“I think it’s unthinkable that we’re debating what a family is, a man married to a woman. They’ve got that right in the barnyard. We’ve had that for 6,000 years and to think that we’re trying to redefine families.”

— Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, speaking today on NBC’s Meet the Press.

The Liberty University School of Law, in Lynchburg, Virginia — the new branch of the university founded by Jerry Falwell in 1971 — opened its doors this year to its first class of law students. According to Mr. Falwell, among the school’s missions is the desire to prepare “conservative warriors” for the “important battles against the anti-religious zealots at the American Civil Liberties Union.”

Mimi Hanaoka

“My skin was rough like a snake’s and then it started peeling off. It was very painful, so I had to go to the hospital,” says Latifa Myinyikwale. While Latifa wasn’t bargaining for a chemical peel in her quest for beauty, that’s literally what she got — after two years of using skin-lightening creams, Latifa, a black Tanzanian, has scars, rashes, and blotches all over her body.  

Black is not beautiful in Tanzania and in other African nations; many women seek to look and become whiter since, as a result of social conditioning and media imagery, whiteness is often perceived as the epitome of beauty. Latifa explains: “You hear that if you want to look beautiful, then you have to look like a white person and to look like a white person you have to use these creams. Of course it is natural that women want to be beautiful.”

Women like Latifa spend a significant amount of their meager income on skin-lightening creams. Products range between four and six American dollars, and with the gross national income at $290 per capita, the pursuit of beauty is costly, dangerous, and disfiguring. Women also suffer from fertility problems and cancers of the skin and liver as a result of the hazardous chemicals, such as mercury and hydroquinone, that may be in the skin-lightening products. The Tanzania Food and Drugs Authority successfully banned 83 of these skin-lightening creams in 2003, and they are now attempting to enforce that ban.

While Tanzania is taking a proactive approach to curb the use of hazardous skin-bleaching products, the practice is by no means confined to Tanzania — approximately half the women in Mali bleach their skin.

As much as ever before, there is now a sense of urgency to convince people that black is most definitely beautiful.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“If we need a special school for homosexuals, maybe we need a special school for little short fat kids, because they get picked on too.”

— Mike Long, chairman of the Conservative Party in New York, speaking about Harvey Milk High School, the first American high school created for “at-risk” youth and specifically lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning students. The school, located in New York City, is named after the first openly gay city supervisor of San Francisco who was assassinated in 1978, and it is an extension of a public school program established in 1985 by the Hetrick-Martin Institute.

The school has been tremendously beneficial for some of its students; children that were harassed and ostracized at their previous schools assert that they now have a safe haven in which they can focus on their studies. While little over half of public school students in New York graduate, 95 percent of the students at Harvey Milk successfully do so.

Mimi Hanaoka

In the game of political musical chairs that is the reshuffling of the Bush cabinet, President Bush has replaced Colin Powell, the outgoing secretary of state, with the current National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and in so doing, he’s effectively silenced the last of his critics and choked off the opposition. The outlook, it appears, is grim and hawkish.    

The British publication the Guardian unabashedly claimed that the replacement of Secretary of State Colin Powell with Condoleezza Rice signals the end of the moderate political voice and the beginning of an unrelentingly conservative administration. The Guardian announced:

“The Bush administration was stripped of its last dissenting voice of moderation yesterday when the secretary of state, Colin Powell, resigned and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser who is known for her conservative instincts, was lined up to replace him.”

Sharing the Guardian’s unease with the appointment of Ms. Rice, Professor Juan Cole, an expert on Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, argues that under the stewardship of Ms. Rice, American foreign policy with respect to the Middle East will be seriously compromised. Professor Cole explains:

“Rice seems to me to have two major drawbacks as Secretary of State beyond her inability to challenge Bush’s pet projects. One is that she is an old Soviet hand who still thinks in Cold War terms. She focuses on states and does not understand the threat of al-Qaeda, nor does she understand or empathize with Middle Easterners, about whom she appears to know nothing after all this time. The other drawback is that she is virtually a cheerleader for Ariel Sharon and will not be an honest broker between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”

The hawks are now all lined up, ready for the kill, and American foreign policy for the next four years will be increasingly rigidly aligned with President Bush’s vision.

Mimi Hanaoka

Are you more likely to be divorced if you live in the Bible Belt than in the hotbed of gay marriage? According to the statistics, the answer is a resounding “yes.”  

William V. D’Antonio, a professor emeritus from the University of Connecticut currently stationed at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., as a visiting research professor, reports in The Boston Globe:

The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that “the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people.” The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

As Mr. D’Antonio acknowledges, it is not merely ideological hypocrisy that contributes to the high divorce rate in the states that tout their “family values;” concrete factors, such as poverty, early marriage, and the comparatively low number of Catholics, all encourage higher divorce rates.

Mr. D’Antonio concludes: “For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry’s home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values.”  

It is, however, problematic to aggressively state, as Mr. D’Antonio does, that the Bible Belt is rife with moral hypocrisy. It is true that the inhabitants of the Bible Belt have social practices that are inconsistent with their alleged family values, but it seems unproductive to demand that people fit into a neat dichotomy of red and blue, liberal and conservative. Since it is a fact that individuals vote in ways that contradict their social behavior, then we may benefit from taking a more nuanced and more honest view of political alliances. An approach that would better accommodate what may be different shades of red and shades of blue would more accurately measure the political pulse of America.  

At the very least, America would benefit from interrogating what, indeed, is meant by the term “family values.” Do the values include stability of relationships with long-term couples and family units? And, if so, isn’t it time we refashioned our image of what appears to be a now bankrupt term?  

Mimi Hanaoka

“They are trying to bury Abu Ammar alive.”

— Suha Arafat, referring to the senior Palestinian officials who arrived today in Paris to visit her ailing husband, Yasser Arafat. Mr. Arafat, who has led the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and who has been both the figurehead and the political leader of the Palestinians for roughly four decades, has been sequestered in a military hospital in Paris amidst rumors that he has fallen into an irreversible coma. It is unclear who will succeed him as the next Palestinian leader.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“If we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal, and the ideal is that marriage ought to be, and should be, a union of a man and a woman.”

— Karl Rove, in a statement aired today on Fox News Sunday. Mr. Rove, as Senior Advisor to President Bush, is largely responsible for President Bush’s rise to the White House and for engineering many of the president’s policies.

As a testament to Karl Rove’s disconcerting grip on both President Bush’s ear and on American policy, John DiIulio, former director of the White House Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, stated: “Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political-adviser post near the Oval Office.”

Mimi Hanaoka

“It is unfortunate that a court of appeals has permitted the Republican Party to continue its plan to challenge voters on Election Day, but we were prepared for this outcome.”

— Ohio Democratic Party Spokesman David Sullivan, in response to today’s ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit of Cincinnati, which will allow the Republican Party to place thousands of monitors inside polling stations in Ohio to challenge the eligibility of certain individuals to vote.

The G.O.P. now has the official sanction of the courts to send a small army of 3,500 monitors to polling stations around Ohio, where they will question the eligibility of voters. Democrats allege that this Republican challenge to voter eligibility is an intimidation tactic against minority voters. Republicans insist that they are merely protecting the democratic process against voter fraud.

In a lower court ruling, Judge Susan J. Dlott and Judge John R. Adams both asserted that there are already measures in place to prevent voter fraud. If we are to believe the dissenting voices, this Republican victory is, at very best, excessive and, at worst, a sanctioned form of disenfranchisement.

Mimi Hanaoka

“This is thousands and thousands of potential terrorist attacks … It’s like they knocked off the Fort Knox of explosives.”

— Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, speaking about the approximately 350 tons of explosives that have been thieved from the al-Qaqaa military complex in Iraq.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, informed the UN Security Council of the theft last night. According to ElBaradei’s report, these explosives — which consist primarily of HMX and RDX, crucial ingredients in the types of plastic explosives that have been used to devastating effect in car bombs in Iraq — went missing during America’s watch. It was during the “theft and looting of governmental installations,” that occurred in the days following April 9, 2003, that these explosives disappeared into the ether. Mission accomplished, indeed, Mr. Bush.      

Mimi Hanaoka

The current spate of Islamically affiliated violence and activity — from the storming of the Ka’aba in Saudi Arabia in 1979 to the September 11 attacks — is the last dying breath, albeit protracted, of Islamic violence, insists Sadik J. Al-Azm.

Sadik J. Al-Azm is Professor Emeritus of modern European philosophy at the University of Damascus, and in his recent article published in the Boston Review, he makes the case that the world is not headed, in any significant sense, toward a clash of civilizations. In Al-Azm’s conception, we are witnessing the last days of serious Islamic violence; while Islamist violence certainly seems to be going out with a bang, and not with a whimper, it is certainly on its way out.

Writing about the September 11 attacks and Juhaiman Al-’Utaibi’s 1979 storming and occupation of the Ka’aba in protest against what he perceived as the hypocritical Saudi regime, Al-Azm states: “But both acts of terrorism exposed the essential weakness of today’s Islamists: the embrace of the inevitable emergence of a new Islamic order is itself a symptom of a self-deluding fantasy that has afflicted the Arab and Muslim world for more than two centuries.”

Al-Azm continues to state that the primary motivating factor of Islamist violence is the heart-breaking disconnect between the halcyon days of Islamic civilization, on one hand, and “being the object of a history made, led, manipulated, and arbitrated by others,” on the other. Therefore, Al-Azm explains:

“So what else can the Muslim or Arab do but muddle through his sad perplexity in the 21st century with the conviction that perhaps one day God or history or fate or the revolution or the moral order of the universe will raise his umma to its proper role once again. Under these circumstances, various kinds of direct-action violence (including terrorism in some of its most spectacular forms) present themselves as the only means of relief from this hopeless impasse.”

Not many scholars would argue with the claim that Islamist violence is a function of desperation and frustration with real and perceived oppression. However, Al-Azm neglects to highlight the historical and contemporary sources for the continued growth of Islamist movements from the 1960s onwards, which include the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the failure of “modern secular nationalism,” the Egyptian-Israeli war and Arab oil embargo in 1973, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Wahhabi-oil connection, the concrete consequences of modernization in the Muslim world such as rapid population growth, an increase in urban population, mass literacy, a large young segment of the population, and high poverty and unemployment rates. While desperation is a crucial factor, there are also concrete forces at play.

For Al-Azm, the West and the Islamic world are “two supposedly clashing sides … so unequal in power, military might, productive capacity, efficiency, effective institutions, wealth, social organization, science, and technology that the clash can only be of the inconsequential sort.”

The question that Al-Azm doesn’t sufficiently answer, however, is how long this protracted death of Islamic violence is supposed to last. Is it merely a question of time until geo-political factors eventually tame Islamic violence? If the current bloody catastrophe in Iraq is merely a particularly bloody blip in an otherwise calming picture, why does the violence show little sign of abating? And most importantly, what will the new, less violent Islamist worldview look like, and what form will it take? What exactly is it that the world is transitioning toward?

Mimi Hanaoka

“This novel will become world famous and will be a source of satisfaction for the author, after the false accusations levelled against him.”

— Miroslav Toholj, publisher of the forthcoming book by Radovan Karadzi, a former Bosnian Serb leader who is one of the most wanted men in the world and who has been accused by the United Nations of various charges, including genocide and crimes against humanity.

The book, which will be titled Miraculous Chronicles of the Night, is a semi-autobiographical historical novel. Radovan Karadzi, who has evaded the United Nations and has been in hiding for the past eight years, has been indicted twice of war crimes by the UN tribunal in The Hague, and he is charged with massacring Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the former Yugoslavia.  Karadzi has been charged by the UN of organizing the slaughter of up to 6,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in July of 1995 “in order to kill, terrorise and demoralise the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat population.”

Miroslav Toholj was previously a Bosnian Serb information minister and an associate of Radovan Karadzi.

Mimi Hanaoka

“Slutty,” isn’t the first word that springs to my mind when thinking of the Islamic hijab — the headscarf worn by some Muslim women both as a sign of Islam and of womanhood — but that’s how Tissa Hami describes it.  And people love her for it.  

Iranian-American Tissa Hami, who performs wearing the traditional Islamic hijab, has been invited to perform as a guest comic on the Boston leg of the Allah Made Me Funny “Official Muslim comedy tour,” the purpose of which is “to make a comprehensive effort to provide effective, significant, and appropriate comedy with an Islamic perspective, which is both mainstream and cross-cultural.”

Preacher Mos, who has written for Saturday Night Life and for the comedian Damon Wayans, is the master of ceremonies of the tour, and he explains that “the purpose of my comedy reflects my Islamic beliefs that say we, as Muslims, cannot be isolationist. My choice of dialogue is laughter, with a message of overall commitment to improving society as a whole.”

Likewise, Hami’s aim seems to be education wrapped in the palatable form of stand-up comedy — she wants to show that “we’re not all terrorists, we’re not all fanatics. That not all Muslim women are oppressed and voiceless.” Hami (whose pre-comedy resume is littered with the Ivy League schools and Wall Street firms) absorbs the religious intolerance and cultural mistrust that has blossomed in post 9/11 America, reconfigures it, and ultimately forces her audience to confront both the humor and tragedy of the current socio-political climate. Her website warns: “People who  disapprove of her act will be taken hostage.”

Mimi Hanaoka