Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Jewish Life - Eskesta - Ethiopian Shoulder Dance

Source: YouTube poster "RuthEshel". "Beta Dance Troupe, Israel - Nefas", October 9, 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1BmKKYMJ7k

"Ethiopian Jewry, the Beta-Israel community, was often known by the name “Falasha,” which in Amharic means foreigner and is a term of derision given them by Ethiopians. No one knew of the community’s existence for hundreds of years. Prior to the Christian era in Ethiopia, a Jewish kingdom is said to have existed in the region of Axum in northwest Ethiopia. For three centuries, from the 13th-16th, the Jews of Ethiopia did battle with the Christians who tried to force them to convert. The last independent stronghold of the community, in the Semien mountains, fell in the 17th century. Many Jews converted to Christianity; but a minority, who lived in small villages, maintained their Judaism under difficult conditions of persecution." [1]

"Beta" means "house" and "Beta Israel" the "House of Israel".

In The Jewish Mind scholar Raphael Patai distills Judaism to a milky crystalline essence of four parts consisting of two beliefs and two duties: "They are the belief in the one God; the belief in the special relationship between God and Israel; the duty toward God; and the duty toward one's fellow man." [2, p.10]

Source: YouTube poster "DolfRabus".  "Eskesta Dance Theater, Haifa, Israel; Dir.: Dr. Ruth Eshel."  July 3, 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUYJuiQeRFA

Beta Israel, Balankab, Ethiopia

Cited Reference

1. Beta Dance Troup: Tradition and Innovation: http://www.beta-eskesta.com/ and http://www.beta-eskesta.com/AboutUs.aspx?id=2

2. Patai, Raphael. The Jewish Mind. London and New York: Jason Aronson, 1977.

3. The Beta Yisrael village of Balankab, Ethiopia; woodcut From H. A. Stern, Wanderings Among the Falashas in Abyssinia London, 1862; reprinted in the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, now in the public domain.

Other Reference

Jewish Women's Archive. "Ruth Eshel": http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/eshel-ruth

Jewish Virtual Library. "The History of Ethiopian Jews": http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/ejhist.html

Wikipedia: "Beta Israel": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Israel

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Black Widows, Black Crows, White Gulls - Hitchcock's Metaconflict

I'll list the Hitchcok films I've watched in June and glance at what else Netflix is sending my way soon enough, but last night's watching The Birds struck me as particularly pertinent to the Islamic Small Wars. 

The avian war party in the film features in addition to crows its share of white gulls as well as other species of bird (those sparrows sure knew how to mess up a living room), but all arrive--scouts, squadrons, and main body--as a mission-oriented force of nature.  From the first seagull's peck that draws blood from Melanie Daniel's scalp, an act of terror if every there was, to the family's grim retreat from the manse on Bodega Bay, there's much that relates to Islamist and other terror.

Black widows: Chechen suicide bombers whose husbands had been martyred [1].  Director Hitchcock and writers Du Maurier and Evan Hunter probably did not have anything like terrorism in mind as they developed the work, and yet in their insight into the mysteries of conflict, and especially conflict remote from the post-Medieval, post-Renaissance, post-Age-of-Reason mind of the modern, which would characterized the 1960's audience for Hitchcock's films, they may have produced a predictive or prescient metaphor. 

Indeed the war involving violent Jihad--its haphazard attacks, suicide bombers, renewals of anti-Semitic rhetoric, and its onslaughts, as that suffered this spring in North Waziristan in Pakistan--may have unfathomable qualities save to those deeply engaged in Islamic studies, and even that with concentration in the language of Jihad and the realpolitik of rogue communities, movements, and even governments.

This passage, which plays shortly before the attack on the village, and one or two others particularly stand out (Sholes captains a fleet of fishing boats; Mrs. Bundy is an amateur ornithologist; Melanie is the rich lady who only drove up to "Bodega Bay" the previous day to fall in love with a lawyer she had met in San Francisco).

SHOLES
I'm only telling you what happened
to my boat.

MRS. BUNDY
The gulls were after your fish, Mr. 
Sholes. Really, let's be logical
about this.

MELANIE
What were the crows after at the
school?

MRS. BUNDY
What do you think they were after,
Miss...?

MELANIE
Daniels. I think they were after the
children.

MRS. BUNDY
For what purpose?

MELANIE
To...
(she hesitates)
To kill them.

There is a long silence.

MRS. BUNDY
Why?

Another silence.

MELANIE
I don't know why.

MRS. BUNDY
I thought not. Birds have been on
this planet since archaeopteryx,
Miss Daniels; a hundred and twenty
million years ago!

A TRAVELING SALESMAN ENTERS, goes to bar, listens.

MRS. BUNDY
Doesn't it seem odd that they'd wait
all that time to start a... a war
against humanity?

MELANIE
No one called it a war!

SALESMAN
Scotch, light on the water.

MRS. BUNDY
You and Mr. Sholes seem to be implying
as much.

[1]
-----

Following the attack on the village, Melanie and Mitch return to the restaurant, and Melanie gets a talking to from a woman with two frightened children in tow (in the script referenced here, this section had not yet been built--I've transcribed the passage):

WOMAN

Why are they doing this?

Why are they doing this?

(to Melanie) They said when you got here the whole thing started.

Who are you?

What are you?

Where did you come from?

I think you're the cause of all this.

I think you're evil.

Evil!

Melanie slaps the woman and the drama continues.

Sound familiar?

It would to a Jew--at least to this one--and it plays with the present leveraging of Israel as the cause of Arab and other Islamic discontent, i.e., the convenient scapegoat, the familiar cause in the dark mirror of their own autocratic evil and violence.

Finally, after Mitch has made his way from house to garage and into Melanie's roadster, he turns on the radio, and finds a news broadcast (also transcribed from the DVD).

ANNOUNCER

The bird attacks have subsided for the time being.  Bodega Bay seems to be the center though there are reports of similar attacks on Sebastopal and from Santa Rosa.  Bodega Bay has been cordoned off by roadblocks.  Most of the townspeople have managed to get out while there are still some isolated pockets of people.  No decisions have been announced yet as to what the next step will be, but there has been some disccuion as to whether the military should go in.  It appears that the bird attacks come in waves with long intervals between.  The reason for this does not seem clear as yet.

Mitch turns off the radio at that point and the drama moves towards its chilling final scenes.

There is Hitchcock's inexplicable avian war. 

Cussed nature?  Revenge for eating chicken?  Outrage at Melanie Daniels' adventurous and forward behavior?  Well, the audience will never know and neither will the players.

It only appears that "the bird attacks come in waves with long intervals between."

Cited Reference

1. CNN. "Chechnya's 'black widow' bombers." July 11, 2003: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/07/11/russia.black.widows/index.html

2. Maurier, Daphne Du (story) and Evan Hunter (screenplay).  "The Birds."  Final Draft, 2nd Revision, March 2, 1962.  Via Script-O-Rama: http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/b/the-birds-script-screenplay.html

Hitchcock, Alfred, Dir.  The Birds.  Universal Pictures, 1963.

Other Reference

CNN.  "Moscow blast kills bomb expert."  February 6, 2004: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/07/10/moscow.bomb/index.html

CNN. "Two Moscow concert bombers kill 14."  July 5, 2009: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/07/05/russia.blast/index.html

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West Bank Do-Good for Um a-Rihan

Um a-Rihan is home to 50 Palestinian families and until now has not been connected to a proper sewage system. The wetlands will not only prevent pollution to the aquifer but will also provide the village residents with purified water for their crops.

Work began there last week to lay the pipes and connect all of the homes to the purification pools.

The IDF is reviewing the project and may even use the method for some of its outlying bases throughout the West Bank.

Katz, Yaakov.  "Wetlands in the West Bank."  The Jerusalem Post, June 28, 2009: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1245924951675&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

As I've said and may say often, the peaceful have a way of progressing around the violent.

The Japanese government has funded the project.  An Israeli engineer, a former Tel Aviv city council member, and the IDF's Civil Administration element provide oversight and permitting.

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Persian History and Communications Technology

What isn't "passed along" on the web when the same defines the social boundary of the intellectual experience?

I will get out of here one day.

:)

Michael Rubin has posted a scholarly wrap on the relationship between the advent of certain technologies in Iran and their influence on its politics:

Rubin, Michael.  "Iran, technology, and revolution."  Middle East Strategy at Harvard, June 25, 2009: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/

To tease you, here's a paragraph from the piece, an anecdote from another era:

As the Shah cracked down, a broad array of constitutionalists, nationalists, liberals, clerics, and Bakhtiari tribesmen coordinated their actions by wire. The Shah’s forces sought to cut the wires, but the network was too vast, and not entirely under the government’s control. Importantly, the telegraph extended across the frontier into what now is Iraq. Senior clerics cabled instructions from Najaf and Karbala.

-----

Less observed may be the role technology on the contemporary perception and exploitation of time.

For example, one may note of the Islamic Small Wars in general that the world travels fast around their comparatively localized disasters. 

Apply the familiar cancer metaphor: until it kills you, you live.

So far, the world less affected by the Islamist Front has been doing quite well.  It has still time to wallow in news of the death of Michael Jackson and return attention to weightier issues at leisure.

Less comforting: some processes that once took N time to accomplish--everything from setting up meetings to setting up battles--may require but a fraction of that time today.  One may imagine that as little as 100 years ago, an autocratic regime faced with a revolt would have to send out its spies, compile its handwritten notes, and possibly turn the same into typed lists ready for hand-off to its goons. 

Today: set up a compelling piece of web-based bait--could be a Jihadi web site or a false revolutionary one--and collect the IP's that enter in the spirit of solidarity.

Ambush works, unfortunately, and where military organizations have had time to methodically produce their "trusted others", civilians with mere hopes and passions and the desire for trust--to be trusted; to trust someone else--make easy game.

Even less comforting than that: the more we look, and the more we express ourselves, perhaps, the less we do, and the less we're likely to get done.

In the Islamic Small Wars, he who has the agenda--and all of the elements that may be defined as part of the Islamic Revolution in Iran have potent agendas, including the will to empire--has the initiative.

For U.S. Homeland Security or, say, the government of Pakistan and its somewhat secularized military, there may be no effective defensive posture in anything like "the long run": for a ruthless and unpredictable foe, there are always more targets, civilian or defense makes no difference, than may be directly defended.  At some point, the disinterested must become highly interested and focused on who is killing them or threatening the same, and there is no other course than to engage fully and relentlessly.

The Islamic Small Wars, every one of them, represent civil wars pitting at least a few ideas about contemporary political administration against medieval ideals and practices.  Even the Islamist president of Somalia, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, seems to want to establish and consolidate a state within defined borders: the opposition Shabaab seems most to want to press on and on and on as mindlessly and as sociopathic as can be.

Moreover, in the realpolitik of feudal systems--the same as now well entrenched in Iran--the development of networks of inducted individuals, families, and organizations has never been so accelerated. One may borrow here from Orwell or Star Trek and the entity known as "Borg": Iran's Revolutionary Guards, its Quds Force, and Basij Militia have in their court much powerful information processing machinery for organizing and facilitating the dismantling of internal resistance to them.

To sum up, I think Iran's "Velvet Revolution" has brought in response an iron fisted tragedy, and it is the sort of tragedy that threatens to engulf those not particularly or directly effected by it or interested in it.  Moreover, the speed at which it may do that has been altered by the pace and scale of computer-networked communications.

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Iran - In the Kingdom of Qods

Iran's ruling clergy has widened its crackdown on the opposition since a bitterly disputed June 12 presidential election, and scattered protests have replaced the initial mass rallies.

The official Web site of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, his main tool of communicating with his supporters, was hacked Friday, leaving it blank, an aide said. [1]

Iran's news blackout continues.  Prefacing the article in which the above statement appears: " Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media."

The Qur'an suggests that in war one "fight in the way of Allah those who fight you. But do not transgress limits. Truly Allah loves not the transgressors" (Qur'an 2:190).

One may wonder what cruelty--shot in the heart for being present at a peaceful demonstration, beaten with clubs, thrown off of a bridge--does not "transgress limits".

Cited Reference

1. CBS News - U.S. & World.  "Iranian Cleric: Some in Unrest Should Be Executed."  June 26, 2009: http://cbs5.com/national/iran.protests.crackdown.2.1060679.html

Other Reference

Wehrey, Frederic, Jerrold D. Green, Brian Nichiporuk, Alireza Nader, Lydia Hansell, Rasool Nafisi, S.R. Bohandy.  The Rise of the Pasdaran: Assessing the Domestic Roles of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Gaurds Corps.  RAND National Defense Research Institute, 2009: http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG821.pdf

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CNN - Iranian Television Wags the Dog

Out of respect for yesterday's victims of state repression in Iran, I'm not going to embed this video:

"Must watch- CNN Caught Red Handed reporting Fake Iranian Election Rally": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Ee_ZJ3zeI

However, it provides a fine lesson out of the Orwell playbook.

Anchor (delivered with an appropriate shoulder roll): Well, as you have seen for youself, compare the footage that our press tv cameraman was on the scene today, compared to what is being reported in the media and CNN, and we challenge our, of course they're our fellow media people to reconsider their sources, go and check on their sources because we had our people in place all afternoon to make sure that we had footage of what was going on today."

If nothing newsworthy was taking place, why videotape it?

I'm positive that should the government of the Islamic Revolution in Iran allow CNN and others to return to return to the streets and redevelop live access across Tehran and the country at large, they will permanently disconfirm the assertions so conveniently patched together by PressTV.

What effects state-controlled media may have in Iran, only those subject to it can tell, and if they're talking, they may not be reaching the ears that would help them.

The last time I encountered this pattern--the relaying of a great democratic protest via cell phone television followed by a massive media shutdown and mass arrests--involved Burma's "Orange Revolution" of 2008. 

 

Burma Student Power Documentary

Burma's Altered Reality--The Sound of Silence in the Communicating Age

Burma, the Noun

Burma--Rolling With It

Information Sans Arms All Burma I.T. Students' Union

Update Burma's Crippled Information Channels

 

The posts are up, but if you click on a URL referenced within a post and it fails to show, well, call it "link rot" but then think about it a moment: did the link die a natural death or was it shoved down what Winston Smith knew as the "memory hole"?

 

Of all I have witnessed of conflict from my second row seat to history, a simple binary in the differential use of language strikes me as a litmus for the detection of evil and good: good souls yearn for a truthful discovery and telling; bad ones seek first to mask their deficiencies and then, striking out, lie like hell for the taking.

 

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Saray and Humi - Eternally

Source: YouTube poster "chmud".  "Saray and Humi at the Israel Dead Sea Belly Dance Festival 07."  March 23, 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv6xkoYdszQ

All readers should know how this poem ends:

THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Reference

Keats, John.  "Ode on a Grecian Urn."  Bartleby.com: http://www.bartelby.com/126/41.html

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The Ugly Day - The Beautiful Night

I'm going to put a little spacer in this blog.

I was ten hours searching videos, reading what others had to think, patching together a world that all share, whether they like it or not, through the cares and communications of God and man and nature.

I don't know it all works, really.

I wouldn't trust anyone who thought they did.

For too many souls in Iran this evening, there may be, probably will be knocks on their doors in the dead of night, or mornings with neighbors or friends disappeared, detained or fled.

From memory, indelible:

--A street lined with cars that had their windshields and side windows smashed;

--Street fires and a barricade crew pushing out something that looked like a steel bicycle parking rack while peers, so many Davids, threw stones up the street, perhaps keeping back a force more inclined to batter with clubs than murder from a distance with bullets;

--There was Neda, as repeated and circulated in death as the Twin Towers in their death, and then news of her family's disappearance;

--I saw but didn't post a young man laying in the street in a blood soaked shirt accompanied by the information that on the video he was shot in the forehead--I saw the gun; I'm not sure I saw the murder; the kid was in pretty bad shape, limp, hollow-eyed when the video started;

--I read in Google translation the stern warning of the state to those defying it in cyberspace: it was chilling; it was Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 brought directly to life;

--And I listened to what sounded like a young woman telling of her big day at the demonstration, only hers was a voice shaking and shaken and scared and angry and overwhelmed.

Life goes on around the dead and wounded, the angry and the frightened, so  I thought I might shift gears and end this evening on a different note.

The better part of the world knows that out of darkness comes light.  This has been a dark day for Iran, and if much of the world has missed the reportage, ignored it, or turned away, then it has been an even darker day for the world and for mankind.

Again: out of darkness comes light, although as Einstein noted (and you can see him do it in a post not far below this one, courtesy of and thank-you to Macedonia) darkness is not light's opposite but the state attending its absence.

A little love and light then, also a prayer for Tehran at about 7:30 a.m., Friday morning, Islam's day of rest, and this prayer for the day dignity, freedom, and peace reign again in most ancient Persia.

Reference

Livius. "Persia": http://www.livius.org/persia.html

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Iran - Witness

xxxxSource: YouTube poster: "mightierthan".  "Iran: Woman Describes Violence in Baharestan Sq Tehran - June 24 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7zVibjTOO4

You know what you heard:

Ivan Watson of CNN International: "We got a report from another source in Tehran describing the situation today as being terrible, saying 'People were being shot like animals.  They beat the people like animals."

A few moments later, the woman says, "In the previous days, they are killing students with axes.  They put the axe to the heart of young men.  It is so (pause) devestating I don't know how to describe it.  I can't find the words, but this is horrific, this is genocide, this is a massacre, this is Hitler!"

You found the words, miss, just fine.

Shall I go on?

"You people should stop this," she says.  ". . . a long time we have been exposed to this and nobody takes action.  It's time to act."

This may be a day in which Israel cannot act for the animosity wrapped around its image in militant Islam--it would seem obliged to act in its own defense and scrupulously so. 

As for the United States, its global war on terrorism has a defensive posture in relation to the intra-state militant cultures that drive destruction and misery before them (and if, as in Pakistan, pushed into reverse, drag it behind them as well--armies are large machines).

Eventually, whether in Pakistan or Somalia, and this with the understandable cooperation of larger powers, the victims as a suffering class shoulder more and more responsibility for their being made so.

That is an easy thing for me to say, I know, but it took some cooperation with clerical aggression and intimidation to cycle the ejection of Shah Reza Pahlavi to this far different but similarly brutal state of affairs.  After living with the monster, its clubs, its gangs, its thugs, and enriching it with labor and resources plus plenty of foreign trade--there's going to be no lack of guilt to go around on this one--the thing makes play of showing the world what it has always been and what it wants: submission to itself, the wealth of its subjugated people, and, appeased, expansion.

A more complete version of the CNN clip is available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DE_ISuoe5Q, courtesy of "ANTiScoop", June 24, 2009.  The clip provides the lead in to the interview.

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Einstein on Evil

Source: YouTube poster "leavithan".  "Albert Einstein - Does Evil Exist?"  May 1, 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0r6qymvopw

Leavithan's page accompanying the video provides its full text--and it is a wonderful script.  Credit for the work: "Ad by Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Macedonia".

Wikipedia.  "Macedonia": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Macedonia  

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