Demonstrating the power of film as a vehicle of political dissent, an initially banned film titled Marmoulak, which portrays a convicted criminal who masquerades as and eventually becomes a Muslim cleric, has been released in Iran. Marmoulak, which means “the lizard,” is a satirical stab at the privileged status of Muslim clerics in Iran’s Islamic republic. The clerics were not amused and demanded that the film be banned; film critics find it hysterical, and in Iran, the film is an enormous commercial success.  

Having Kamal Tabrizi’s Marmoulak released in Iran is no small victory. The press enjoys relative freedom in Iran, but the conservative judiciary certainly frowns upon the notion of an unfettered media. The satellite dish — wildly popular and often available in the Middle East despite various governments’ restrictions — is available in Iran, and over 80 percent of Iran’s population watches television.  

While America and the Coalition Provisional Authority is busy shutting down legitimate venues of political discourse and political dissent, such as al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq, others are continuing to use popular media and specifically film as an avenue of social, institutional, and political criticism. Earlier this year, the Turkish minister of culture and tourism permitted Ararat, a 2002 film by Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan, to be screened in Turkey. Ararat, which depicts the events of 1915 in which droves of Armenians were expelled from modern-day eastern Turkey, is arguably virulently anti-Turkish. In blunt terms, it accuses Turkey of state-sponsored genocide of the Armenians living in Anatolia.

The version of Marmoulak currently being screened is not the pure voice of unconstrained political and institutional critique — the original version of the film has been edited to make it, presumably, less offensive to both individuals and to members of the religious establishment. It is, however, a legitimate, widely available, and hugely successful forum for political expression in the Islamic republic of Iran; and that’s more than can be said of America’s approach to the issue of political dialogue and dissent in Iraq.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Speaking to the wildly divergent cultural perspectives held by Japan and the United States regarding the three Japanese hostages who were recently held and released in Iraq, The New York Times published a piece that highlights the crippling shame that these newly released hostages face at home in Japan.

Lauding the three hostages for their courage, Colin Powell cheerfully and bullyingly declared: Well, everybody should understand the risk they are taking by going into dangerous areas … But if nobody was willing to take a risk, then we would never move forward. We would never move our world forward.”

In Japan, however, the situation is neither as transparently jingoistic nor as simplistically reassuring. As Norimitsu Onishi reports in The New York Times, these released hostages — Nahoko Takato, 34, a member of a non-profit organization; Soichiro Koriyama, 32, a freelance photographer; and Noriaki Imai, 18, a freelance writer — face scrutiny and confront a deep and abiding shame now that they have returned home.  

Mr. Onishi’s cultural analysis is that these hostages, in flouting the Japanese government’s travel advisory to steer clear of Iraq, defied “what people call here ‘okami,’ or, literally, ‘what is higher.’” In Mr. Onishi’s analysis, these civilians “acted selfishly.” Mr. Onishi accurately captures the frustrated indignation of a certain segment of the Japanese population and quotes Yuriko Koike, the environment minister, who lambasted the hostages for being “reckless.”

Mr. Onishi’s analysis is certainly cogent, but he fails to mention the phenomenon of “meiwaku,” a Japanese term loosely translated as “nuisance.” Not only was the hostages’ belligerent — if well-intentioned and generous — defiance of the Japanese travel advisory condemned by the government and some citizens, but there is also a strong horror in Japan of creating a nuisance of oneself, and this is precisely what these hostages can be seen to have done. At a time when a large number of Japanese are appalled by the nation’s remilitarization and its deployment of troops to what is very arguably a war zone — something that is still prohibited by the Japanese constitution — these citizens traveled to Iraq, had the great misfortune of being kidnapped, and subsequently whipped the nation into a state of worried frenzy. In the crudest terms, these well-intentioned citizens can be accused of creating a colossal and national nuisance.

“You got what you deserve!” and “You are Japan’s shame,” were among the comments that these hostages encountered when they returned home to Japan.  

Tabling the debate of whether the actions of these civilians were responsible, appropriate, or praiseworthy, the harsh condemnation and Japanese perspective on the incident should at least give Mr. Powell pause before he launches into official pronouncements of delighted praise. Mr. Powell and members of the coalition should certainly offer their support to these hostages for the horror they have had to endure. However, given that these hostages have claimed they have had to battle greater stress upon their return to Japan than they faced as hostages in Iraq, threatened with knives and the prospect of being burned alive, Mr. Powell must — particularly at such a politically, socially, and emotionally charged moment in Japan — be sensitive to the cultural and social perspectives that he happily and arrogantly tramples upon.  

Mimi Hanaoka

The American war to win the hearts and minds of the citizens of Iraq has surely failed, but the American government has been extending its tentacular reach into the Middle East through the preferred medium of intellectual warfare: the media.

During the summer of 2003, America launched Hi, a lifestyle magazine targeted at the 18- to 35-year-old age bracket for both men and women. The magazine, sponsored by the United States State Department, is produced by a firm based in Washington D.C. called The Magazine Group. The magazine enjoys funding from a bill, supported by the House of Representatives in the summer of 2003, for a variety of foreign projects in the Middle East. The president of the firm, Jane Ottenberg, perkily stated:

With its vibrant editorial and eye-catching format, we hope the magazine can serve as a springboard for greater dialogue and understanding between young Arab readers and young Americans.

The United States also runs the Arabic language Al-Hurra — which means “the free one,” — television network, along with Radio Sawa.  

Among the chorus of criticism from the Middle Eastern and Arabic language media that greeted the launch of Al-Hurra was a particularly well articulated voice of concern from Egypt’s Al-Akhbar:

The objective might be legitimate in normal circumstances. But seeking to achieve such objectives at a time when the US administration’s declared policy is to change ruling regimes – by force, if necessary – and to reform and discipline people through promises or threats, means we can only view this network with suspicion.

While it is doubtful that the chirpily titled Hi magazine will be popular, or even widely read, it is certainly competing against the local media, which includes Hezbollah’s satellite television channel, al-Manar, the highly popular Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite TV station, and the Saudi-backed Al-Arabiyya channel which broadcasts news. This intellectual battle of the media is generally less bloody than conventional warfare, although given the cycle of violence that erupted after the Coalition Provisional Authority shut down al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq, the dividing line between physical and propaganda warfare is becoming increasingly blurred.

Mimi Hanaoka

Hoping to regain the dignity that has been stripped, over the centuries, from the Roma community, the Gipsy Kings, a popular French folk band, have stated that they intend to “reclaim” the term gypsy. Given that the image of the Roma, or Gypsies, that has captured the popular imagination is that of a migrant herd of vagabonds, suspicious of outsiders and mired in poverty, the move by the Gypsy Kings — who sing in the Gypsy dialect of Gitane — to transform the term gypsy into something that is positive is both welcome and heartening, and comes at a time when individuals and governments are attempting to address the issue of anti-Roma prejudice.    

The Roma, a historically marginalized group, continue, in some regions, to live in abject poverty. In some regions of Slovakia, some Slovakian Roma communities have an unemployment rate of 100 percent.  

One of the recent attempts to refigure and rectify the popular understanding of the Roma is Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, a 1996 book by Isabel Fonseca, an American author who is now married to Martin Amis. The book concerns the Roma population of Eastern Europe and documents the four years Fonseca spent in Roma communities. The title of the book is taken from a Roma saying — At least when I die, bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all of my life.  

Popular literature may help to develop a more compassionate understanding of the Roma, but Hungary is now taking a more formal approach to the issue of anti-Roma prejudice. Hungary has implemented a three-year program, targeted towards the majority of the population, to increase their respect for the Roma minority. The program encourages the general population to increase their understanding of and interaction with the Roma community.  

Hopefully, it is through this multi-faceted approach of government initiatives, public awareness, literature, and music that the old saying — At least when I die, bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all of my life — can begin to lose its relevance to contemporary Roma life.  

Mimi Hanaoka

A facile understanding of the meaning of diversity is troubling, as is the oversimplification of the issue of equality into a stark dichotomy of race and wealth.  

Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago, declares in The New York Times that in their quest to increase the wealth of “cultural identities” in their student bodies, colleges and universities obscure the question of socio-economic diversity. Michaels claims:

Diversity, like gout, is a rich people’s problem. And it is also a rich people’s solution. For as long as we’re committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don’t have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated.

Michaels does make a valid point that socio-economic diversity is vital to creating a vibrant, fair, and stimulating educational environment. However, framing the issue of diversity in such stark and, if we were to believe Michaels, mutually exclusive terms — race or wealth — is abysmally unproductive. We — and certainly Michaels — must expand our understanding of what constitutes diversity without compromising our commitment to furthering, in concrete terms, the wealth of diversity in institutions of higher education. Absent of diversity — in its physical manifestations, its socio-economic context, and in diversity of opinion – even the best-intentioned education can only create a myopic world view that leaves students ill-equipped to respond to the needs of an increasingly multicultural society. Whittling down the concept of diversity to one of either race or socio-economic status is at best an anemic understanding of diversity.  

Mimi Hanaoka

The United States is now embroiled in an escalating hell of its own making; hundreds of Iraqi civilians are reported dead in Fallujah, the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council is apparently livid that it was not consulted by the United States prior to the U.S. program to “pacify” Fallujah, and President Bush and the Coalition Provisional Authority have created a united front of resistance against the US-led occupation.  
  
While it is unclear whether the current cease-fire will produce a peaceful agreement, it is evident that Paul Bremer and the CPA instigated a disastrously violent chain of events when the CPA temporarily shut down al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq. In choking off a legitimate forum for political discourse by shutting down al-Hawzah, the CPA further angered, frustrated, and insulted a large number of Iraqis; frustration led to protests which, in turn, led to the current orgy of violence.  

Abdel Hady Abu Taleb, a journalist, demanded in Egypt’s state-owned Al-Akhbar newspaper, “How will the Americans explain to the world the joint Shiite-Sunni intifada?” How indeed will President Bush and the Coalition Provisional Authority explain to the world and to the families of the dead how the alleged victory in Iraq has disintegrated into an angry bloodbath? And what is to become of Iraq, given that President Bush is adamantly insisting on June 30 as the date on which the CPA will hand over power to a local Iraqi government?  

Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of Sacred Space and Holy War, which examines the history of Shiite Islam in Iraq, Iran, and the Persian Gulf, stated on April 10, 2004:

This looks to me like an incipient collapse of the US government of Iraq. Beyond the IGC, the bureaucracy is protesting. Many government workers in the ministries are on strike and refusing to show up for work, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Without Iraqis willing to serve in the Iraqi government, the US would be forced to rule the country militarily and by main force. Its legitimacy appears to be dwindling fast.

Muqtada al-Sadr’s Friday prayers sermon, read by one of his aids at the Great Mosque of Kufa, sounds both increasingly prescient and like a clearly articulated battle-cry:

“I direct my words at my enemy, Bush … If your justification for the war on Iraq was Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, then these issues are past, and you are now making war on the entire Iraqi people. I advise you to withdraw immediately from Iraq, otherwise you will lose the elections for which you are now campaigning, and you will lose your own people, and other peoples, as well … America is not confronting a popular resistance, but rather a genuine revolution.”

President Bush and the CPA, though lethally allergic to the idea of an Islamic society, need to reconsider what the new Iraq will look like, and they must reconcile themselves to the fact that it may be clerics — unlike the secular Baathist regime — who become the leading voices in a new Iraq.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Reportage is a function of market and readership, and while this is a natural development, there is certainly something unnerving about opening CNN.com and finding that the front page headline is not about the disastrous developments in Iraq, a reminder that we are living through the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, an update on Haiti or any other consequential piece of news, but rather, “UConn beats Georgia Tech for NCAA hoops crown.”

We are often separated from a variety of ideas, news, facts and opinions by the simple fact of the chasm of language. As a vehicle to help readers distance themselves from their solipsistic worldview that is circumscribed by language, The BBC Monitoring’s site culls reportage from various news media and translates the information from up to 100 languages into English. Today, one portion of the site conveniently gathers snippets and headlines from Arabic language newspapers pertaining to the confrontation in Iraq between the supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shia cleric, and coalition forces.    

If this great ether of the Internet can provide more than easy pornography and free music, let it be the opportunity to see the world through a different cultural, religious, intellectual and emotional lens.    

Mimi Hanaoka

When the Coalition Provisional Authority last week temporarily shut down al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq, I wondered if Paul Bremer was effectively driving those hungry for political dialogue increasingly towards religious centers.  Apparently he was.

Supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr today clashed with coalition forces in Najaf and Sadr City, a Shia enclave on the outskirts of Baghdad. It is possible and probably true that Muqtada al-Sadr’s followers would have engaged in violent conflicts with coalition forces regardless of whether Bremer had shut down al-Hawzah. However, it is certainly worth recognizing that it was only last week that al-Sadr’s newspaper was closed by Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority, and that the CPA’s rationale for closing the weekly newspaper was that it contained articles designed to provoke instability and incite violence against the coalition forces.

In silencing a potential forum for political discourse, Bremer has certainly failed to stem violence against coalition forces, and he has arguably driven those who desire a political voice even further toward religious centers and violence.  My aim is not to question the importance or impact of these religious centers, nor I am equating violence with religious centers.  Rather, I want to underscore the idea that by silencing a newspaper — a medium that America ostensibly values as crucial to political discourse and the dissemination of ideas — the coalition provisional authority is chocking off an avenue for democratically acceptable political involvement.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Bassem Mroue of the Associated Press reported yesterday that the U.S. led Coalition Provisional Authority has temporarily shut down al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq. Mr. Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority have determined that newspaper contains articles designed to provoke instability and incite violence against the coalition forces, and that the operations of the newspaper will be suspended for sixty days.

In response to the closure, over a thousand supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr staged a demonstration near the newspapers offices.  

Hussam Abdel-Kadhim, 25, who participated in the demonstration, claimed that what is happening now is what used to happen during the days of Saddam. No freedom of opinion. It is like the days of the Baath.”

Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of Sacred Space and Holy War, which examines the history of Shiite Islam in Iraq, Iran, and the Persian Gulf, responded to the incident by stating:
  
“There is a real question as to whether cracking down on the newspaper like this will make things better or worse. Since Muqtada has a tight network of mosque preachers throughout the south, he is perfectly capable of getting out his views without a newspaper, through the sermons of his lieutenants. Likewise, he gets quoted in Iran-based Arabic language television and radio broadcasts.”

Now that the newspaper has been shut down, will those that want to hear the message of Muqtada al-Sadr increasingly turn towards mosques for their political dialogue? And, if so, what will Mr. Bremer do then? Trying to limit the rash of violence is all well and good, but by stripping Iraq of legitimate public forums of political discourse, such as a newspaper, Mr. Bremer may well be driving those hungry for political dialogue increasingly towards religious centers. And that, I doubt, is what Mr. Bremer wants.  

Mimi Hanaoka

The Passion of The Christ has excited outrage, controversy and furor; in fact, the historical inaccuracies and arguably anti-Semitic material in the film have created a powerful advertising machine. The film has done enough damage, but is it capable of doing any good?  

If The Passion of The Christ is capable of making any productive contributions to contemporary life, let it be a revival of interest in Aramaic and other languages that are in danger of extinction. Although Aramaic — an ancient Semitic language — is often misunderstood to be a dead language, it is still spoken by small pockets of Christian communities in the Middle East, including regions in Iraq, Turkey and Iran.  While Aramaic will have to settle for the injection of publicity it received from The Passion of The Christ, the Maori language and culture of New Zealand today gained a concrete and powerful tool for its preservation.

Today, New Zealand introduced its first Maori language television station, the aim of which is to preserve and promote the language and culture of the indigenous people of New Zealand.  The Maori comprise approximately 12.5 percent of New Zealand’s population of four million, but less than 10 percent of the Maori population speaks the Maori language.  

The station is targeted for a young audience, since a startling proportion of the Maori population — approximately half — is under the age of 24. By making Maori immediate, accessible and relevant, the television station will hopefully encourage a revival in Maori language and culture.  

Perhaps today is a bad day for sound scholarship and religious understanding, but it is certainly a good day for the preservation of language and culture.  

Mimi Hanaoka

The latest installation in the line of merchandise and marketing that capitalizes on Asian stereotypes is Comedy Central’s staggeringly humorless and offensive show, Banzai. The show’s official tagline, posted on the Comedy Central web site and which presumably intends to mimic the broken English that all Japanese apparently speak, reads: “Get ready for new gaming opportunity!”

The show panders to the bottom-feeders of the Comedy Central audience — in the brief minutes that I watched the show in transfixed horror, I saw a man who was excitedly screaming in broken English as two dwarves attempted to climb a “mountain,” which was, in fact, a rather tall man.  Characters, which I can only presume where meant to look like the Japanese script of Kanji, occasionally cascaded across the TV screen.

Comedy Central joins Urban Outfitters and Abercombie & Fitch in peddling Asian-themed merchandise.  Abercrombie was pilloried for its offensive line of clothing; among the Abercrombie t-shirts that excited national outrage was a shirt that featured a hunched over and apparently Chinese cartoon figure under the slogans “Wok-N-Bowl,” “Let the Good Times Roll” and “Chinese Food and Bowling.”

Asian-American Village has addressed the creative retaliation that Abercrombie & Fitch’s marketing ploy has produced, such as t-shirts that read “Artfulbigotry & Kitsch.”  While it doesn’t appear that Banzai has excited the same outrage that the Abercrombie scandal achieved, it is certainly evidence of a commercial trend.  

Aside from its curious and total lack of humor, and disregarding the offensiveness of the show, Banzai evidences a complete lack of cultural context. “Banzai,” the title of the show, is a cheer that is often used at times of celebration. However, it is also a cheer that resonates deeply with Japanese nationalist sentiments, and which Japanese nationalists, who often campaign in the streets of Tokyo, yell out with pride. At a time when Japan is entering into a situation of armed conflict for the first time since the end of WWII, and when the remilitarization is a serious — and, for many, a very troubling — issue in Japanese politics, Comedy Central displays its blindness to the cultural context in which it exists.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Vacuous editorials are always frustrating, and David Brook’s column in today’s New York Times is particularly bewildering.

The heart of Brook’s argument is that “Whether you believe in God or not, the Bible and commentaries on the Bible can be read as instructions about what human beings are like and how they are likely to behave. Moreover, this biblical wisdom is deeper and more accurate than the wisdom offered by the secular social sciences …”

While I find Brook’s argument to be unfounded and bizarre, he is, of course, entitled to his own views on religion and social science. Where I pick a quarrel is in his assertion that “thoroughly secularized listeners lack the mental equipment to even begin to understand” statements made by al-Qaeda. Secularism is not at the root of why certain segments of the American population — secular or otherwise — fail to understand the motivation of those who join al-Qaeda and why the movement has been so effectively terrifying. Religiosity does not necessarily make anyone understand the allure of a violent Islamist movement. Judging from the caliber of scholarship and the intellectual rigor he demonstrates in his article, I doubt that Mr. Brooks understands what drives individuals to join al-Qaeda.

By limiting his understanding of al-Qaeda as a purely religious organization, Mr. Books fails to understand the historical, economic, political, and cultural context that has given rise to Islamist movements and their extremist segments. Mr. Brooks fails to recognize that we must adopt a complex and kaleidoscopic view of the factors that contributed to the rise in Islamist movements and the allure of al-Qaeda.

There are many factors that contribute to anti-American sentiment and the resurgence in Islamist movements that began in the 1960s and 1970s that continue today.  These factors 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. Gilles Kepel, in Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, offers an excellent explanation of the subject, and I would challenge Mr. Brooks and those who share his views to understand the social, political, and historical context for al-Qaeda and to grapple with why some individuals find joining al-Qaeda to be such an attractive option. Limiting such a movement to the sphere of religion is to fail to understand its context, appeal and motivation.  

Mimi Hanaoka