from churchtimes.co.uk
Jeddah-based journalist Sabria Jawhar, a participant in a SFCG-UN Alliance of Civilizations workshop, weighs in on the burqa debate.
By Sabria S. Jawhar
From The Saudi Gazette
Two weeks ago I was interviewed on an Australian television news program about the wave of proposed burqa bans in Europe, Canada, and now, apparently, in Australia. No one should be surprised about my opinion of the whole thing: It’s dumb.
My argument to George Negus, the interviewer at SBS, was simply that someone in a position of authority should have the wherewithal to ask a woman who wears the burqa whether she is forced to wear it and if she feels oppressed. If she is forced to do something that she doesn’t want to do, then it’s a symptom of possible domestic violence and there are existing laws to deal with that.
I also noted I didn’t see much difference between the Taliban forcing women to wear the burqa and some old white guys passing laws forcing women not to wear it. It’s all the same to me.
Mr. Negus, much to my surprise, had a good grasp of the burqa issue. Except for the briefest of moments when his staff asked me to if it is possible to wear the abaya and niqab for my appearance – as if it were some sort of costume I put on and take off when it suits my mood – I must say they didn’t have hint of Western bias in the way the interview was conducted.
This made an impression because the following week I attended a journalism workshop sponsored by the United Nations’ Alliance of Civilizations and Search for Common Ground in Beirut. Search for Common Ground is a group that’s been around for nearly 30 years with the goal of dealing with global conflict though collaborative problem-solving instead of taking an adversarial approach. The group uses the media, specifically print, television and radio, to resolve conflict in a constructive manner.
Many of the attendees at the workshop were journalists from Lebanon, Morocco, Yemen, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Oman and Saudi Arabia. Although the burqa ban was not discussed specifically at the workshop, the SBS interview could have been held up as an example for Western media of intelligent reporting. The engine that drives the issue of the burqa is the Western press.
European and North American journalists, mostly white males with a sprinkling of their non-hijabi Muslim sycophants, are shaping the public debate surrounding the issue of whether the burqa is an oppressive symbol of Islam.
Commenting and reporting based solely on the Western concept of freedom (and forgetting the basics, such as freedom of choice), pundits and columnists have molded the issue into a battle between civilizations, Christian versus Muslim values, and modern ideals versus culture and tradition. Who’s going to win this argument?
Western media, of course. The West has the resources to use as a sledgehammer to make their point, while the Arab media shrink from the thought of confrontation.
But here’s a thought: The only journalist lazier than an Arab is a Westerner. I can’t think of a single reported instance of a Western newsperson asking a burqa-clad woman her opinion until someone bothered to ask Afghan lawmaker Shinkai Karokhail for a comment. Not surprisingly, she said the only thing she finds more “appalling” at being forced to wear a burqa is a law banning it.
All of this brings me back to the Beirut journalism workshop, which was filled with young, university-educated Muslim women. Many of these ladies wore hijabs and many wore the burqa, or abaya, in their native countries.
These women are visible and have an opinion worth considering. Yet they are virtually ignored by the media. These women simply don’t exist when lawmakers consider punitive laws affecting them and the cultural traditions they hold close to their heart.
The nature of journalism is to tell a story of conflict. No better example can be served than the burqa ban. Yet journalists can serve the international community better if it employed just a few of the goals of Search for Common Ground by seeking collaborative solutions to issues, and at the same time hold lawmakers and the Taliban accountable for the oppressive measures they force on Muslim women. – SG
The writer can be reached at: sabria_j@hotmail.com and her blog is: www.saudiwriter.blogspot.com
Read the original posting here.
Can a Beauty Pageant foster Common Ground?
- Miss USA, Rima Fakih (AP/Isaac Brekken)
Beauty Pageants don’t usually fall under the realm of this blog, despite the ubiquitous beauty queen call for “world peace!” Yet the 2010 Miss USA Pageant winner has garnered attention from unlikely sources for a simple reason: She’s the pageant’s first Arab-American winner.
Fakih, who hails from Michigan and immigrated from Lebanon with her family as a child gives a different face to Arabs and Muslims than is often seen in American media. Her achievement comes at a time of intense debate around immigration.
Mia Farrow and Country Director Quentin Kanyatsi
UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow visited SFCG in Guinea where she traveled recently for the launch of a joint UNICEF-SFCG project on Youth and Non-Violence. (See our earlier report on her trip here.)
She discussed how youth can be peaceful actors of change, especially during the upcoming elections.
Guine is a young country, with people aged 15-34 accounting for 30% of the population. This, coupled with the fact that youth (especially men) are often the targets of political manipulation and the victims and perpetrators of political violence, makes them a critical population to reach.
As part of the Youth and Non-Violence project, SFCG and UNICEF have created workshops for at-risk youth that seek to promote civic responsibility and engagement. During her visit, Farrow was able to speak with some of the young people targeted by the initiative. Over the next two years, the project seeks to reach 23,000 young people in Conakry and the Forest Region.
In an interview with RFI, Farrow said that she felt positive change was coming:
“What I’m hearing around the country, especially from young people, is ‘Tomorrow belongs to us, we want a democracy, we want healthcare, we want education, we want peace.'”
Farrow and SFCG Guinea Staff
Read more about SFCG’s work in Guinea!
from nytimes.com
“Over the past two months, as a debilitating protest in Bangkok took hold and shadowy groups have operated with impunity, I have crouched behind furniture in hotels when grenades exploded on the street outside. I stood on a wide avenue as dozens of dead and wounded protesters were carried from the carnage of a failed military crackdown. I hid behind a telephone pole during an hourlong crackling barrage of gunfire. And on Thursday, a man I was interviewing was struck in the head by an assassin’s bullet and collapsed at my feet.”
Read the rest of Thomas Fuller’s glimpse into the current strife in Thailand here.
Reconciliation
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again
and ever again, this soiled world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin— I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
~Walt Whitman
By Seth Sandronsky
from the Sacramento News & Review
Whites in the tea party movements bash the federal government for unfair taxation, and therefore share common ground with other nonpartiers of the same and different hues. I actually agree with the tea partiers on the unjustness of the current tax system. Is there a bigger waste of our national resources than funding what GOP President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed the “military-industrial complex,” leaving fewer greenbacks to improve lives here?
A search for common ground requires an open and honest discussion of our differences and similarities. Tea partiers and folks who don’t like the tax system but aren’t “partiers” must all have paid employment to get by. This seems like a no-brainer: working-class politics waiting to be born.
Yet, sometimes, what is most obvious is a bit hard to see—this has to do with the nature of our class society which tends to make folks misread their actual place in the social order. We know the “have-mores” as the big banks and companies “too big to fail.” But that’s not the half of it for the rest of us who are right-sized for failure, short of cash and having to borrow it for food, health care and shelter before the Great Recession and upper-class bailouts.
Tea partiers and other working folks deal with economic inequality every day. Consider this: The United States gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services bought and sold, tripled from 1970 to 2003. During this time, the “top 13,000 tax-paying households … saw its wages and salaries increase fifteen-fold,” economist Michael Perelman writes, while for the bottom 99 percent of Americans, average income remained basically unchanged. The overwhelming majority has been and is treading water, as a tiny minority has reaped income gains that boggle one’s mind.
This brings us to race. Yes, there is only one, the human race. But this is America. The nation began with the theft of black labor and American Indian lands. Crucially, arriving immigrants who figured in these events were neither black nor American Indian. Further, the new arrivals were not all white, i.e., citizens, as we know the term now.
Noel Ignatiev examines Irish immigrants’ journey from American outcasts to white citizens in How the Irish Became White. Karen Brodkin details some of this white ethnic and racial history in How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America.
Meanwhile, the U.S. population of whites falls as nonwhites rises. Why? Think trade policy. The North American Free Trade Agreement has caused millions of desperate Mexicans to flee to the United States for work.
“The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line,” wrote black scholar W.E.B. DuBois of the American nation more than a century ago. Tea partiers who slam President Barack Obama for being black instead of for expanding foreign wars and backing corporate America weaken mutual support between working people.
Common ground between tea partiers and others is out there. But to nurture it, we need to unpack the structures of class and race openly and honestly. This is easy to say and less so to do. The task is urgent.
Read the original article here.
