BBC News: A Sarcastic Response to Syria's Militants

BBC News: A Sarcastic Response to Syria's Militants

BBC News: A Sarcastic Response to Syria's Militants

By : Jadaliyya Reports

By Mike Thomson

BBC News

9 February 2017

It takes a special kind of person to run a radio station in an area controlled by Islamist militants in northern Syria. Music is forbidden, so are women presenters. But Raed Fares - manager of Radio Fresh FM - has come up with a creative response to the militants` demands.

It is mid-day and almost time for the latest news from Radio Fresh FM in the rebel-held province of Idlib, in north west Syria.

Suddenly the airwaves are filled with assorted sounds of tweeting birds, clucking chickens and bleating goats. As the newsreader gets under way, the cacophony continues beneath his voice. 

You might be forgiven for thinking that this is some sort of farming bulletin. It`s not. It`s simply that the station`s manager, Raed Fares, has had enough of being told what to do by the powerful jihadist group, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham or JFS - which until last July was linked to al-Qaeda and known as the al-Nusra Front.

"They tried to force us to stop playing music on air," says Fares. "So we started to play animals in the background as a kind of sarcastic gesture against them."

In what appear to be further acts of sarcastic sabotage aimed at JFS`s ban on music, Radio Fresh FM has introduced long sequences of bongs from London`s Big Ben clock, endless ticking sounds, ringing explosions and the whistle of shells flying through the air. 

And instead of songs with melodies, the station now plays recordings of tuneless chanting football fans.

Fares has been getting involved in confrontations of one kind or another for years now.

 

He took part in hundreds of demonstrations against Syrian President Bashar Assad`s regime at the beginning of the uprising in 2011 and continues to see it as the biggest enemy. Many of his friends were killed or imprisoned, as the authorities responded with increasing violence.

 

 [Raed Fares was one of many demonstrators in the town of Kafranbel in the early days of the Syrian uprising]

Then came the threats from fighters of the so called Islamic State. Like JFS, they said the station`s music was haram, or offensive to Islam. Believing this to be totally wrong, Fares ignored the threats and carried on as before, but nearly paid with his life.

Just over three years ago, when the 44-year-old former estate agent arrived home in the early hours of the morning, after finishing work at the radio station, two IS gunmen with Kalashnikovs were waiting for him. They fired a barrage of shots, leaving more than a dozen holes in his car, even more in the wall behind, and two in the right side of his body. These shattered several bones in his shoulder and ribs, as well as puncturing his right lung.

Fares was left lying in a pool of blood and only narrowly survived after being rushed to hospital by his brother.

"I still have trouble breathing, he later said, but my doctor says my lungs should be no problem because of the size of my nose." 

It`s not that surprising that IS doesn`t like Fares. After all, he did once design a poster depicting Syria as an alien with a monster called ISIS exploding out of its chest. The group has since been pushed out of Idlib province. 

President Assad, though, is his favourite target. He once got his friends to drape themselves in shrouds and then filmed them staggering out of graves calling for Assad to step down, as if even the dead want him gone. He posted it online and it was played on a number of Arabic television stations.

Humour, it seems, is never far from the surface with Raed Fares. Take his response to another of JFS`s demands, to get rid of women news readers - who are also haram, they say.

Has he, I ask him, agreed to swap them for men?

"No, I have another solution for that issue. We simply put their voices through a computer software programme which makes them sound like men."

Though having heard the resulting broadcasts, I would say the women now sound closer to Daleks or robots than men.

 

[Raed Fares at work, at Radio Fresh FM]

The feisty 6ft 2in station manager has also refused JFS`s demands to allow their members into the radio station to monitor the behaviour of his staff.

"We said `No,`" he says. "You have to monitor the transmissions, not what people are doing inside the radio station."

JFS are not the only extremist rebels in the area. There are about a dozen others, and even though some of the biggest factions have recently been forming new alliances, this still makes the area chaotic to govern.

There is little more than two hours of mains electricity a day, water supplies are limited and food increasingly expensive in a region flooded with 700,000 refugees from elsewhere in the country.

The fact that Fares`s dispute with JFS has continued for so long is evidence that the group is a little more tolerant than IS. But as a family man with three children is he not worried that sooner or one of these jihadist groups will kill him?

"They`ve tried that five times already," he says. "If it happens, it happens. But they haven`t succeeded yet. I try to survive, but if I can`t, it`s OK."

He tells me that the lowest point in his life came when one of his closest friends was killed and another severely injured by a bomb last summer. Fares admits that he nearly took his own life in the days that followed. But now, he says, he is more determined than ever to carry on.

"We started the revolution together and were all aware that we faced the same risks," he says. "That means that my life isn`t more expensive than my friends who lost their lives."


[This article was first posted on BBC]

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412