Listen / Download an audio report on Lebanese singer Fayrouz. This report touches on the important historical and present day role of the famous Lebanese singer within the Lebanese identity. This report was produced during the height of the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon in Cairo, Egypt for a BBC World Service program, Global Hit. This excellent report features music from Fayrouz and live interviews from Egypt.
Corey Robin – London Review of Books
Last year marked the centenary of Hannah Arendt’s birth. From Slovenia to Waco, conferences, readings and exhibitions were convened in her honour. This month, Schocken Books is issuing a new collection of her writings, its fifth publication of her work in four years. Penguin has reissued On Revolution, Eichmann in Jerusalem and Between Past and Future. And Yale has inaugurated a new series, ‘Why X Matters’, with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters.
Arendt would undoubtedly have been pleased by all this. She didn’t like attention, but she did love birthdays. Birth meant the arrival of a new being who would, or could, say and do things no one had said or done before. The appearance of such a being, she thought, might move others to speak and act in new ways as well. There was always a certain pathos to this notion. Whatever its promise, birth is a fact of nature. And nature, Arendt insisted, is the sphere not of novelty or freedom but of repetition and routine.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the centenary of Arendt’s birth should have devolved into a recitation of the familiar. Once a week, it seems, some pundit will trot out her theory of totalitarianism, dutifully extending it, as her followers did during the Cold War, to America’s enemies: al-Qaida, Saddam, Iran. Arendt’s academic chorus continues to swell, sounding the most elusive notes of her least political texts while ignoring her prescient remarks about Zionism and imperialism. Academic careers are built on interpretations of her work, and careerism, as Arendt noted in her book on Eichmann, is seldom conducive to thinking.
Today we are launching an appeal for a world-wide cultural boycott against the Israeli state.
John Berger
UK Guardian newspaper, December 15, 2006
Today I am supporting a world-wide appeal to teachers, intellectuals and artists to join the cultural boycott of the state of Israel, as called for by over a hundred Palestinian academics and artists, and – very importantly – also by a number of Israeli public figures, who outspokenly oppose their country’s illegal occupation of the Palestine territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Their call, printed in the Guardian today, can be read here. A full list of signatories can be found here.
(The drawing, After Guernica, is by John Berger.)
Jeremy Harding – London Review of Books
Shatila is a short car journey out of Beirut and a few minutes on foot down a street full of market stalls. You pass a refuse heap where goats browse and small children smash up polystyrene packaging, duck into any of the narrow alleys to your right and enter one of the oldest refugee camps in the world. It was established by the Red Cross in 1949 on behalf of Palestinians herded from their villages the previous year. About 700,000 people were evicted in 1948 and of these perhaps 100,000, many of them peasants and smallholders from the hinterland of Haifa, fetched up in Lebanon.
Film Screening with filmmaker David Martinez visiting from San Francisco.
SATURDAY, November, 18th, 7pm
School of Community & Public Affairs
2149 MacKay [above de Maisonneuve]
Metro Guy-Concordia
Suggested Donations 5$.
Join filmmaker David Martinez for an intimate screening of 500 Miles to Babylon a one-hour documentary film currently in post-production about Iraq under U.S. occupation. Narrated by the filmmaker, using footage shot in Iraq during the past years threaded with graphically animated archival sequences to provide historic context, the film will address the current war not simply is a conflict over petroleum profits or a scheme to fill a company’s coffers, but as part of a larger American imperial project.
(…اكثر)
CONFERENCE REPORT
Almost 30 Montrealers travelled to Toronto to participate in this conference. The movement to boycott Israeli Apartheid is growing in Montreal: contact Tadamon or the Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine (www.cjpp.org) to find out how you can get involved.
The landmark conference held in Toronto from 6-8th October 2006 “The Struggle Continues: Boycotting Israeli Apartheid“, was an inspiring and significant event. Over 600 people attended the conference sessions, one of the largest Palestinian solidarity conferences ever held on this continent.
Although the conference was primarily designed for Palestine solidarity activists in Ontario, a significant number of participants came from across Canada including Montreal, Halifax and Vancouver as well as the US. International guests included Jamal Jumaa from the Stop the Wall Campaign in Palestine, Salim Vally from the Palestine Solidarity Committee in South Africa, Betty Hunter from the Palestine Solidarity Committee in the UK, and Jonathan Rosenhead, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics and member of the British Committee for Universities in Palestine. Robert Lovelace, Co-Chief of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, closed the conference with a powerful comparison of the experience of colonialism in Canada and Palestine.
When they talk about the war,
planes breaking sound barriers
My mind recalls the nights,
The sleepless dark silent nights,
an uncommon silence
A hollow silence filled with the sound of danger
So close by, i NEED to run!
Tadamon! Montreal in collaboration with Les Pages Noires Productions organized a major cultural fundraising event in Montreal entitled “Poets Against the War” on August 30th, featuring over 20 poets from around the world voicing the work in solidarity with the people of Lebanon & in opposition to war.
Included in this message is full biographical information on the performing poets & a link to an online video concerning the event….
Charbel Rouhana blends political awareness, traditional Arabic music and
compositional experimentation
By Stefan Christoff
Special to The Daily Star
Friday, July 07, 2006
BEIRUT: Somehow Lebanon’s electric political climate always seems to provide
fertile ground for innovative artistic expression. Such expression may be
rooted in the country’s rich cultural history, but on occasion, it also offers
important insight into the present challenges facing Lebanon (and by extension
the region at large).
Over the past nine years, Charbel Rouhana has become a fixture on the local
music scene. A rising star and longtime “special guest” at the Blue Note Cafe
in Hamra, Rouhana uses song to present an inspiring voice for social change.
The celebrated oud player and contemporary composer has successfully harnessed
folkloric Lebanese traditions and combined them with present-day musical
innovation and insightful social commentary.
