“Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuck-offs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage,” famously stated Hunter S. Thompson, who was known as much for his drug-induced shenanigans as he was as the founder of gonzo journalism, a style in which the author is central to the story he is reporting.  

Thompson — irreverent, acerbic, and sardonic — committed suicide today by fatally shooting himself.  He was 67.

Mimi Hanaoka

“I understand the logistical problem but still we are very depressed that we have not been allowed to vote, this is our right,” stated Iman Qahtani, a female Saudia Arabian journalist, speaking about the first quasi-democratic municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, in which women were banned from voting.
    
Despite the fact that women comprise over half of the population in Saudi Arabia, and despite the fact that the election rules assert that all citizens who are 21 or older, with exception of military personnel, may vote, Saudi women were disenfranchised by a technicality. Voters must have an identification card to register to vote, but only six percent of women requested the necessary ID cards. Citing the impossibility of giving ID cards to all women ahead of the vote, election officials simply banned all women from voting.  

Although women remain disenfranchised, this is the first time men are voting in something that even remotely resembles a democratic system. Saudi Arabian men are currently actually only voting for half of the seats on the municipal council; the other half will be appointed, and the monarchy, which is effectively headed by the crown prince Prince Abdullah Bin-Abd-al-Aziz Al Saud, is still the ultimate power in the kingdom.

The final results will probably not be released until the weekend, but candidates who have Islamist support are projected to win the largest number of seats.

Mimi Hanaoka

Political parties with the words “national” or “democratic” in their name are often amusingly and tragically totalitarian in their aims, and the National Democratic Party (NDP) of Germany is no different. An extreme right-wing party with neo-Nazi sympathies, the NDP has roiled up a controversial debate about the WWII bombing of Dresden.

As politicians in the eastern German region Saxony, who convene in Dresden, began their parliamentary discussion about how to commemorate the victims of the bombing of Dresden on the 60th anniversary of the event, a dozen members of the NDP refused to participate in the one minute moment of silence dedicated to remembering the victims of the second world war and German National Socialism. The NDP members refused to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz, one of the most notorious concentration camps. Only those who died when German cities were bombed should be commemorated, they insisted. Juergen Gansel of the NDP later condemned the Allied attack on Dresden as “mass murder,” in “Dresden’s Holocaust of bombs.” Gansel asserted that the NDP is “taking up the political battle for historical truth, and against the servitude of guilt of the German people.”

For two days during World War II, beginning on February 13, 1945, the Allied forces bombed the city of Dresden, which functioned as a strategically important rail and communications hub for the Nazis. Responding to a Russian request, British and then American aircraft rained bombs on the city. Due to the influx of German refugees entering the city from the eastern provinces, some historians suggest that the official death toll of 35,000 is too conservative.

The NDP’s particular brand of historical revisionism seems to carry a starting amount of currency among young Germans; a poll conducted by the newspaper Welt am Sonntag revealed that 27 percent of Germans 30 years old or younger considered it acceptable to call the bombing “ Dresden’s Holocaust of bombs.” In contrast, only 15 of those who were at least 60 years old found the term acceptable. Disturbingly, it is the German youth who are carrying the banner of historical revisionism.

Mimi Hanaoka

“It is important for the Archdiocese of Boston, in this moment, to again apologize for the crimes and harm perpetrated against children by priests who held the trust and esteem of families and the community… Survivors and families who bear the wounds of these shameful acts are held with great tenderness in our prayers.” — A statement issued by the Archdiocese of Boston in response to the conviction of Paul Shanley, a defrocked Roman Catholic priest, who was found guilty of raping a boy in Massachusetts in 1980. Shanley, 74, may face a sentence of life in prison.

The Archdiocese of Boston has already agreed to pay 85 million dollars in order to settle over 500 civil suits relating to sexual abuse in the priesthood and consequent cover up scandals.

Mimi Hanaoka

“Actually, it’s quite a lot of fun to fight; you know, it’s a hell of a hoot. I like brawling; it’s fun to shoot some people,” claimed Lt. Gen. James Mattis of the U.S. Marine Corps, speaking about shooting people in Iraq.

Mattis was speaking about his experiences in Iraq at a recent panel discussion at the San Diego Convention Center in California, attended by about 200 people. Mattis went even further to state: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil … you know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”  

According to Gen. Mike Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, Mattis has been “counseled” about his statements, but it appears that he will face no disciplinary action.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“The commission found that (Sudan’s) government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks,” including “killing of civilians, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur.” Although some individuals might have perpetrated “acts with genocidal intent,” the government of Sudan “has not pursued a policy of genocide.”

— The results of the recent United Nations report, begun in October of 2004 at the behest of the UN Security Council, on whether genocide is taking place in Sudan.

The conflict is occurring in the western region of Sudan, and the Sudanese government stands accused of providing support and arms to the Arab Janjaweed militias that are engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleaning against Sudan’s black African population. Since February of 2003, the conflict has resulted in over 70,000 deaths and two million refugees.

The recent UN report — which contradicts the American declaration that genocide is currently occurring in Darfur — recommends that the International Criminal Court (ICC) located in The Hague try any specific cases of genocide and war crimes that may have occurred in the Sudan. Had the UN report concluded that genocide is occurring in Darfur, the UN would have been legally obligated to intervene to help end the conflict.

Mimi Hanaoka

Ahead of the elections to be held today, insurgents in Iraq fired a rocket into the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Saturday in an attack that killed two Americans and wounded five others. Despite the overnight curfews that are in effect in Iraq, on Saturday a suicide bomber killed eight in Khanaqin, while mortar and machine gun fire continued to ring through the capital.

If the Americans are hoping to hear the true voice of the Iraqi population and its 14 million eligible voters through this election, the prospects are grim; according to a poll conducted by Zogby International, a staggering 76 percent of Iraqi Sunni Arabs, who are the populational minority, declared that they “definitely would not vote,” while only a feeble 9 percent expressed their intention to cast their ballot. In stark contrast, the same poll revealed that 80 percent of Shiites claimed they will likely or definitely vote.  

What the Iraqis are even voting for is somewhat confusing. The Iraqis are electing a 275-member national assembly, whose task it will be to write the permanent Iraqi constitution. This 275-member assembly isn’t to be confused with the permanent assembly — there will be another election in December to choose a permanent national assembly. Additionally, the Iraqis are voting on provincial parliaments, while the Kurdish population in the north of the country is selecting candidates for the Kurdish regional government, which was set up in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Some American politicians have abandoned even the pretense of a safe and inclusive Iraqi election. Speaking from the comfort of the haven of Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum is being held, Senator John McCain admitted that some “some pretty horrific things” may occur today in Iraq. Easy for you to say, Senator; even as you speak, the Iraqis are dying for democracy.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“Neither religious nor secular fundamentalism can save us … but a new spiritual revival that ignites deep social conscience could transform our society.”

— Jim Wallis, Christian commentator, editor, and author, most recently of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.    

Jim Wallis characterizes himself as a “progressive evangelical,” — not to be confused with a Democrat, since his views can veer to the right of center — and he condemns both the Republican and Democratic approach to faith and political life. In his recent book, Wallis claims that while the conservatives have successfully harnessed the power of religious language for political gain, the Democrats, in propounding the secularist cause, have both lost the most recent elections and lost sight of what Wallis believes should be the American goal — to move beyond partisan politics while embracing Christian values.

The left “doesn’t get it” because it refuses to reintroduce Christian values into the Democratic platform, which allows the Republicans to enjoy a stranglehold on the religious voice in American politics. The right, on the other hand, is “wrong” because it manipulates religious language for a political agenda that is inconsistent with the Christian tradition. The way to change the status quo, Wallis claims, is not for the Democrats to move away from Christian values; the solution is for Democrats and, indeed, all Americans, to embrace and reintroduce Christian values into the political spectrum.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“Things are now clearer than ever: We have the right to feel a chill down the spine. To describe Bush as a madman with a mission at the head of a state bristling with weapons does not really get us any further … and, although insulting, it is no longer even particularly original. And yet this U.S. administration sends a chill down the spine of anyone unwilling to become accustomed to listening to this madness.”

— the German publication Die Tageszeitung, responding to President Bush’s second-term inauguration.  
  
While George W. Bush escaped the controversy and legal wrangling that sullied the presidential election four years ago, his domestic approval rating now only scrapes in at around 50 percent, which is staggeringly low; the previous second-term president to have had such a low approval rating was Dwight Eisenhower in 1957.

Mimi Hanaoka

“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major. Say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. Say that I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things in life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I want to say. If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody he is traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1968 sermon titled “The Drum Major Instinct.”

Coretta Scott King, the wife of the late Reverend King, has written an essay for The King Center in which she explains the meaning of today’s holiday, which celebrates the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Thanks to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, the chemical and biological weapons watchdog group, the Sunshine Project, has uncovered an American military project that never came to fruition: the gay bomb.

According to the BBC, the military “envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a ‘distasteful but completely non-lethal’ blow to morale.”

The catalog of other bizarre weapons listed in the 1994 proposal that the military ultimately did not create include a chemical that would encourage wasps or agitated rats to attack enemy troops, a weapon that would render human skin intolerably sensitive to sunlight, a chemical that would induce “severe and lasting halitosis,” and a weapon that, in the BBC’s polite language, would “simulate flatulence in enemy ranks.”

The BBC tartly quoted one of the official and ethnocentric reasons the flatulence bomb was scrapped: “people in many areas of the world do not find faecal odour offensive, since they smell it on a regular basis.”  
  
The bigoted heteronormativity of the gay bomb and the curiously offensive nature of the proposals do provide an odd comic relief against the grim backdrop of the American military’s most recent incidents in Abu Ghraib, other prisoner detention centers in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and in Guantanamo Bay. The military might, however, devote less time pondering the tactical validity of flatulence and more time creating strategies of reconstruction for the nations that America has further destabilized.    

Mimi Hanaoka

Homosexuality is prohibited in Islam and is illegal in Iran, but a Muslim cleric in Iran has ruled that a sex change operation is a human right; he is so convinced of this human right that he’s advocating on the behalf of transsexuals, and he’s so fascinated by the individuals he studies that he dreams about them at night.  

Hojatulislam Kariminia, a Muslim cleric who addressed the consequences of sex change operations — which were condoned by Ayatollah Khomeini 41 years ago — in his doctoral thesis, declared: “I want to suggest that the right of transsexuals to change their gender is a human right.”  

Mahyar is one such individual in Iran who claims that she is a woman encased in a man’s body, and she’s willing to hawk off a kidney to pay for the sex change operation; Mahyar has already had her testicles removed, and she is waiting for the next surgical step, in which surgeons will create female sex organs out of parts of Mahyar’s intestines.

If we are to believe Dr. Mirjalali, the most prominent sex change surgeon in Iran, Mahyar is far from being the only Iranian who wants a sex change; Dr. Mirjalali has performed 320 such operations in the past 12 years, while he states that his European counterparts only perform about 40 operations in 10 years.  

One of Hojatulislam Karimini’s stated aims is to “introduce transsexuals to the people through my work and in fact remove the stigma or the insults that sometimes attach to these people.” Indeed, while the religious establishment has decreed sexual reassignment permissible, it still rubs against the grain of mainstream Iranian society. Iranian law, however, is also supportive of postoperative transsexuals; they may legally change the gender on their birth certificates and passports, something that will not be possible until April of 2005, with the Gender Recognition Act 2004,  in the much more socially lenient United Kingdom.  

While a more inclusive sexual revolution is postponed for the indefinite future, the transsexual revolution in Iran has already quietly begun.  

Mimi Hanaoka