“We make no pretense of where we are…The real question is ‘Where is Haiti?’ — and ‘What is Haiti?’ If you are honest, even if you tell them, most passengers don’t know where they are, usually.”

Royal Caribbean International promises Caribbean cruises filled with blue skies, palm trees, and…abject poverty? As Danna Harman reports for the Christian Science Monitor, Royal Caribbean cruise ships dock at the Labadee beach in Haiti to disgorge passengers eager for jet skiing and sunbathing, not unlike Royal Caribbean’s stops in the Bahamas or Bermuda. But somehow Haiti doesn’t have quite the same ring as some of the Caribbean’s more prosperous islands. The cruise line identifies the location as “Labadee, Hispaniola” on its website and describes it as a private, secret destination.

The only real secret about Labadee is the poverty surrounding it. The real Haiti looks like this and like this — a country with the highest HIV seroprevalence rate in the Western hemisphere and a history of United States involvement and homegrown despotism. After driving to Labadee through the hilly countryside of Haiti’s northern coast, I found that the most striking thing about the beach was not its pristine vistas or palm trees, but the cement laid down under the sand to mask the land erosion resulting from overfarming. And while I found it easy to scorn the cruise boat tourists who disembarked, believing they were in Hispaniola, the missionaries quoted in the Christian Science Monitor article are correct. It’s only through tourism and marketing that Haiti will ever recover from its deep economic depression. In a way, the country must hide its true identity in order to sell itself to the clueless consumers who can save it.

llouison

I usually only post once a week, but I received a press release the other day that got my attention.  It’s about the first Yiddish action film made in 60 years called A Gesheft (The Deal) from Kosher Entertainment Productions. You don’t see many Yiddish films in the local multiplex, so I thought I should pass on the information for all of you who have been waiting all these years for someone to finally make a new Yiddish movie. I think it’s about time, don’t you?

The film is the brainchild of two Orthodox Jewish brothers, Yakov and Mendy Kirsh, a bookkeeper and a real estate agent respectively, who have no prior filmmaking experience. “We decided that religious Jews needed their own movies far from the dangerous influence of Hollywood,” comments Mendy Kirsh. “There’s no treyf (things that are non-kosher) in this movie!”

They’re sending me a copy on DVD, and I told them I’d review it.  If you want to check it out now, you can go to their website.  Just click on the company name at the top where you can purchase the DVD for $20, or simply find out more about their film and view trailers.

Just be aware that there are no women actors in the film because Orthodox Jewish men cannot be entertained by women.  The one woman character is played by a man, though he’s covered up so you can’t see his face. Talk about your niche marketing.

If the film is a big success, be sure that the studios will be quick to come out with Yiddish teen market films such as Oy, Where’s My Oyto? and HBO will probably make a Yiddish version of The Sopranos called The Shvitzers. It also reminds me of an old TV skit about Orthodox Jews in space, but that dates me.  Zay gezunt!

Rich Burlingham

“I am appealing to those who kidnapped the American journalist Jill Carroll…I am appealing to you in the name of God, in the name of anything holy, to let her go. She came to the General Conference of the Iraqi People headquarters to interview me. I am Dr. Adnan Dulaimi. I am the one who has been defending Iraqi unity and Iraqi independence. I’m the one who has been committed to the rebuilding of Iraq… I am asking you to release this woman. By kidnapping her, you are insulting me…I’m appealing to you, the ones who are holding this woman, to let her go, to free her, for the sake of our country and in the name of our honor and principles, in the name of the Iraqi people…”

— Adnan al-Dulaimi, of the Iraqi Accordance Front, joining the chorus of citizens and luminaries who are calling for the release Jill Carroll, the female American journalist who was kidnapped on January 7th while reporting in Baghdad.    

There have been a torrent of calls for Jill Carroll’s release, praising her professionalism and her concern for the Iraqi people, from myriad sources, including: the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas; the Iraqi Accordance Front; Montasser al-Zayat, head of the Liberties Committee at the Egyptian Lawyers’ Syndicate and former member of Gamaa Islamiya, the militant Egyptian Islamist organization; the Iraqi Islamic Party; Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brothers Mohamed Mahdi Akef; the Muslim Brotherhood Association, and a slew of others. Jill Carroll is a frequent contributor from Iraq to The Christian Science Monitor. Her captors released a video of her on January 17th in which they threatened that they would kill her unless all of the female prisoners in Iraq were freed within 72 hours. Jill Carroll’s family, various dignitaries, and numerous organizations continue to lobby for her release.

Mimi Hanaoka

In politically incensed eras like we’re experiencing today, filmmakers enjoy reveling in issues that have no simple solutions, and with a usually stringent point of view. Films like Syriana and Paradise Now are recent examples. Another current film, Steven Spielberg’s Munich, is indeed a political thriller, but this legendary director is able to present to us points of views from two sides of an issue. The result has brought some acid criticism from both the pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian camps that are the focus of the film. The trouble with films such as Munich is critics’ objectivity can be easily tainted by the desire to give them great reviews because the subject matter is so important and the directors so admired. This happened with Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, which even with profound subject matter, in retrospect, wasn’t that good of a film. Luckily, Munich is such a finely crafted piece of cinema with a director at the top of his game that critics such as myself do not have to worry about false praise.

With Munich Spielberg illustrates a tenuous issue that was as much headline material back in the 1970s, when the film’s events take place, as it is today and has been for a thousand years. On the one hand, the film is an essay on the disagreements over homeland that have been at the center of the hate between these two groups for ages, but these issues are only marginally explored under the veil of a taught, gut-wrenching thriller that examines many levels of right and wrong and all the gray in between.

Spielberg, along with his long-time collaborator, cinematographer Janzusa Kaminksi (Schindler’s List, War of the Worlds), decided early on that they wanted to take on more than just the décor of the early 70s and give the film a look and feel similar to many of the celebrated political thrillers from that era, such as The French Connection, Z and The Day of the Jackal. Kaminski creates a look that’s gritty on the one hand and emotionally decisive on the other by using techniques such as skip bleach, which give the film a color-muted appearance, and by the use of the zoom lens, which was a new gadget back when and understandably overused. On working with Spielberg, Kaminski says, “He’s a very skillful director when it comes to the camera.” This is illustrated by the director’s subtle placement of the camera that helps build tension and create mood simply by giving us a certain perspective to watch vital action unfold.

Much of the credit for giving Munich its gravitas is the multi-layered script that not only recounts violent events in history but also humanizes those events by using characters to represent all the emotions emoted from all sides. Spielberg gives credit to both the source material — Canadian writer George Jonas’ book Vengeance, which the director says “has never been discredited” — and playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America), who took a draft by Eric Roth and gave to it what is his first screenplay soul, depth, and relevance.

Choosing the right actors was also integral in making Munich shine, and with over 200 speaking roles, the casting team had their work cut out for them. They scoured the world to find not only the right looks and sounds but also the best actors. For instance, they hired Palestinians and Israelis to play those involved with the Black September massacre of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 games. Producers say that the tension on the set during the 10 days it took to shoot those scenes was not all acting. In one case, the son of one of the slain members of the Israeli team played his own father, who died when he was only an infant. He says acting in the film allowed him to gain an understanding of the terror his father experienced.  

To play the five significantly different covert assassins whose secret mission was to kill those responsible for the massacre, Spielberg and team purposely hired five significantly different actors. Leading the group is Australian Eric Bana (Black Hawk Down, Hulk) as Avner, the Israeli intelligence officer who must leave his pregnant wife behind in order to do his patriotic duty by leading the group. Bana creates an understated performance that underscores the hate that penetrated all who supported Israel after the athletes’ deaths but also the confusion over issues of morality and whether the mission was justified. His greatest strength as an actor was to give Avner the ability to feel some empathy for the Palestinian cause without losing his loyalty to his people. Avner is a character who acts as we all think we would in similar circumstances — willing to risk everything to correct a wrong but with an insight that doesn’t allow us to become a monster. The new James Bond, British actor Daniel Craig, plays the muscle of the group, who tries to keep their reasons for the mission clear and, by the fact that his character is South African, emphasizes their plight as a global one.  As the toy-maker turned bomb-maker, French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz perfectly plays the sensitive one, and they were lucky to get him because he had told his agent that he didn’t want to act anymore — unless on the remote chance that Spielberg came calling one day. Renowned German actor Hanns Zischler (Sunshine, Ripley’s Game) plays a Mossad agent who is undercover as an antiques dealer. He is the most distant of the five, but you can see by Zischler’s perfectly crafted performance that his character Hans has an inner rage that allows him to act in sometimes immoral ways. Rivaling Bana for the most complex character creation has to be Irish actor Ciarán Hinds (Road to Perdition, HBO’s Rome), whose Carl, the clean-up man, is the most meticulous member but also the one with the most wisdom and inner conflict over the moral implications of their actions. He knows they have to fulfill their mission, but he doesn’t have to like how they have to go about it. The rest of the cast is superb including Australian Geoffrey Rush (Shine, Pirates of the Caribbean) as Avner’s Mossad contact, Frenchman Michael Lonsdale (Day of the Jackal, Chariots of Fire) as Papa, and Israeli star Ayelet Zorer as Avner’s wife.  

For Avner, his struggle over the relevance of the definition of home is the key theme that resonates beyond the plot of the film.  It is the central question that many, especially emigrants and refugees, have pondered and dissected for hundreds of years. Early in the film Avner tells his wife that home isn’t Israel or any plot of land, but his family. As the film progresses this notion gets more and more muddled, and he becomes pulled from one side by the needs of his people, represented by a persecuted Jewish past, and from the other by his wife and child, whom represent what he hopes is a peaceful future. It is a question left unanswered on all levels.  At the end of Munich, when Avner is walking the streets of his new Brooklyn home with his infant daughter, he spots what he believes are men who want him dead. It is an important moment, for his past and future suddenly become in flux, and with Spielberg’s simple but effective staging and Bana’s exceptional performance, you cannot only witness a father’s worst fear — a threat to his child — but also the inner conflict between saving a whole race of people and saving his own family, which he knows will always be with him no matter where he calls home.  

Munich is playing nationwide and will probably be around through awards season. Rated R. 164 minutes. Released through Universal. Click here for listings in your hometown.

Rich Burlingham

Andrew Jones, the 24-year-old head of the Bruin Alumni Association at UCLA, is offering a $100 bounty to students who offer information on instructors who are “abusive, one-sided or off-topic” in their discussion of political ideas. Never mind the fact that many of these professors are recipients of teaching awards conferred by students.

Jones has posted a list he calls the “Dirty 30,” in which he accuses 28 professors of unpatriotic behavior with a rating system of “Power Fists.” The last two names on the list have, apparently, not yet been determined.

The most offensive contenders for the list this month are professors Peter McLaren and Kent Wong, both receiving a Jones score of 5/5 “Power Fists”:

1. Peter McLaren (5/5 Power Fists)
This Canadian native teaches the next generation of teachers and professors how to properly indoctrinate students — Paolo Freire-style.  Thanks to his hard-charging efforts, McLaren debuts at the top of the charts.  Long live the king!

2. Kent Wong (5/5 Power Fists)
In any other group, Kent Wong, the dyed-red laborista radical, would be hold [sic] an undisputed title for heavyweight extremism.  If Wong keeps up his public attack on everything to the right of Chairman Mao, he may still do it.  Stay tuned!

Los Angeles Times writers Stuart Silverstein and Peter Y. Hong observe that “although the group says it is concerned about radical professors of any political stripe, it has named an initial ‘Dirty 30’ of teachers it identifies with left-wing or liberal causes.” So far Jones has raised $22,000 from 100 donors in support of his efforts.

Jones is the former chairman of the UCLA student group, the Bruin Republicans. He graduated in June 2003 and now supports himself as the only full-time employee of the Bruin Alumni Organization.

Wavering, barely discernible, language awakens. She seems never able to find her bearing in the human space that is taking hold of the creature who wakes slowly, or at once. When her awakening is sudden, space strikes at man as if it had been waiting to overwhelm him, to make him know he is only a human being and nothing more.

Meanwhile, the flow of time, always delayed, kindly takes to the creature who wakes wrapped in his own time. This time he treasures and will not surrender, lodged in it as he is with confidence. And language awakens amid this vital confidence that nests in the human heart and without which man would never speak. One could even say that this vital confidence and the source of language become mingled, or link up into a union that allows the human lot to improve.

Language is of a tame disposition. This she manifests in her awakening. Wavering, she murmurs, she babbles in broken, barely audible words. She is like a foolish bird who does not know where she ought to go, as much as she tries to rise in her feeble flight.

This nascent, wavering language comes to be replaced with words arrayed by the conscious intellect that articulates them. As if the intellect, too, were taking hold, challenging the space that relentlessly pushes into sight, confronting the day that calls for an immediate action, a single doing comprised of a whole series of deeds. Words loaded with purpose.

And so the first language retreats, returns to her silent, hidden meandering, leaving behind the imperceptible trace of her own opacity. She is not lost. As babble, as the murmuring of the indelible confidence, she will cross the range of words dictated by purpose, releasing them one by one from their chains. And during this brief dawning, one feels how language slowly grows in silence. In the soft glow of being reborn, language, at last, disentangles herself, all the while leaving her seed intact. The seed that in the pale dawning of freedom always made itself known a moment before reality broke in.

And reality remained such, nourished by freedom and propped up by language, being spoken and taking shape. For language and freedom come before reality, foreign and intrusive as it is to the creature who has not finished waking into being human.

El despertar de la palabra

Indecisa, apenas articulada, se despierta la palabra. No parece que vaya a orientarse nunca en el espacio humano, que va tomando posesión del ser que despierta lenta o instantáneamente. Pues que si el despertar se da en un instante, el espacio le acomete como si ahí le hubiere estado aguardando para definirle, para hacerle saber que es un ser humano sin más. Mientras el fluir temporal, en retraso siempre, se queda apegado al ser que despierta envuelto en su tiempo, en un tiempo suyo que guarda todavía sin entregarlo, el tiempo en el que ha estado depositado confiadamente. Y la palabra se despierta a su vez entre esta confianza radical que anida en el corazón del hombre y sin la cual no hablaría nunca. Y aún se diría que la confianza radical y la raíz de le palabra se confundan o se den en una unión que permite que la condición humana se alce.

Es de dócil condición la palabra, lo muestra en su despertar cuando indecisa comienza a brotar como un susurro en palabras sueltas, en balbuceos, apenas audibles, como un ave ignorante, que no sabe dónde ha de ir, mas que se dispone a levantar su débil vuelo.

Viene a ser sustituida esta palabra naciente, indecisa, por la palabra que la inteligencia despierta profiere como una orden, como si tomara posesión ella también, ante el espacio, que implacablemente se presenta y ante el día, que propone acción inmediata que cumplir, una en la que entra toda la serie de acciones. Palabras cargadas de intención. Y la palabra primera se recoge, vuelve a su silencioso y escondido vagar, dejando la imperceptible huella de su diafanidad. Mas no se pierde. Como un balbuceo, como un susurrar de la inextinguible confianza atravesará las series de las palabras dictadadas por la intención, soltándolas por instantes de sus cadenas. Y en esta breve aurora se siente el germinar lento de la palabra en silencio. En el débil resplandor de la resurrección la palabra al fin se desprende dejando su germen intacto, que en el débil clarear de la libertad se anunciaba un instante antes de que la realidad irrumpiese. Y quedaba así luego la realidad sostenida por la libertad y con la palabra en vías de decirse, de tomar cuerpo. La palabra y la libertad anteceden a la realidad extraña, irruptora ante el ser no acabado de despertar en lo humano.

About the piece: Composed in exile, in between journeys from a village under the French Alps to Rome and back, Clearings in the Wood (Claros del bosque, 1977) is the most mature work of the Spanish poet/philosopher María Zambrano.

Clearings in the Wood stands out among those of my thoughts that spilled into print, for it comes out of the writing’s own irrepressible surge that resulted in notebooks and pages no one is aware of, not even I, reluctant as I am to reread myself.

I believe this book most resonates with the “idea” that “thinking is above all—as a source and as an action—the making sense of what is being felt,” understanding by experience the “inborn feeling (el sentir originario),” a term I have been using for years.

Jan Vihan Jan Vihan is a contributing writer for In The Fray.

Bernard Lewis is probably the most prominent academic speaking about Islamic fundamentalism.    The articles “What Went Wrong?” and “Roots of Muslim Rage” in The Atlantic framed the debate in America.  He has made regular forays into the White House to explain his theory that the Muslim world is responding to the sense of inferiority it has nurtured at least since the Reconquista.  

Lewis tends to discount the importance of current grievances and implicitly assumes that people are mostly motivated by things that happened hundreds of years ago.  It may be that there is more historical awareness in the Muslim world than in America, but ancient history is not what makes so many Muslims sympathetic to Osama bin Laden.  Specifically, Lewis refuses to recognize the importance of American support of Israel, which most Muslims see as the driving force behind the radicalism.  He has even agreed with the ludicrous neo-conservative idea that local governments create anti-Israel sentiment to draw attention from their own repression.

Although Lewis’ Orientalism makes him distasteful to many people, his ideas are still helpful.  It is easy to believe that Muslims have a vague understanding of the historical dominance of Muslim culture over Christianity and that this contributes to a persistent unwillingness to accept subordinate status.  However, this does not directly lead to the ideology.  A reasonable person would listen when someone says they harbor resentment over the imposition of Israel, the support of repressive regimes, and the innumerable problems left over from colonialism.

What Lewis gives us is the long historical perspective, which helps explain why the effects of these betrayals were so uniquely dramatic in the Muslim world.  Some cultures become demoralized by their subordinate position, as has happened in much of Latin America.  If the society has no organizing ideology, it can’t mobilize to change the situation and slough off the dominators.  Some societies do develop ideological responses, as both Japan and Germany did.  To Lewis’ credit, nobody would think to explain the rise of the Nazis or Japanese militarism without some historical perspective.   However, it would be quite wrong to leave out the Treaty of Versailles or the Great White Fleet.

The Arab world particularly, but joined by other related Muslim cultures, has been engaged in a battle for its destiny for much of the last century — maybe longer.  The structure of international politics and economics has placed them in an inferior position.  The imposition of Israel against their will and several catastrophic defeats in the wars to retake the land confirmed it beyond any doubt.  In response, the Arab world has generated two major ideological movements.  Pan-Arab nationalism was a vital force until the disastrous miscalculation of the 1967 war against Israel.  The Baath, pseudo-nationalist rulers in Iraq and Syria, lived on as the carcass of this movement.  Radical Islamists who have taken up the banner will likely one day fail their own substantial test.  But unless the entire Muslim world is forced into demoralization and an acceptance of defeat, there will continue to be ideologies of resistance.

Pete DeWan

“When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I’m talking about…. It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard.”

The Senator’s remarks (made at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Harlem) have been blasted by the Bush administration, including Laura Bush, for comparing the current House of Representatives to a Southern plantation. Senator Clinton claims that we “know what [she’s] talking about” — but do we? In Clinton’s parlance, plantations are synonymous with slavery and racism, and perhaps that’s the way it should be given the historical realities of Southern culture prior to the Civil War. But in the South, retirement communities in the Outer Banks are named “Green Plantation,” and the homes of former slave owners are tourist attractions on the historical registrar.

Plantations symbolize different things to different races, political parties, and regions in our nation. I’m no proponent of  the South’s romantic recasting of its past, but Clinton’s use of the plantation as a metaphor obfuscates her point and can only serve to further alienate a region the Democrats must retake. The Democrats don’t need to use contentious symbols in unrelated political dialogue when it’s the homogenous, conservative men and women of the House of Representatives that truly need the nation’s attention.

llouison