Café de Flore, Paris: La France toujours! et Vive Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Freidan, et Hoda Sha'rawi

Link to me thinking about a book I should write. This takes a little time to download. Lien à moi pensant à un livre que je devrais écrire. اتصال(ياخذ قليم من الوقت) وانا افكر عن كتاب ضروري ان اكتبه


With all the news about Syria, I forgot, but was reminded by my friend Cindy, about the importance of what women in Saudi Arabia do.

Avec toutes les nouvelles de Syrie, j'avais oublié, mais mon amie, Cindy, m'a fait souvenir de l'importance de ce que font les femmes en Arabie Saoudite.

مع كل الاخبار عن سوريا, نسيت, و لاكن صديقتي سندي ذكّرتني عن اهمية ما تفعلون النساء في العربية السعودية


Saudi women defy ban on driving cars

Cindy* wrote:
Dozens of Saudi women drove cars in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and other Saudi cities June 17 to protest the ban on women driving.
It was the first major protest against the Saudi monarchy’s reactionary ban since November 1990, when 47 women drove 14 cars in a convoy on a Riyadh highway. That action came after U.S. women soldiers were stationed in Saudi Arabia prior to the start of the U.S. war against Iraq and freely drove military vehicles.

The 47 women were arrested, lost their passports for a year, and were fired from their jobs. A religious order prohibiting women from driving was handed down and quickly embraced by the Interior Ministry.

The ruling Saudi family, a close ally of Washington, has historically invoked Islamic law to justify tight restrictions on political space, not only for women but all working people in the kingdom.

Women are allowed to drive in some rural villages, where they have traditionally taken produce to market, hauled water, and transported people.

In addition to the prohibition on driving, Saudi women cannot vote. They require a male guardian’s permission to take a job or travel.

*July 4th issue of a US paper written in the interests of working people

ٍمن شقتي From my appartment

Today's Friday protests in Syria are called : Legitimate Bereavement فقدان شرعية

McNamara Ground Ops Coffee Machine, Detroit...Al-Jazeera on Syria

دير الزور حلب حمص حماة درعاء دمشق

Deir Al-Zor, Halab(Aleppo), Homs, Hama', Der'aa, Dimashq(Damascus)

Hier soir il y avait des manifestations pour la chute du regime Syrian dans les villes. Les attaques de l'armée syrienne continue dans le nord d'Alep. 10,000 refugiées en Turaquie maintenant dans des camps cloisonnés.

Un lénine de la Syrie expliqurait l'importance de ces paysans du nord de Syrie qui font greve--le seul moyen qu'ils ont,--en quittant leurs récoltes. Des grèves des petits marchands commencent dans d'autres villes syriennes en meme temps.

Il y a pas mal de Kurds syriens dans ces pays au nord d'Alep. Le régime syrien attaque cette région pour jouer avec le stigma raciste contre les Kurds. Mais il ne réussi pas. Tous les syriens sont avec les Kurds. Il y a des manifestations a Qamishli, grand région kurde juste a coté de la Turquie.

écrit pendant le دوام ليمي "night shift" à l'aeroport de Detroit le 23 juin, 2011, correspond à 9h du matin Al-Jazeera, Qatar le 24 juin.

Café de Flore, Paris and Abd Al-Halim Hafez's birthday

As we said before, all accounts of gallantry shall be from Café de Flore, Paris. What is nice about Google in Arabic is that yesterday, June 21, we were reminded that it was Egyptian male singer, Abd Al-Halim Hafez's birthday. No more gallant man than he, yesterday, on this singer-of-love-song's birthday, with the possible exception of Nelson Mandela, who received the elegant Michele Obama in his home town of Soweito yesterday,too. Gallant as he is, I'm sure Nelson Mandela(Freedom Now) won't bother Michele's pretty little head with a tribute to the role of the Cubans at the battle of Quito Canavale-to the role of Cuba in the ending of Apartheid. Michele Obama should read his speech, given in Cuba first thing after his release from prison in 1990 in Pathfinder Press' HOW FAR WE SLAVES HAVE COME. July26-1991-Cuba-and-Africa.mp3 is link to my reading of the speech, and a link to Mandela's speech at the UN, at about the same time, when the Apartheid Government was stalling on pushing De Klerk to step down and set up a democratic, non racial, South Africa. I heard Mandela speak in Tiger Stadium, in Detroit that year.

3011

Macnamara Airport Ground Ops Coffee Machine...Syria

Last night students at Damascus University protested the regime: nothing about it on BBC this morning.

Some of the greats in English Literature at the University of Damascus; my father, Edward Said, and all the Syrians who came to help teach in Saudi Arabia. (above, is a picture of a café in Paris named after my daughter, who met my father in his retirement in East Lansing, Michigan.)
More about English Literature in the Middle East in future blog entries from the poetry café in Gaza, the tea-and-falafel-shop outside Shati' Beach Camp to which yesterday 36 US peace activists set sail to break the Israeli blocade.

From my appartment, Joffrey's Coffee Shop, near Main Gate, KFUPM, Dhahran

All other news shall be from my appartment. This morning, I downloaded and installed Audacity and Lame encoder for making MP3's on my little ASUS Netbook. I am sitting here in the café, missing my students, who are finally free and on holiday. This little café, near Al-Nakhil (The Palm Tree) Restaurant, where I often have Biryani for lunch, is on the formerly deserted site where the father--(Tom Barger)--of my Shemlan colleague, Tim Barger, first discoverd oil in Saudi Arabia.

Shati' Tea-and-Falafel Shop, Gaza - On Learning..Philosophy of TechTalk*

*TechTalk, by Oxford University Press, is the series we use to teach Elementary and Pre Intermediate English to future Engineering students here at KFUPM.
According to Barthélémy, a professor at Lycée Henri IV, where Philippe Daumas* studied, we have to take the Encyclopedists of the Enlightemment, the age of "Les Lumieres" as an approach to a humanistic view of Machines and tools.(picture of Lycée Henri IV, above)

This is summarized in this nice translation of part 1 of Gilbert Simondon's 1958 Ecole Normale Supérieure - Sorbonne Thesis, L'individu et sa génèse physico-biologique, translated here, downloadable in pdf(copy here).

I'll have to put this kind of relation to Diderot's Encyclopedia with the Aleppo soap manufactures and "sina,a" of the Arabs.

Technical Mentality, translated by Arne De Boever, gives a nice summary of what Simondon meant by a culture of Technology(copy here). He has references to the potter making the pot; so this relates very closely to the trades of Syria. This unpublished text of Simondon, given to Jean-Hugues Barthélémy by his son was first published in Gilbert Simondon. Revue philosophique 3 (2006) Paris, P.U.F. 343-357
*Philippe Daumas, great supporter of the Palestinian Cause at University of Montpellier, where Taha Hussein studied, too.

Café de Flore, Paris - Syrian government's gallantry?

Today, Saturday 18 June after the Friday mass demonstrations against the Regime of Bashar al-Assad, BBC TV showed film footage one of their reporters got by going, somehow into Syria and interviewing people in the fields, camped out to avoid the Syrian army going through their village and pillaging and bulldozing houses.

Huge demonstartions in Hama and Aleppo Friday the 17th. Very inspiring, but not covered very much in the Western media. Solidarity candle-lit "Free Syria" on the lawn in Canberra, Australia.

Once again, I'm having difficulty posting this from a computer with Windows 7.

Café de Flore, Paris Syrian gov's gallantry toward Hama' farming women?

Today, Saturday 18 June after the Friday mass demonstrations against the Regime of Bashar al-Assad, BBC TV showed film footage one of their reporters got by going right through the Turkish border into a part of Syria. He interviewed an Syrian woman wearing her long blue robe and a white scarf over her head. She reminded us of those wonderful, proud, Palestinian women with their embroidered black robes selling fruit and vegetables in the main market of Gaza City. (above, Café de Flore, Paris)

Shati' Tea and Falafel Shop - Cultural musings on Syria's Ma'arrat al-Numan struggle

Pendant que l'armée syrienne continue d'assiéger la petite ville--maintenant grande--de Ma'arrat al-Numan, je pense à Abu 'Ila Al-Ma'arri le grand pessimiste du moyen age. N'est-ce vrai que l'attaque contre cette ville est la lutte contre le Voltairisme -c.a.d. contre la liberte dans la croyance personelle-- que Abu Ala a introduit dans la pensée au moyen age?

How wrong the Obamas and Defense Secretary Gates have it, in supporting the conservative religious forces in the world...just like Assad going against the memory of Abu 'Ila Al-Naman who contributed so much to making religion a personal, freedom of thought thing. I wonder if that is why Assad is beseiging so fiercely this little town--now quite big--were Abu 'Ia Al-Ma'arri was from.

McNamara Ground Operations Coffee Machine Political reflection

There is a certain similarity between The Imperialists' governments and the Syrian and Lybian police states these days. Both are blaming Al-qa'ida for their domestic repression. Just as in the US, one cannot say such things--except here anonymously--same in Syria. Of course much worse in Syria, where now eight thousand people have had to flee the northern cities of Jiser al-Shughur and another city in Idlib province into Turkey. I could see from the faces in the crowd of the pro-Assad rally Wednesday the 15th? that Assad is able to rally the better-off middle bourgeoisie. It seems to be the farmers who are moving politically in this rich farming country.

Care de Flore, Paris

Terrible problems with Blogger.com. I can't change what I publish. Anyway, here's a link to what I am thinking about as the events in Syria transpire.
Louis Massignon's preface to Al-Qasimi's "Industries of Damascus"

Shati' tea and falafel shop "Jim Baker's Blue Jay Yarn," by Mark Twain

To experience Yosemite the way my mother, an old Californian, whose mother started the Save the Redwoods League, you should stay at "Housekeeping Camp" of the Yosemite National Park service. But you have to book long in advance for the summer months. I don't know if they let the burning logs fall off El Capitan at night, and if there is piano in the outdoors in the valley. I remember the funny song, "I'm an acompanist..the guy who never gets into the act." I heard that at Yosemite. It is something to see, that great cliff, cheared off like a half-loaf in the valley there in front of the Ahwahnee Hotel.

Here's a link, in old Macintosh Geneva font, to Mark Twain's "Bluejay Yarn" Chapter Three in A Tramp Abroad, where he ends with:

"Well, sir, they roosted around here on the housetop and the trees for
an hour, and guffawed over that thing like human beings. It ain't any
use to tell me a bluejay hasn't got a sense of humor, because I know
better. And memory, too. They brought jays here from all over the United
States to look down that hole, every summer for three years. Other
birds, too. And they could all see the point except an owl that come
from Nova Scotia to visit the Yo Semite, and he took this thing in on
his way back. He said he couldn't see anything funny in it. But then he
was a good deal disappointed about Yo Semite, too."

From my apartment, faxing Obama...with a grapefruit from S. Lebanon coast

P.O. Box 1745
KFUPM
Dhahran 31261
Saudi Arabia

The President of the US
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

June 4, 2011

Dear Mr. President,
Greetings again. I am the writer of a May 19 fax and email expressing my distress that Dominique Strauss Kahn was in prison, ending with the following plea to you that something be done so that he not have to spend more nights in his cell on Reiker's Island.
"Would George Washington have put General Lafayette in New York prison if he had been a little bit "French" and over gallant with the ladies at a cotillion at Mount Vernon? Come on!
...You ran on "cosmopolitanism." Please intervene: maybe even make a visit to DSK in prison so that they would treat him a little better, at least."
They did treat him a little better, whether because of my fax or my prayers, or something the White House did; he is now awaiting trial in a comfortable place and the media has moved on to other things.
Nevertheless, the discovery that I could send messages to you, has encouraged me to pass on to you some "remarks to the younger generation," as I am sort of a dinosaur, having actually been alive (in the US) during the 1967 events, and in their aftermath (in Lebanon and Egypt) which you mentioned in your "67 borders with swaps" speech to the State Department employees.
In response to your "swaps," Natanyahu used the word "indefensible" for the 1967 borders. I woiuld agree that Abba Eban's lies, during the televised UN debates during the 1967 war, to rationalise Israel's grasping of the West Bank from Jordan were, indeed indefensible arguments. It is good that Natanyahu reminded us, obliquely, as does UN resolution 242, that Israel's land grab in 1967 was indefensible. Of course Natanyahu didn't mean that he agreed that Abba Eban made a false, "indefensible" argument at the UN. He meant "undefendable-not able to be defended"--to him, unless the seacoast and farmland of Israel has a land buffer, with settlements, in the occupied West Bank, it is is not able to defend itself from all the weaponry which President Assad of Syria, the Military Care-taker government of Egypt, and King Abdullah of Jordan are known to have.
As for your use of "swaps," --though it is nice and American, and seems to come right out of Mark Twain's, "Tom Sawyer," ---there is nothing left for the Palestinians to swap! What they had--the five hundred agricultural villages, the whole system of rain catching systems, of organic irrigation--were bulldozed and most of the inhabitants expelled in 1948. When I had the word "swaps" in my Engineering English course for Saudi students here, I couldn't find a word to give the Arabic translation of swaps, but after your speech, Al-Arabiyya TV translated it as "tabadul," exchange.
Back to my sympathy for France--let's remember that French, not English, is still a much more precise language for diplomacy, especially in light of Natanyahu's sloppy use of "indefensible," when he meant to gloss over his delusion that Israel, with an atomic bomb and everything, is "undefendable" against Assad, Tantawi, and Abdullah. The Arab countries agreed to the French wording of UN resolution 242, which says Israel must withdraw from "des territoires occupées" --"des," being understood as a contraction of "de" and "les," from THE occupied territories. (The Arabic of 242, is even more precise, since it says withdrawal from "the;" Al- the famous Al-, which has given us so many technical words (we are not that far from the transmission of the pre-Socratics, through Aristotle, to Europe, by Avicenna) like algorithm, alloy, algebra, etc,. The English, on the other hand says, "from occupied territories," which is not clear whether it means calling on Israel to withdraw from all the occupied territories or just from the occasional, or "some," occupied territories. Your "swaps," is just the civil war-Mark-Twain-19th century version of the English version of Resolution 242, and I commend you for animating, in this way, the rather stale English version of 242. (We English teachers always dream of teaching English as a Second Language with Literature, especially Literature of the caliber of Mark Twain or Hemmingway; but we're stuck with TOEFL -Test of English as A Foreign Language- like the history of Coca Cola, Betsy Ross, Paul Revere, the Grand Canyon, and the Gemini Space probe)
However, Natanyahu's misuse of "indefensible" opens the door to taking him up on his English and saying to him, "yes, what Israel did to the Palestinians in 1948, and then again in 1967 is indefensible." Also, what Israel is doing to the land is indefensible. I wish, with the new emphasis on the fight to live ecologically on an ecological planet, somebody would point out that the Arizona-style irrigation systems that Israel put in place, bulldozing over the centuries-old systems that the Palestinians had developed over millennia, are desiccating the land. The aquifers from the northern lakes are being used to pump excessive water into areas where the Palestinians formerly caught the winter rain water and used an elaborate system, developed in the Arabian peninsula during the Roman period--actually transmitted to Roman engineers by the Arabs, probably--and perfected in the Omayyad period, in Syria (c.f. Nelson Glueck's study of the Nabatean irrigation systems of the Negev desert, "Rivers in the Desert." and physical remains of Arab dams and water collecting works in Spanish Andalusia).
I think most Jewish citizens of Israel would agree that the continued refusal of their government to abide by UN resolution 242, which also states that the Palestinians must have the right to return to 1948 Israel, is also indefensible, untenable, and unnecessary. The Palestinians would be glad to live together with the Israelis in their old land, and the modern Israelis who colonized the land no longer need to be on a constant war footing: there is no more talk of fighting Assad, Tantawi, or Abdulla from the hawks, or the doves, in Israel "because of a ship sailing through the straits of Tiran"-this was the excuse Abba Eban and Moshe Dyan gave in 1967 for dropping red-hot walls of Michigan-made, Dow Chemical Napalm on the Egyptian Sinai to take Gaza and the Sinai. The Israelis are pooped out, and no longer enthusiastic about being "fortress Israel" on a constant war footing. They need a democratic secular Palestine. What would happen if they let the Palestinians back in and they worked together to save the land? It would be great! And it would be a shining example of the old civilized days when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together fruitfully throughout the Middle East and transmitted their techniques--soap, Alchemy(Chemistry), Hippocratic-Avicennian Medicine, farming(the farmers Almanac), new vegetables from India and Iran(egg-plant-aubergine, Jaffa oranges). It would have repercussions all over, as the ancient systems of working with the existing water came back to the fore,
I know it is hard to change old ways of thinking in the State Department. They won't forgive the Students in Tehran for taking over the US Embassy after the downfall of the Shah--all this talk against the Iranian nukes is the old State Department line of anger that Carter's restoration of the Shah didn't work. Israel's paranoia about Hizbolla in Lebanon is just because the Israeli army got a little licking in I-forget-when and had to leave Tyre, where residents (in exile in Dearborn, MI) say they saw Israeli archaeologists doing the craziest of things--looking for gold under Hiram's tomb! And all this talk of Hamas being a "terrorist" organization is just because most of the Gazan's are refugees kicked out from Majdal (where Mary Magdalene was from and from which she was kicked out by the Romans and went to Saintes Maries de la Mer in France), and from all the coastal towns bulldozed south of Jaffa. (The coastal road is nothing today but cement highways, tenement houses, parched earth..and the 9th century Arab new town of Ramla, which is now known as one of the most notorious oubliettes for Palestinian prisoners, but used to be all orange and olive groves like southern Lebanon and the Gaza strip itself.) Hamas and Fateh are just tweedle dumb and tweedle dee, like the Democratic and Republican Parties in the US. Yasser Arafat's Fateh was deemed to be a terrorist organization by Sharon, who bulldozed Jenin and Ramalla and cornered Arafat in his building, which "proved," by military war that he was a terrorist. The same for Hamas. If you don't recognize the two-state solution, and prefer to hold out for your right, explicit even in UN Resolugion 242, to live alongside the Israelis in your old farming land, you are a "terrorist."
Finally, one more speaking gambit that Natanyahu opened while you were in Ireland, and he was speaking before the House of Representatives was that he expressed concern that Israel is seen as "the bad guy," and that this is not so: he went on to say how the Palestinians within 1948 Israel proper have a kind of democracy that forms a beacon to the youth fighting for employment and rights in the farming villages and cities of Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, etc. But it is not to the youth outside the "sixty-seven borders with swaps" that the Palestinian citizens inside Israel are important. They are important because they are within the belly of the beast, as it were, and work alongside, or at least have the potential to work alongside the Israelis and explain that they can live together and explain that there is a need for a return of the refugees and, thus, for a democratic Israel. It is a tough thing to explain, given the kind of walls between Israelis and Palestinians living in Israel. The Palestinians need a little help from the international community explaining how, indeed, Israel is a colonial settler state--it is sort of the "bad guy"-- yet, the colonists are there now, and yet, and yet, we still need to live with these colonists. It is a matter of water or no water, of life or death, of the land, or of no-land, of the most beautifully designed medieval city in the world(Arab Jerusalem), or a desert without history, of restoring the 500 bulldozed hilltop villages with their natural rain-catching streets and cisterns, or only cement tenements and prisons. It is a matter of patria o muerte, as Che would say. I have attached the famous article Max Rodinson published--a pdf of the French article he got printed in Sartre's "Les Temps Modernes"--to help start helping explain the hiatus that Netanyahu gave us a peek into, in his speech to the House of Representatives.
In concluding, as we watch the Druze of the Hauran(Der'aa, and environs) take up the cudgels to fight for independence in Syria--just as the Hauran started the revolt against the French after Sykes Picot at the end of WW 1--it is a pleasure to recount to you, Mr. President--Ah, can I call you, my slim, elegant hero, like I like to think that I was, too, at your age?--these reflections from the Jurassic period so pertinent to today.
Sincerely,

3011

P.S. If I don't get an automated response within a few days saying no, I will take it that the white house wouldn't mind if I published this, without my signature, on my anonymous blog, which nobody reads anyway, at www.mediterraneancoffeeshops.blogspot.com