All posts by Mimi Hanaoka

 
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My War: Killing Time in Iraq


"This is a totally screwed up policy… The commanders are just really nervous because they can't keep control any more."

—Colby Buzzell, winner of this year’s Blooker prize for his blog-based book, My War: Killing Time in Iraq, speaking about the recent Pentagon decision to restrict the soldiers’ freedom to post to blogs. Soldiers will need to present potential blog entries to their supervising officers before they may post their entries. Buzzell, a former machine gunner, recorded his year-long tour of duty in his blog, which today won the $10,000 annual Blooker prize.

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A day for Darfur


“Four years after the start of the conflict the blood of more than two hundred thousand murdered Darfuris stains the deserts of Darfur. The lives of the local population lie in tatters, as does the reputation of the international community.”

—Ismail Jarbo, a survivor of the Darfur conflict and a participant in today’s Global Day of Darfur, which is occurring in more than 35 capitals to mark the fourth anniversary of the conflict. According to the UN, approximately 200,000 people have been killed in the conflict while millions have been made homeless.

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Gay connections


"We hope that after this show airs, homosexuality will no longer be an issue, that society will be more enlightened about it, more understanding and more tolerant."
—Gang Gang, the producer of "Gay Connections" in English or, according to the Chinese press release, "Connecting Homosexual People," the first program to focus on gay issues in the country.  The 12-episode show is produced by a Hong Kong-based broadcast, launched by a Chinese TV channel, and is airing on the Internet. Despite the fact that homosexuality was categorized as a mental illness until 2001, the show is hosted by AIDS activist Didier Zheng, who is openly gay.

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Translating for God


“I decided it either has to have a different meaning, or I can’t keep translating…I couldn’t believe that God would sanction harming another human being except in war.”
— Laleh Bakhtiar, speaking about Chapter 4, Verse 34 of the Muslim holy text the Qur’an, which concerns the appropriate treatment for a rebellious woman. The appropriate meaning and translation of the verse has been debated, and Laleh Bakhtiar plans next month to add her new translation to the 20-odd extant translations of the Qur’an. Among the interpretations of the verse is the understanding that it advocates a three-fold measure in which the woman is first reprimanded, then abandoned in bed, and then beaten, which is one meaning of the verb “daraba.” Laleh Bakhtiar has, to significant controversy, translated the instruction as “go away from them.”

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“Hitlerian” marriages


"The era of plurality and diversity is permeating Mexico City."
—Julio Cesar Moreno, a Mexico City councilor who presided over one of the first gay civil unions in Mexico City.

On Friday, civil unions between same-sex couples were legalized in Mexico City, despite prior opposition from the Roman Catholic Church —the faith to which approximately 90% of Mexico’s 107 million residents subscribe—and the denouncement of the legalization of the unions, curiously, as “Hitlerian” by some officials from the Catholic Church.

While the civil unions now give the same rights to homosexual and heterosexual couples with respect to property, inheritance, and retirement funds, it does not include the right to adopt children, which remains a privilege of marriage.

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Dirty words


"This could be the beginning of a movement. I forgive those young people who do not know their history, and I blame myself and my generation for not preparing you. But today we are going to know our history. We are not going to refer to ourselves by anything negative, the way the slave master referred to black people, using the n-word."
—New York City councilman Albert Vann, referring to the ban of the racial slur in New York City, which won the unanimous backing of the city council on February 28th.

The ban, however, is symbolic, and use of the slur will not incur punishment.

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Jailed for blogging in Egypt


Despite the fact that Egypt is scheduled to host a forum in 2009 on the topic of Internet governance, Egypt today put a blogger behind bars for four years after he was convicted of insulting Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s seemingly eternal president, and insulting Islam.

Abdel Karim Suleiman, 22, a former law student at Egypt’s al-Azhar University, a traditional seat of learning, was sentenced during his five-minute court session to one year for insulting President Mubarak and three years for insulting Islam.

Amnesty International decried the sentence as “yet another slap in the face of freedom of expression in Egypt.”

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Finding God online


"It is technology which is enabling us to reach the Gods at the click of a mouse." —Mervyn Jose, an employee of Saranam.com, a website based in India which charges a fee for performing prayers, blessings, and offerings at Hindu temples on behalf of clients. Saranam effectively offers religious outsourcing, and it’s services are apparently most popular with a tech-savvy demographic of the diaspora: according to The Washington Post, approximately 60 percent of the company’s clients live abroad and are Indians in their thirties who work in the technology industry.

The site sometimes looks like a Best Buy, with advertisements for services that read: “Saranam is offering a new subscription service called Club Saranam that gives you an incredible 15 pujas per month for just $15.00. This price is inclusive of shipping to any part of the world.”

Not everybody is skeptical about phoning it in. Gopal Pujari, a priest at the Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu and Kashmir, in northern India, noted: "Time is changing and so are devotees; they don't have so much time and they live very far… But they have devotion in heart and despite all the constraints, they still remember God in any which way they can."

For some, religion by proxy is infinitely preferable to no religion at all.

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Christians and yoga


Demonstrating an intolerance that is noxious, bizarre, and antithetical to living in a globalized world, the founder of PraiseMoves – a recently concocted “Christian alternative to yoga” – is demonizing yoga, of all things. PraiseMoves founder Laurette Willis was, apparently, stunned to learn that yoga was related to Hinduism, and now decries the practice, suggesting that the mental components of yoga can lead, apparently, to something approximating possession: “If there's nothing in your mind, you're open to all kinds of deception… While I don't believe Christians can become possessed, I do believe we can become oppressed by demonic spirits of fear, depression, lust, false religion, etc.”

While the movement’s idiocy may neuter its effectiveness, the motivations for PraiseMoves are both destructive in its encouragement of religious division and demonization as well its curious inability to acknowledge religious dialogue and shared religious practices that have evolved through inter-religious contact. If Ms. Willis were to be told that the Christmas tree is a practice that has rich pagan roots, she might be nudged to reconsider her intolerance. Although factionalization and the rhetoric of religious and ethnic division has gained currency and publicity, Ms. Willis would do well to be reminded that religious practices neither developed in a vacuum, nor are they static: they are dynamic processes that have developed through intellectual exchange – polemic and violent as well as syncretic and peaceful – both within and with other faith communities.

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Little Mosque on the Prairie


“If there’s an imam on Earth who resembles this one, I will convert to Islam, don the veil and catch the next plane to Mecca.”

— Margaret Wente, writing a somewhat gushing review in the Toronto daily The Globe and Mail of the new Canadian sitcom “Little Mosque on the Prairie.”

The show revolves around a small community of Muslims in a town in rural Saskatchewan, and the series premiere – which drew, by Canadian standards, a staggering 2.09 million viewers – tracked the group trying to set up a mosque in the town parish.

Zarqa Nawaz, creator of “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” explains the concept: “I want the broader society to look at us as normal, with the same issues and concerns as anyone else…We’re just as much a part of the Canadian fabric as anyone else.”

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Muslims and terrorists


China has been busy this week quashing Muslim terrorists and defending stability in China, as the government asserts, or possibly just stifling Muslim belief and the ethnic minority, Uygur Muslims, as supporters might contend.

On Monday the Chinese police announced that they raided a suspected terrorist training camp in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, killing 18 alleged terrorists in the process and seizing a hoard of hand-made grenades that were both completed and being made. Chinese police claim that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which the United Nations considers a terrorist organization, ran the camp.

Some eight million Muslim Uyghurs, who are ethnic Turks, live in the Xinjiang province, and some groups of Uyghurs are violently petitioning to establish an Islamic state independent of China.

The training camp may well have been a terrorist training camp. However, it’s difficult to ignore the timing, on Sunday, of China’s increased urgency to target Uyghurs and to denounce Rebiya Kadeer, an exiled dissident and nominee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, as a separatist and “terrorist.” Rebiya Kadeer has been based in the U.S. since March of 2005; she was jailed six years ago for “leaking state secrets,” which was, in effect, communicating with her U.S.-based husband about Chinese reporting on the Uyghurs.

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Iraq in 2006


As revelers rang in 2007, the Iraqi ministries released grim statistics for 2006: 14,298 civilians died violent deaths. Add to that the violent deaths of soldiers and police and the number rises to 16,273. The AP reached an independent count of 13,738 deaths.

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