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"We Didn't Know It Was Impossible, So We Did It": The Quebec Student Strike Celebrates Its 100th Day
![[Student strikers in Quebec. Image via Occupy Theory.]](/content_images/3/sm_quebec.jpg "[Student strikers in Quebec. Image via Occupy Theory.]")
Origins of an unlimited general strike (“grève générale illimitée”) Students in Quebec are marking their hundredth day of an unlimited general strike on Tuesday, 22 May, the culmination of the most stunning mass protest movement of recent months and North America’s largest student movement in years. In fact, the mobilizations in Quebec might just be Canada's Arab Spring. Students have been organizing against tuition hikes for nearly one and a half years, when the Quebec government first proposed to raise tuition fees by seventy-five percent over five years (amended to eighty-two percent over seven years by the government at the end of April). Before the general ...
Keep Reading »Sanctions Against Iran: A Duplicitous "Alternative" to War
Media reports on Iran oscillate wildly between threats of imminent military action and hopeful reports of diplomatic progress. Amidst this confusing din, there is a constant truth: the United States has not ceased its economic bullying of Iran, nor has the threat of war receded. As Dennis B. Ross, the Obama Administration’s former Iran advisor, told the New York Times, “now you have a focus on the negotiations...It doesn't mean the threat of using force goes away, but it lies behind the diplomacy.” This echoes President Obama’s persistent refrain on Iran: “All options are on the table.” We argue that sanctions against Iran are not designed to work as an actual ...
Keep Reading »Palestinian Hunger Strikers: Fighting Ingrained Duplicity
![[Palestinians hold photographs of their relatives jailed in Israel during a support rally for Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, May 5, 2012. Image by Majdi Mohammed/AP Photo.]](/content_images/3/sm_LadiesStriking.jpg "[Palestinians hold photographs of their relatives jailed in Israel during a support rally for Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, May 5, 2012. Image by Majdi Mohammed/AP Photo.]")
On his seventy-third day of hunger strike, Thaer Halahleh was vomiting blood and bleeding from his lips and gums, while his body weighs in at 121 pounds—a fraction of its pre-hunger strike size. The thirty-three-year-old Palestinian follows the still-palpable footsteps of Adnan Khader and Hana Shalabi, whose hunger strikes resulted in release. He also stands alongside Bilal Diab, who is also entering his seventy-third day of visceral protest. Together, they inspired nearly 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners to go on hunger strike in protest of Israel's policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial. Administrative detention has constituted a core of Israel's ...
Keep Reading »El Haqed: Examining Morocco's Judicial Reform in 2012
![[El Haqed after his release from jail on January 2012. Image from L7a9ed/Wikimedia Commons.]](/content_images/3/sm_L7a9ed-janvier2012.jpg "[El Haqed after his release from jail on January 2012. Image from L7a9ed/Wikimedia Commons.]")
On 9 September 2011, Mouad Belghouat, a 24 year old Moroccan rap musician, was passing out fliers to advertize for a demonstration in his impoverished neighborhood outside the cosmopolitan city of Casablanca. On the evening he and his friends were handing out fliers for the upcoming march, Belghouat was approached by another young man, Mohamed Dali, later reported to be a member of the “Alliance of Young Royalists,” who verbally targeted Belghouat, calling him a traitor. Belghouat himself is a member of the February 20th movement, a coalition of activists that has been organizing demonstrations for over a year in Morocco, calling for greater democratic ...
Keep Reading »No Boycotts Here: Veolia's Booming Business from OPT to KSA
![[Image from leedspalestineblog.org.uk]](/content_images/3/sm_leedspalestineblog.org.uk.png "[Image from leedspalestineblog.org.uk]")
Veolia, a publicly owned French company that provides environmental services in the fields of water, waste management, energy and transportation, has long been the target of one of the most successful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns for its violation of Palestinian human rights. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), Veolia has facilitated the Israeli occupation by building and operating a tram-line which links Jerusalem with illegal settlements in the West Bank, by dumping waste from Israel and illegal settlements on Palestinian land at the Tovlan landfill, and by providing wastewater treatment to several illegal settlement, including Modi’in ...
Keep Reading »Carceral Politics in Palestine and Beyond: Gender, Vulnerability, Prison
![[Event Poster. Image from the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia Univeristy]](/content_images/3/sm_rsz_1carceral.jpg "[Event Poster. Image from the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia Univeristy]")
On Thursday, April 5 at 6PM the Center for Palestine Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University will host the event “Carceral Politics In Palestine and Beyond: Gender, Vulnerability, Prison,” featuring panelists Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Mai Masri, and Lena Meari. This topic has recently been put under the international spotlight by Palestinian detainees who have gone on hunger strike in order to expose the brutality of Israel's prison-detention complex, an important arm of its criminal military and civilian occupation of Palestine. At Jadaliyya we believe that events that highlight such important and critical topics should be ...
Keep Reading »The Draft Anti-Terrorism Law in Saudi Arabia: Legalizing the Abrogation of Civil Liberties
![[Saudi policemen form a check point near the site where a demonstration was expected to take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 11 March 2011. Hassan Ammar/AP Photo]](/content_images/3/sm_police.jpg "[Saudi policemen form a check point near the site where a demonstration was expected to take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 11 March 2011. Hassan Ammar/AP Photo]")
In July 2011, Amnesty International published a leaked copy of the draft Saudi Arabian Penal Law for Terrorism Crimes and Financing of Terrorism. This Anti-Terror Law, which grants the Ministry of Interior unprecedented levels of authority and discretion in intelligence gathering, policing, and detention, has already been reviewed by the Security Committee of the Consultative Council (Majlis al-Shura) and the Committee of Experts in the Ministers’ Council, and awaits final approval for its enactment. Given the recent appointment of the Interior Minister Prince Nayef Bin Abdulaziz as the new Crown Prince, it seems likely that the law will soon be adopted. Widespread ...
Keep Reading »How Not to Study Gender in the Middle East
![[Changes in traditional Sudanese dress. Image by Khaled Albaih]](/content_images/3/sm_large.jpg "[Changes in traditional Sudanese dress. Image by Khaled Albaih]")
One: Gender is not the study of what is evident, it is an analysis of how what is evident came to be. Two: Before resolving to write about gender, sexuality, or any other practice or aspect of subjectivity in the Middle East, one must first define what exactly the object of study is. Be specific. What country, region, and time period forms the background picture of your study? Furthermore, the terms “Middle East,” “the Islamic World” and the “Arab world” do not refer to the same place, peoples, or histories, but the linkages between them are crucial. Moreover, the “state” is a relatively new phenomenon in the Middle East. In order to study gendered political economy in ...
Keep Reading »القضاة التونسيون بين السلطة والجمعية والنقابة
![[Image of Tunisian judge holding list of demands for judicial independence. Image from Presstv.ir]](/content_images/3/sm_Screenshot2012-02-29at10.17.29PM.png "[Image of Tunisian judge holding list of demands for judicial independence. Image from Presstv.ir]")
إذا ما أراد المراقب المتعمق في الشؤون القضائية اللبنانية، (والتي تنفرد فيها السلطة السياسية، أو من ينوب عنها في قصر العدل كمجلس القضاء الأعلى، بالكلام عن القضاء وعليه)، بالذهاب إلى تونس اليوم، سيصدم بحيوية المنافسة، واحتدام النقاش العام بين جمعية القضاة التونسيين ونقابتهم. حيث يرى المظاهرات والنقاشات والمؤتمرات والمقابلات الصحفية والعلمية واللجان المشتركة والمواقع الالكترونية، ويلاحظ إن القاضي يتقاسم المنابر مع المحامي والصحفي والناشط والسياسي. ولكن الصورة طبعا ليست بهذا الصفاء الجميل، إذ هناك من يعترض على بعض الممارسات أو المزايدات، أو من يندد بالانقسامات داخل الجسم الواحد، إلا انه، و بعيداً عن إي تقويم لما يحدث، يشكل الواقع القضائي التونسي اليوم تجربة فريدة في مجال ...
Keep Reading »The Hunger Strike Defeated the Secret Evidence: The Case of Khader Adnan
![[Protester marching in support of Khader Adnan in Ni'ilin, West Bank,17 February 2012. Image by Friends123]](/content_images/3/sm_khaderadnanarticleasd.jpg "[Protester marching in support of Khader Adnan in Ni'ilin, West Bank,17 February 2012. Image by Friends123]")
With a hunger strike lasting 66 days, Khader Adnan, a Palestinian baker from the village of Arabeh in the West Bank, successfully undermined the seemingly incontestable system of administrative detention in Israel and revealed the injustice of secret evidence. Administrative detention, a form of punishment in which a person can be detained on the basis of secret evidence and held in prison without charge, is based on three sources of law: Military Order No. 1591 Regarding Administrative Detention – 2007 that applies in the West Bank; the Emergency Powers (Detention) Law - 1979 that applies in Israel; and the Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law - 2002. Most ...
Keep Reading »Saudi Feminism: Between Mama Amreeka and Baba Abdullah
On 9 May 2012, Manal al-Sharif was awarded the Havel Prize for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway. This came shortly after al-Sharif was honored as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World at a Gala in New York City. Such events have given rise to a pattern: just as numerous pictures and videos of activists attending various conferences and receiving numerous awards surface, waves of criticism pour in. Their motives are viewed with suspicion, worthiness is questioned, and ...
Keep Reading »Should Tunisia Pay Ben Ali's Debts?
The journalist, uneasy, risked his question: “Do you have any fears that there is perhaps a far left movement coming through these revolutions that perhaps want more closed economies? I mean, there have been a lot of pictures of Guevara.” At a press conference on the Arab Uprisings held in April last year at International Monetary Fund (IMF) headquarters, then-Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn gave a reassuring nod in that direction. “It is a good question,” he responded. “A good question. There ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran
Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Amy Motlagh (AM): Part of the study of literature is obsessive re-reading. In this case, I became preoccupied with what I felt was a narrow translation of a word in the English edition of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (which is perhaps the only Persian novel to achieve the status of a work of “world literature”), giving rise to an ...
Keep Reading »خطيئة الدستور (2): والآن تشاهدون فيلم اسماعيل ياسين في تأسيسية الدستور
حذر الجزء الأول من هذه السلسة من أن اتفاق فرقاء الصراع الدستوري الحالي على تصوير دستور ١٩٢٣ على أنه كان دستورا سباقا يعكس تخليهم عن مطالب ثورة يناير وعدم اهتمامهم بتبعية مصر للاستعمار من أجل إعلاء مصالحهم الحزبية الضيقة. ودفعني ذلك إلى رفض الإطار الذي يحكم وضع الدستور الحالي من حيث المبدأ حتى لا ينتهي بنا الحال إلى وضع دستور "سباق" كدستور ١٩٢٣: يقنن الاستعمار ويبني دولته المستعمرة على الصفقات السرية وأكل حقوق أغلبية الشعب. لكن، وعلى الرغم من ضرورة رفض الإطار الحالي لوضع الدستور من حيث ...
Keep Reading »Personalizing Civil Liberties Abuses - The Case of Dr. Al-Arian
On Saturday, I was at the University of Chicago for an event to discuss humanitarian intervention and empire. One of my fellow speakers was Tariq Ramadan, the highly regarded Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford. He’s one of the world’s most accomplished scholars in his field. For almost six years — from 2004 until 2010 — Ramadan was banned from entering the U.S. In 2004, he had accepted a tenured position at Notre Dame University, but was forced to resign it when, nine days before he was ...
Keep Reading »Does International Law Shelter States from Accountability?
Regrettably, states’ power to protect themselves and to ensure impunity has continued to grow in recent years. This paper discusses two recent examples of this political trend: the far-reaching reaction to Judge Baltasar Garzon’s legal decision not to apply the 1977 Spanish Amnesty Law to crimes against humanity committed during the Franco regime, and the recent International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on state immunity according to which a state is immune from jurisdiction before foreign national ...
Keep Reading »Young Women Demanding Justice and Dignity: By All Means Necessary
Amina Filali was a young Moroccan girl who was raped at the age of 15 then forced to marry her rapist. She was battered, bruised, and starved until she committed suicide in March 2012. She was 16 years old. Contributing to Amina’s suicide are her rapist turned husband, article 475 of the Moroccan penal code that absolves an aggressor of his crime once he consents to marrying his rape victim, the judge who called for a mediation instead of a prosecution against the offender, the police, and the religious ...
Keep Reading »‘Virginity Test’ Doctor Acquittal Reveals Military Judiciary Shortcomings
Disappointed but not surprised, lawyers and supporters of Samira Ibrahim blamed a verdict issued Sunday acquitting the military doctor that Ibrahim accused of carrying out a so-called “virginity test” on her and six other women last year on the fact that the case was heard in the military judiciary. Following the verdict, Amnesty International issued a statement saying this is proof of the military judiciary’s incapability to handle human rights violations. “This decision is not only a travesty ...
Keep Reading »Meet the Head of Egypt's Presidential Election Commission
Egypt is gearing up for the final stages of a tumultuous transitional period under the rule of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) and preparing to enter a new phase following a scheduled handover of government authority to a newly-elected president at the end of June. The much-anticipated presidential vote is scheduled to be held on 23 and 24 May to elect Egypt's first president since Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in a popular uprising one year ago. The man in charge of overseeing the poll is ...
Keep Reading »Exploiting a Dynamic Law of Prolonged Occupation: The Israeli High Court of Justice and Israel's Quarries in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
On 26 December 2011, the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) rendered its judgment in a case challenging Israel’s quarrying activities in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) filed by the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din. The petitioners demanded that the activities be terminated since they violate Israel’s obligation to administer the OPT for the benefit of the local population. Israel started operating quarries in the OPT in the 1970s; today there are ten, eight of which are in operation. ...
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