Democrats, when would you stop believing that? When would you say fuck this shit there are better ways to reach my goals?

1. Not the actions of elected politicians that makes perfect sense, and it’s what you’d expect from the electoral and economic system. It’s left-wing people’s attitudes towards the electoral system that baffles me. (back)
2. Oh I miss Douglas Adams. (back)