It's always refreshing when you read something as brilliant as this in the morning:

Let’s just face it: the “decency of the world” is relative. Perceptions and attention are all that matters when you want to tell/sell your story. If Israel, a mighty country which has brutalized the Palestinians for so long still manages to sell its story to the world, why is it that the Palestinians are incapable of selling theirs, although they are more deserving of sympathy and help?

What the Gaza Brand CANNOT be:

The creation of a sustainable core idea for telling Gaza’s story to the world, needs a thorough clean-up of the language we use to describe our tragedies. The clean-up needs to get rid of the language of exaggeration, of comparisons to past “epic” events and of generalizations, racism against jews and heroic Islamic/Arabic self-aggrandization.

In other words, it is not business as usual.

The brand cannot be the “Gaza Holocaust”: the “Holocaust” brand has already been taken by the world’s Jews. No one takes us seriously when we talk about Gaza’s Holocaust. Let’s acknowledge that suffering of the Palestinians today, although tragic and totally unacceptable, still is not directly comparable with the systematic annihilation of the Jews by the Nazi in World War II.

The brand cannot be “Gaza’s Epic, Heroic Battle of Victory”: If we keep talking about epic battles, the world might actually believe it and thus will fall into Israel’s trap of portraying its war on Palestinians as war of equals. It is NOT a war of equals and we should not claim we’re winning it.

The brand cannot be “Wipe Israel off the Map”: This sounds aggressive and, frankly, is not credible. Given that Israel actually has nuclear weapons, they can more credibly talk about wiping an Arab country off the map.

The brand cannot be “Hamas”: Political movements come and go. Gaza is not about Hamas. Gaza’s problem and Palestine’s problem was there before Hamas.

The brand cannot be about “glorifying death”: If all we’re saying is “we don’t care if we die” others will just shrug their shoulders when the bombs fall on our little concrete huts.

What the Gaza Brand SHOULD be:

The brand should be about defying mindless power: it should shame Israel for inflicting violence upon a population, resulting in the shameful ratio of 100:1 (killing 100 Palestinians for every 1 Israeli killed).

The brand should be about Palestine and the dream of a people of life in a free homeland.

The brand should be all about Human Rights as a universal concept that Palestinians seek to attain

The brand should have Global Appeal: it cannot have global appeal while being chauvinist or aggressive. It should also be connected to the suffering of people everywhere, not just people in Palestine.

It should be about Hope: without emphasizing hope and belief in a better tomorrow, you can hardly inspire people to support you. Remember, in a few days we’ll be living in the Post-Bush, Obama era. Hope is a word that has gained new currency.

Focusing the message to tell the world what happened in Gaza might only a piece of the puzzle. But in a media saturated world, we’d better start thinking clearly about what we want to tell the world.

About damn time too!

And yes, BY EVERYBODY I mean YOU, even if you are Pro the War or supporting Hamas, read it! Consider it an alternative prespective worth considering, if you will!

Oh boy. This is beautiful:

The misadventures that AIG's silo architecture can create are sharply illustrated by the company's disasters in mortgage securities. These problems certainly were spawned in AIG Financial Products. But the fact is that FP had a moment of enlightenment in late 2005, when it began to believe that the housing boom was nearing an unfortunate end and decided to stop selling credit default swaps on super-senior tranches of CDOs. It had a few deals in the pipeline, however, so total "multisector" CDS – AIG's name for these spiffy items – climbed a bit further in early 2006, to a total of nearly $80 billion. Later, as 2006- and 2007-vintage mortgages turned toxic, AIG talked proudly to analysts about its wise decision to pull out before trouble hit. The company proved to be excruciatingly wrong in thinking it was safe, of course, since earlier vintages have been creamed too. But the point is that by August 2007 – the start of the credit crisis – CEO Martin Sullivan and FP's boss, Joseph Cassano, were saying to everybody who'd listen that FP had ducked the mortgage bullet by avoiding the 2006 and 2007 securities that were by that time viewed as poisonous.

Various other AIG silos, unfortunately, weren't listening. The regulatory statements filed by AIG's operating subsidiaries show that a raft of these companies, and particularly the life insurers among them, were still loading up on late-vintage residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) in December 2007 – months after AIG had begun congratulating itself on ducking the mortgage bullet. Why, Liddy is asked, would one arm of AIG be buying mortgage securities while another is pronouncing them dangerous? As if there might be someone in AIG's empire he didn't care to offend, Liddy states his answer carefully: "You know, the company is a highly decentralized, far-flung enterprise. And different pieces of the company took different risks. Let me just leave it at that."

We won't leave it entirely, though, because the RMBS turned out to be connected by tunnel to the netherworld called securities lending. For many years, the AIG operating companies, like many other large holders of fixed-income securities, have lent these to banks and brokers that have reasons for needing them – maybe clients wanting to sell short. For this service, the lenders had received cash collateral that slightly exceeded the value of the bonds. Over the years, AIG's companies had invested this short-term money in conservative, liquid investments and thus been always ready to repatriate the collateral if their customers wanted it back.

But this strategy didn't make much money. So in the middle of this decade, the AIG companies began both to greatly increase the amount of securities lending they were doing – the total hit about $90 billion in the third quarter of 2007 – and to invest the collateral in longer-term, seemingly safe AAA securities that offered good yields. The main choice for investment was, you guessed it, RMBS. That bit of elegant selection left AIG's operating companies not only using short-term money to invest long, which is known folly, but also putting this money into impenetrable securities poised to both tumble in value and establish new records for illiquidity. When news of AIG's problems spread in 2008, the banks and brokers came tearing back to redeem their cash collateral, and the AIG companies couldn't hand it over, because it was tied up in unsalable RMBS. This was a second vise that tightened around AIG. One company insider calls this whole investment plot "just one of the dumbest things I've ever seen."

And guess who bought those RMBS? The US government. And guess with whose's money?

Lovely, ain't it?

I have been at the beach for the majority of last week, so the news of Mahmoud Darwish's death didn't reach me until I arrived on monday. In case any of you are wondering who he is or what the big deal is, and it is a big deal, even for our fruity internet no-poetry-reading generation , well, his story is right here . Some of it anyway. Either way, our boy Darwish was an ardent communist, and god bless his heart, he wasn't like today's communists who cozy up to religious fundamentalists, so quite naturally Hamas hated his ass. They hated his ass even more after he published his recent poem lampooning them and Khaled Mesh3al, titled the Prophets of Gaza. Here is its text:

 أنبياء غزة

لولا الحياء والظلام، لزرت غزة، دون أن أعرف الطريق إلى بيت أبي سفيان الجديد، ولا اسم النبي الجديد
ولولا أن محمداً هو خاتم الأنبياء، لصار لكل عصابةٍ نبيّ، ولكل صحابيّ ميليشيا
أعجبنا حزيران في ذكراه الأربعين: إن لم نجد مَنْ يهزمنا ثانيةً هزمنا أنفسنا بأيدينا لئلا ننسى
مهما نظرتَ في عينيّ.. فلن تجد نظرتي هناك. خَطَفَتْها فضيحة
قلبي ليس لي… ولا لأحد. لقد استقلَّ عني، دون أن يصبح حجراً
هل يعرفُ مَنْ يهتفُ على جثة ضحيّته – أخيه: (الله أكبر) أنه كافر إذ يرى الله على صورته هو: أصغرَ من كائنٍ بشريٍّ سويِّ التكوين ؟
أخفى السجينُ، الطامحُ إلى وراثة السجن، ابتسامةَ النصر عن الكاميرا. لكنه لم يفلح في كبح السعادة السائلة من عينيه
رُبَّما لأن النصّ المتعجِّل كان أَقوى من المُمثِّل
ما حاجتنا للنرجس، ما دمنا فلسطينيين
وما دمنا لا نعرف الفرق بين الجامع والجامعة، لأنهما من جذر لغوي واحد، فما حاجتنا للدولة… ما دامت هي والأيام إلى مصير واحد ؟
لافتة كبيرة على باب نادٍ ليليٍّ: نرحب بالفلسطينيين العائدين من المعركة. الدخول مجاناً .. وخمرتنا لا تُسْكِر
لا أستطيع الدفاع عن حقي في العمل، ماسحَ أحذيةٍ على الأرصفة
لأن من حقّ زبائني أن يعتبروني لصَّ أحذية ـ هكذا قال لي أستاذ جامعة
أنا والغريب على ابن عمِّي. وأنا وابن عمِّي على أَخي. وأَنا وشيخي عليَّ
هذا هو الدرس الأول في التربية الوطنية الجديدة، في أقبية الظلام
من يدخل الجنة أولا ً؟ مَنْ مات برصاص العدو، أم مَنْ مات برصاص الأخ ؟
بعض الفقهاء يقول: رُبَّ عَدُوٍّ لك ولدته أمّك
لا يغيظني الأصوليون، فهم مؤمنون على طريقتهم الخاصة، ولكن، يغيظني
أنصارهم العلمانيون، وأَنصارهم الملحدون الذين لا يؤمنون إلاّ بدين وحيد:
صورهم في التلفزيون
سألني: هل يدافع حارس جائع عن دارٍ سافر صاحبها، لقضاء إجازته الصيفية في الريفيرا الفرنسية أو الايطالية.. لا فرق؟
قُلْتُ: لا يدافع
وسألني: هل أنا + أنا = اثنين ؟
قلت: أنت وأنت أقلُّ من واحد

Since I am not going to translate this poem (I don't possess the english proficiency or literary prowess to actually do that), Let me just assure you that it's ripping Hamas a new asshole and making fun of its supporters and leaders, calling Mesh3el "the prisoner whose ambition is to inherit the prison", Lamenting the fundies insistence that the Mosque and University are equal in terms of education (the two arabic words describing them come from the same root) and expresses his deep anger at the secular and atheist supporters of Hamas, whom he believes only care about getting their faces on Television. So, yeah, our boy is no fan of hamas, and Hamas knew it, but they also knew how popular he is amongst the palestinian population, so they couldn't really go out and insult him, so they did it underhandedly: Mesh3el came out and said that Darwish's loss is a serious one for the palestinian people, but palestine can give birth to 10 Mahmoud Darwish's . So, really, not a big deal his death. Move along people. Nothing to see here. Don't get on our forums though: we call him an apostate there.

Ahh, I love me an angry fundie, and especially those who anger him in style.

RIP Mahmoud Darwish! 

Read this!

On the History of Palestinian collaborators with Zionists:

In his groundbreaking book Army of Shadows, Hillel Cohen,
a research fellow at Hebrew University's Truman Institute for the
Advancement of Peace, exposes this particularly nefarious side of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Cohen has spent years in numerous Israeli
and British archives gathering information that many would pre­fer
to forget, and in Army of Shadows he sum­mons his findings to
document the actions of a seemingly endless number of Palestinian
mukhtars (village leaders), land merchants, in­­formers,
weapons dealers, journalists, busi­nessmen, farmers and teachers who
collaborated with the Jews between 1917 and 1948. By focusing on them,
Army of Shadows chron­icles a tragic chapter in the people's
history of Palestine, one that many Arab scholars have refrained from
writing because it contradicts the dominant ethos of Palestinian
national unity. Zionists have ab­­stained from recording it as
well because it undermines their claim that the Palestinians were able
to unify and fight against the es­tablishment of a Jewish state
after the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947. Cohen reveals
that many Palestinians signed pacts with the Zionists during the 1948
war and that some even fought with the Jews against the Arab armies.

Collaboration is a very thorny issue, primarily because of its
corrosive blend of betrayal, exploitation and deceit, so it's not
surprising that Army of Shadows created a stir when the Hebrew
edition was published in 2004. Both liberal Jews and Palestinians found
the book difficult to digest because each group found its side portrayed
in unflattering terms. Many Jewish readers were upset by Cohen's
revelation that the prestate Zionist intelligence agency, Shai, and the
Jewish Agency's Arab bureau exploited almost every honest Jewish and
Palestinian relationship to advance narrow Zionist interests. There
were, Cohen notes, many Jews who desired only friendship or good
business relations with Palestinians but were eventually identified by
the Shai, which used them to collect information and enlist Palestinian
collaborators. The Jewish Agency even helped establish and finance
Neighborly Relations Committees, which initiated mutual visits and
Jewish-Palestinian projects, ranging from pest control to the
sending of joint petitions to the Mandatory government. The rationale
for the creation of these committees was not only to enhance coexistence
but also to recruit informers.

[...]

Army of Shadows also disturbed Palestinian readers because
it reveals for the first time the extent of Palestinian collaboration
with the Jews during the Mandate period and the ensuing 1948 war. Some
Palestinians were opportunists who collaborated with the Zionists to
make money or advance their careers–these were primarily land brokers
and people seeking administrative jobs. Others were mukhtars who
wished to advance their regional or village interests or, in cases of
internal competition, to solidify their leadership with the Zionists.
Still others can be characterized as Palestinian patriots who simply
disagreed with the dominant national leadership. Finally, there were
those who had Jewish friends and did not view Zionist
immigration as a catastrophe. The problem, though, as Cohen
points out, is that regardless of the motivation, collaboration
contributed to the fragmentation of Palestinian society at a time when
its very fate was being determined.

Simultaneously, Cohen underscores the Palestinian leadership's
failure to cultivate a unified national ethos. While disunity among a
people is in no way unique, in this case, as Cohen shows, it was
aggravated in two ways. First, a totally different and competing
national movement was making claims on the same territory, and this
movement knew how to profit from splits within Palestinian society in
order to undermine national aspirations. Indeed, the Zionists exploited
the fissures to recruit and deploy collaborators, and this ultimately
served to deepen internal Palestinian discord and frustrate
Palestinian nation building.

Second, and more disturbing for a Palestinian readership, Cohen
stresses that instead of capitalizing on the fact that Palestinian Arabs
shared a national consciousness and were divided mostly on pragmatic
questions about how to achieve their goals, the dominant Palestinian
group, led by Hajj Amin al-Husseini and loosely organized under the
auspices of the Arab Party (established in 1935), defined all competing
nationalist views and actions as treasonous. Collaborators, accordingly,
were no longer just those who aided the Zionists' military efforts; they
were local and regional leaders, merchants who traded with Jews,
journalists who wrote in favor of the Zionist project and, most
important, land dealers who helped Jewish institutions locate and
purchase Palestinian land. 

H/T: arabist 

This is beautifully spot-on and funny as hell!

A heartbreaking dispatch from the Columbian armed conflict!

Shamelessly stolen from here:

In other words, Palestinians are about in the mid-average range for
third-world countries, and rank almost the same as Mexico (the USA's
bordering country and trade ally) on the poverty index. Interesting.

For some perspective

Human Poverty Index (HPI-1) 2004
Palestinians have a better time than:

Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen, Morocco, Africa and most of South Africa, Central America and Asia

Probability of not surviving past age 40(%)2004
Palestinians have a better time than:

Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen, Morocco, Africa and most of South Africa, Central America and Asia

Adult illiteracy rate (%ages 15 and older)2004
Palestinians have a better time than:

Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen, Morocco, Africa and most of South Africa, Central America and Asia

People without access to an improved water source (%) 2004
Palestinians have a better time than:

Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen, Morocco, Africa and most of South Africa, Central America and Asia

Children underweight for age (% ages 0-5) 2004
Palestinians have a better time than:

Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen, Morocco, Africa and most of South Africa, Central America and Asia

Zionists! *shakes fist in the air*

Check it out yourself here! 

The Video is here!

Kinda makes the government's official story look like shit, huh? 

Why actors and models like to hang out with Chavez..