Bluebird

Israeli women marginalized

As ultra-Orthodox flex muscle, Israel feminists see a backsliding

Women who thought Israel's battle for gender equality was mostly won warn of a new assault from the fast-growing ultra-Orthodox, seeking to expand religious-based segregation into the public realm.

An Ultra Orthodox Jewish man walks past a vandalized poster in Jerusalem. Images of women have been vanishing from the streets of the city. (Sebastian Scheiner, AP / November 7, 2011)

By Edmund Sanders, Los Angeles Times

November 12, 2011, 9:41 p.m.

Reporting from Jerusalem—

When public buses rumble to a stop in some of Jerusalem's religious neighborhoods, women often dutifully enter by the rear door and sit in the back, leaving the front for men.

There's no law requiring the women to do so, but those who don't risk verbal taunts and intimidation.

It's a curious sight given Israel's history as an international trailblazer for women's rights.

The country produced one of the democratic world's first female heads of government with Golda Meir's election in 1969. Women lead Israel's Supreme Court and two of the nation's main political parties. Israel drafts women into military service and has some of the world's toughest laws against sexual harassment and rape.

Yet Israeli women say that recently some of their most basic rights have come under attack, including singing and dancing in public, vying for student government positions at a religious college, appearing on billboards in Jerusalem, speaking on a religious radio station and even using the sidewalk during religious celebrations.

Feminists who once thought Israel's battle for gender equality had been mostly won are warning of a new assault from Israel's fast-growing ultra-Orthodox community, which is seeking to expand religious-based segregation into the public realm.

"We are going backward and losing all our achievements," said Rachel Liel, executive director of the New Israel Fund, which advocates for civil rights and equality. "A 21st century democracy is not a place where women sit in the back of the bus."

Israel's ranking in gender equality — based upon workplace discrimination, pay differentials and other factors — compared with other countries dropped from 36th place in 2007 to 55th in 2011, according to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index.

A study last year by the advocacy group Israel Religious Action Center, which is leading the campaign to allow women to pray as men do at the Western Wall, found that attempts to segregate men and women had expanded from private buildings and religious sites to public spaces, including a post office, pizza parlor, grocery store and fairgrounds.

"The pattern is one of creeping encroachment," said Anat Saragusti, director of Agenda, an Israeli group that works on minority-rights issues. "They try a little, see if it works, and then push the envelope a bit more every time until things reach a critical mass and are irreversible. That's when people wake up. But by that point, it's often too late."

During a religious holiday last month, male residents of Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood banned women from using the main streets to prevent mingling of the sexes, defying a Supreme Court order allowing women on the streets. Last year, the same neighborhood constructed a separate, covered sidewalk that women were forced to use, a measure also rejected by the court as discriminatory.

The Israeli Andalusian Orchestra, based in the largely secular city of Ashdod, last month said it was dropping a female vocalist from its standard subscription schedule after conservative customers complained that it was against their religion to listen to a woman sing in public.

One way women's rights activists are pushing back is by plastering posters of themselves around Jerusalem to protest what they say is the growing trend of advertisers to self-censor female images from billboards and bus placards after many such ads were ripped down or burned.

The Israel Defense Forces, which has long been a national symbol of gender equality and opportunity for women, is facing intense criticism after scores of dancing female soldiers were shuttled away from dancing male soldiers during a public military ceremony celebrating the Sukkot holiday last month. Military officials said they are investigating the incident. A month earlier, some male cadets walked out of another official event because female soldiers were singing.

Ultra-Orthodox leaders agree that the problem is one of encroachment, but they insist that it is the secular and the liberal religious communities that are seeking to impose modern values and prevent the ultra-Orthodox, also known as haredim, from practicing a stricter form of Judaism. Those traditional values typically include restrictions on television and the Internet, modest dress codes and segregation of the sexes, which haredi leaders say is needed to protect women from sexual exploitation and men from temptation.

"Women walk down the street as though they are at the beach," said Rabbi Shmuel Pappenheim, a spokesman and leader for an umbrella group of ultra-Orthodox factions. "If in the past this was typical only of Tel Aviv, today it has reached Jerusalem as well. They encroach on our way of life, prompting our people to impose new restrictions, deepen separation and erect higher barriers to keep it away."

The conflict is gaining intensity, he said, because of the rising influence and numbers of the haredi community, once a small, scattered minority that today numbers 1 million, about 15% of the population. The ultra-Orthodox live mostly in separate cities and neighborhoods where they have been free to practice their beliefs without interference. As their political power grows, they are demanding more accommodation for their way of life, Pappenheim said.

"We used to be a small minority fighting for survival," he said. "Now we are a huge minority. As the saying goes, with food comes more appetite."

He said the segregation was not intended to discriminate or oppress women but to "protect women's honor and dignity."

Critics say the issue is not religious tolerance, but equality.

"With all due respect, women are quite capable of defending their own honor," said Hila Benyovits-Hoffman, an Israeli blogger who writes frequently about gender issues. "This insane gender separation and obsessive attention to women's bodies have nothing to do with religion. Perhaps it is sexual repression or frustration out of control."

Many activists criticize mainstream politicians for failing to speak out more aggressively against the segregation, particularly female leaders such as Kadima party Chairwoman Tzipi Livni, Labor Party head Shelly Yachimovich and Supreme Court Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch. All three declined to comment for this article.

"Israel's women politicians do not like to be associated with women's issues and do not want to be single-interest feminist activists," said Saragusti of Agenda. "But who will take care of women's issues if those who made it to the top won't?"

edmund.sanders@latimes.com

Saudi Women Given Right to Vote

By REUTERS

Published: September 25, 2011 at 9:57 AM ET

JEDDAH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia will allow women to stand for election and vote, the king announced on Sunday, in a significant policy shift in the conservative Islamic kingdom.

In a five-minute speech, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud said women will also take part in the next session of the unelected, advisory Shura Council, which vets legislation but has no binding powers.

"Because we refuse to marginalise women in society in all roles that comply with sharia, we have decided, after deliberation with our senior ulama (clerics) and others... to involve women in the Shura Council as members, starting from the next term," he said in a speech delivered to the advisory body.

"Women will be able to run as candidates in the municipal election and will even have a right to vote."

Women's rights are regarded as a litmus test for the government's appetite for social and political reform. Saudi Arabia adheres to a strict version of Islamic law that enforces the segregation of the sexes.

"This is great news," said Wajeha al-Huwaider, a Saudi writer and women's rights activist. "Women's voices will finally be heard.

"Now it is time to remove other barriers like not allowing women to drive cars and not being able to function, to live a normal life without male guardians."

The king did not address the issue of women being allowed to drive. Although there is no written law against women driving, they are not issued licences, effectively banning the practice.

Women in Saudi Arabia must also have written approval from a male guardian -- a father, husband, brother or son -- to leave the country, work or even undergo certain medical operations.

After entering the Shura Council chamber leaning heavily on a cane, King Abdullah, who is thought to be 87 or 88, read only a section of a longer prepared statement that was later released in full by the authorities.

The part he did not read included reference to Saudi foreign policy including the kingdom's continued support for a Gulf-brokered plan for a power transition in Yemen.

SEEKING CHANGE

King Abdullah has long been pushing cautious political reforms, but in a country where conservative clerics and senior members of the ruling family oppose even minor changes, liberalisation has been very gradual.

He built a new university for students of both sexes and encouraged women to participate more in the labour market.

Despite calls on social media for widespread protests in Saudi Arabia during the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests in the Middle East and north Africa, the only noteworthy demonstrations were confined to the country's Eastern Province, which is home to the country's Shi'ite minority.

Activists in the country have long called for greater rights for women. Ruled by an absolute monarchy supported by conservative Wahhabi clerics, Saudi Arabia is a conservative country where religious police patrol the streets to ensure public segregation between men and women.

A campaign this summer by women who broke Saudi law by driving on the kingdom's city streets prompted some arrests.

Saudi Arabia will hold only its second nationwide elections in recent memory on Thursday for seats on municipal councils, but critics of the ruling al-Saud family say the poll, in which voting is limited to men, is a charade.

Supporters of the absolute monarchy say the elections are designed to give Saudis a greater say in politics, but critics point out that the elections are for only half the seats on councils that have few powers.

The Shura Council, which vets legislation but cannot veto it or enforce changes, is fully appointed by the king.

"Despite the issue of the effectiveness of these councils, women's involvement in them was necessary. Maybe after women join there will be other changes," said Naila Attar, who organized a campaign Baladi (Arabic for My Country) calling for women's involvement in the municipal council elections.

"I believe this is a step to involve women in the public sphere. It is the top of the pyramid and a step in the direction for more decisions regarding women."

(Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Robert Woodward)

A swim for all

 

Where Politics Are Complex, Simple Joys at the Beach

By ETHAN BRONNER

Published: July 26, 2011

TEL AVIV — Skittish at first, then wide-eyed with delight, the women and girls entered the sea, smiling, splashing and then joining hands, getting knocked over by the waves, throwing back their heads and ultimately laughing with joy.

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A Joyous First Swim, but a Risky One

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Most had never seen the sea before.

The women were Palestinians from the southern part of the West Bank, which is landlocked, and Israel does not allow them in. They risked criminal prosecution, along with the dozen Israeli women who took them to the beach. And that, in fact, was part of the point: to protest what they and their hosts consider unjust laws.

In the grinding rut of Israeli-Palestinian relations — no negotiations, mutual recriminations, growing distance and dehumanization — the illicit trip was a rare event that joined the simplest of pleasures with the most complex of politics. It showed why coexistence here is hard, but also why there are, on both sides, people who refuse to give up on it.

“What we are doing here will not change the situation,” said Hanna Rubinstein, who traveled to Tel Aviv from Haifa to take part. “But it is one more activity to oppose the occupation. One day in the future, people will ask, like they did of the Germans: ‘Did you know?’ And I will be able to say, ‘I knew. And I acted.’ ”

Such visits began a year ago as the idea of one Israeli, and have blossomed into a small, determined movement of civil disobedience.

Ilana Hammerman, a writer, translator and editor, had been spending time in the West Bank learning Arabic when a girl there told her she was desperate to get out, even for a day. Ms. Hammerman, 66, a widow with a grown son, decided to smuggle her to the beach. The resulting trip, described in an article she wrote for the weekend magazine of the newspaper Haaretz, prompted other Israeli women to invite her to speak, and led to the creation of a group they call We Will Not Obey. It also led a right-wing organization to report her to the police, who summoned her for questioning.

In a newspaper advertisement, the group of women declared: “We cannot assent to the legality of the Law of Entry into Israel, which allows every Israeli and every Jew to move freely in all regions between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River while depriving Palestinians of this same right. They are not permitted free movement within the occupied territories nor are they allowed into the towns and cities across the green line, where their families, their nation, and their traditions are deeply rooted.

“They and we, all ordinary citizens, took this step with a clear and resolute mind. In this way we were privileged to experience one of the most beautiful and exciting days of our lives, to meet and befriend our brave Palestinian neighbors, and together with them, to be free women, if only for one day.”

The police have questioned 28 Israeli women; their cases are pending. So far, none of the Palestinian women and girls have been caught or questioned by the police.

The beach trip last week followed a pattern: the Palestinian women went in disguise, which meant removing clothes rather than covering up. They sat in the back seats of Israeli cars driven by middle-aged Jewish women and took off headscarves and long gowns. As the cars drove through an Israeli Army checkpoint, everyone just waved.

Earlier, the Israelis had dropped off toys and equipment at the home of one of the Palestinian women, who is setting up a kindergarten. The Israelis also help the Palestinian women with medical and legal troubles.

Israel’s military, which began limiting Palestinian movement into Israel two decades ago to prevent terrorism at a time of violent uprisings, is in charge of issuing permits for Palestinian visits to Israel. About 60,000 will be issued this year, twice the number for 2010 but still a token amount for a population of 2.5 million. Ms. Hammerman views the permits as the paperwork of colonialist bureaucrats — to be resisted, not indulged. Others have attacked her for picking and choosing which laws she will and will not obey.

The Palestinian visitors came with complicated histories. In most of their families the men have been locked up at some point. For example, Manal, who had never been to the sea before, is 36, the mother of three and pregnant; five of her brothers are in Israeli prisons, and another was killed when he entered a settler religious academy armed with a knife.

She brought with her an unsurprising stridency. “This is all ours,” she said in Tel Aviv. She did not go home a Zionist, but in the course of the day her views seemed to grow more textured — or less certain — as she found comfort in the company of Israeli women who said that they, too, had a home on this land.

Another visitor lives in a refugee camp with her husband and children. Her husband’s family does not approve of her visits (“ ‘How can you be with the Jews?’ they ask me. ‘Are you a collaborator?’ ”) but she did not hide the relief she felt at leaving her overcrowded camp for a day of friends and fun.

The beach trips — seven so far — have produced some tense moments. An effort to generate interest in a university library fell flat. An invitation to spend the night met with rejection by Palestinian husbands and fathers. Home-cooked Israeli food did not make a big impression. And at a predominantly Jewish beach, a policeman made everyone nervous.

So, on this latest visit, the selected beach was one in Jaffa that is frequented by Israeli Arabs. Nobody noticed the visitors.

Dinner was a surprise. Hagit Aharoni, a psychotherapist and the wife of the celebrity chef Yisrael Aharoni, is a member of the organizing group, so the beachgoers dined on the roof of the Aharonis’ home, five floors above stylish Rothschild Boulevard, where hundreds of tents are currently pitched by Israelis angry with the high cost of housing. The guests loved Mr. Aharoni’s cooking. They lighted cigarettes — something they cannot do in public at home — and put on joyous Palestinian music. As the pink sun set over the Mediterranean, they danced with their Israeli friends.

Ms. Aharoni was asked her thoughts. She replied: “For 44 years, we have occupied another country. I am 53, which means most of my life I have been an occupier. I don’t want to be an occupier. I am engaged in an illegal act of disobedience. I am not Rosa Parks, but I admire her, because she had the courage to break a law that was not right.”

Dowd on driving

Op-Ed Columnist

Sing Out, Hillary

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: June 21, 2011

WASHINGTON

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

 It would have been thrilling, of course, if Hillary Clinton had channeled Aaron Sorkin and smacked around the barbaric Saudi men who force women to huddle under a suffocating black tarp.

As Allison Janney’s C.J. Cregg once fumed on “The West Wing” about Saudi Arabia: “This is a country where women aren’t allowed to drive a car. They’re not allowed to be in the company of any man other than a close relative. They’re required to adhere to a dress code that would make a Maryknoll nun look like Malibu Barbie. They beheaded 121 people last year for robbery, rape and drug trafficking. They have no free press, no elected government, no political parties. And the royal family allows the religious police to travel in groups of six carrying nightsticks, and they freely and publicly beat women. But ‘Brutus is an honorable man.’ Seventeen schoolgirls were forced to burn alive because they weren’t wearing the proper clothing. ... Saudi Arabia, our partners in peace.”

It would have been thrilling if Hillary 2011 had simply channeled Hillary 1995, when, as first lady, she made her bodacious speech in Beijing, declaring that “women’s rights are human rights.”

In her memoir, Hillary wrote that, despite pressure against it, she was determined to give that speech because she was fed up with “the crucial concerns of women” getting sacrificed “to diplomatic, military and trade issues.”

So it was startling on Monday when Saudi women activists, struggling to bring the Arab Spring to the medieval House of Saud by urging women to drive, chided Hillary for her silence.

Clinton’s office responded that the secretary had used “quiet diplomacy” — raising the issue, and more pressing ones, in a call with the Saudi foreign minister on the Day of Driving Dangerously.

By Tuesday, the secretary of state — who has worked hard for women under the radar and whose legacy will be shaped by her support of women’s rights around the world — realized that she needed to be a bit louder.

“What these women are doing is brave and what they are seeking is right, but the effort belongs to them,” she told reporters, adding that she wanted to “underscore and emphasize that this is not about the United States. It’s not about what any of us on the outside say,” but about “the women themselves.”

One Saudi liberal told me that Hillary should sing out: “Hillary should be more forthcoming and forget about oil. She should also focus on the plight of maids in Saudi Arabia. An Indonesian maid here was beheaded two days ago for killing her employer. Many workers are on death row and don’t get a fair trial.”

No one expected Hillary to be as exuberant as the Ukrainian feminists who cruised in solidarity around the Saudi Embassy in Kiev, covering their faces and baring their breasts.

Clinton is a diplomat now. She knows it’s tricky to push Bedouins, who get stubborn and dig in their heels. Saudis prefer concessions to be seen as gifts.

Still, because the Saudis are our drug dealers on oil, America has never fought hard enough for oppressed women in the authoritarian kingdom.

“We have bigger fish to fry,” a top foreign policy official told me this week.

The Saudis are disgusted with President Obama for what they see as his abandonment of Hosni Mubarak, dithering on a Palestinian state and being “unduly beholden to Israel,” as Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi ambassador to the U.S., wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece. The prince said that Saudi Arabia and other Arab states would help Palestinians bypass the U.S. and Israel and seek statehood at the U.N.

The Arab News reported that the Saudi Women for Driving Internet campaign was “deemed a failure, as hardly any women drove that day,” only about 40, and most did not continue after Friday.

Saudi fans of the 87-year-old King Abdullah, who started the first co-ed university in the kingdom, are upset and surprised that he hasn’t already allowed women to drive.

They blame it on the resistance of the ultraconservative Prince Nayef bin Abdel Aziz, the interior minister who is believed to be responsible for jailing the first driver, Manal al-Sharif, for nine days. Nayef is said to be arguing with the more progressive king for additional time to prepare for female drivers.

Given the king’s declining health and the illness of his half-brother, the Crown Prince Sultan, the chance to give women any rights may be running out. Nayef, who has long been in charge of the roaming odious religious police who let those schoolgirls die in the fire in Mecca because they didn’t have their headscarves on, is a contender to replace the crown prince, and it’s unlikely he’ll pull a Nixon-in-China move on women’s freedom.

The juxtaposition of images said it all. A smiling Michelle Obama and her daughters meeting with Nelson Mandela was a vivid reminder of how far South Africa has come since it ended race apartheid under pressure. The small courageous spurt of ladies in black driving was a vivid reminder that Saudi Arabia, under little pressure, is still locked in gender apartheid.

"Drive," she said

---

May 24, 2011, 11:30 am

Saudi Woman’s Driving Video Preserved Online

By ROBERT MACKEY

Supporters of Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi woman leading a campaign against Saudi Arabia’s ban on female drivers, have posted multiple copies of a video that shows her driving last week on YouTube.

As my colleague Neil MacFarquhar reports from Saudi Arabia, the Saudi government has “moved swiftly to extinguish a budding protest movement of women claiming the right to drive,” in recent days.

Manal al-Sharif, one of the organizers of an online campaign encouraging Saudi women to drive en masse on June 17, was arrested on Sunday, days after she posted video of herself flouting the kingdom’s ban on female drivers on YouTube. Traces of Ms. Sharif’s campaign also started to disappear from the Web.

Following her arrest, the YouTube video of Ms. Sharif driving became inaccessible, as did a second clip, in which she outlined how women could take part in the June 17 protest. A Facebook page she set up called “Teach Me How to Drive So I Can Protect Myself,” which had more than 12,000 fans, was deleted. The Twitter account she used to spread news of the protest movement was copied and altered to make it seem as if she had called off the campaign.  

On Sunday, Eman Al Nafjan, a Saudi blogger in Riyadh who spotted the fake duplicate of Ms. Sharif’s Twitter account, reported: “Someone pretending to be her tweeted that she has repented once she realized that the call to lift the ban is an Iranian and atheist conspiracy that will lead society to moral decadence.”

Despite these apparent efforts to erase Ms. Sharif’s call for civil disobedience in the kingdom next month from the Web, her supporters have moved to keep the campaign alive online by creating a replica of the Facebook event page and posting copies of the video that shows her driving on YouTube, so it can still be seen inside the kingdom. (One of those copies is embedded at the top of this post.)

Her online message about the June 17 protest have also been copied, and were featured in news reports, like this one from Al Jazeera, that cannot be so easily deleted:

Saudi bloggers, like Ms. Nafjan, have also posted summaries of Ms. Sharif’s instructions to women who want to take part in the protest on June 17, advising them of the following five rules:

1. There will be no gathering or demonstrations. Each woman that wants to participate should just get in her car and go about her daily business without [her] driver.

2. Only women who have valid driving licenses from other countries are to drive.

3. Volunteers will teach other women to drive until the government sets up an official system for women to obtain local driving licenses.

4. Everyone should drive with their safety belts on and drive carefully.

5. Women who drive are encouraged to videotape it and upload it to YouTube.

The new campaign is not the first attempt to raise support for a lifting of the Saudi ban on female drivers. As The Lede explained in a previous post on the issue, Wajiha Howeidar, an activist who recorded the video of Ms. Sharif driving last Thursday, posted a similar video of herself behind the wheel on YouTube in 2008.

Before Ms. Sharif was arrested, Ms. Howeidar told France 24 by email that social media tools have made it easier for Saudi women to register their discontent with the ban. She wrote:

I’m under the impression that this mobilization has somewhat changed mentalities inside the country, but I also see that authorities haven’t budged an inch. Our leaders are like many others in the Arab world: they don’t take their people’s opinions and aspirations into account.

When I saw Manal’s initiative of launching a ‘Women Drivers’ day on June 17, I immediately decided to help her. The fact that she uses new technologies like Facebook and Twitter means that she is capable of reaching a much bigger number of people. I remember in 2007 trying to rally my friends by email and over the phone: it was a much longer process. In just a few days, Manal has already alerted thousands of people and even gotten local media’s attention.

"Leave the copter, take the corpse."

Op-Ed Columnist

Cool Hand Barack

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: May 3, 2011

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

 

No wonder the president’s top generals call him “a Cool Hand Luke.”

After giving the order for members of a Navy Seals team to execute a fantastically daring plan to, let’s be honest, execute Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama put on a tuxedo and gave a comedy speech Saturday night in a Washington ballroom of tippling journalists and Hollywood stars.

If we could have seen everything unfolding in real time, it would have had the same dramatic effect as the intercutting in the president’s favorite movie, “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone calmly acts as godfather at his nephew’s baptism at church, even as his lieutenants carry out the gory hits he has ordered on rival mobsters.

Just substitute “Leave the copter, take the corpse” for “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”

The president’s studied cool and unreadable mien have sometimes distanced him from the public at moments of boiling crisis. But in the long-delayed showdown with Public Enemy No. 1, these qualities served him perfectly.

The timing was good, blunting the infelicitous  remarks made recently to The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza by an Obama adviser, who described the president as the un-John Wayne ushering a reviled and chastened America away from the head of the global table. The unnamed adviser described the Obama doctrine on display in Libya as “leading from behind,” which sounds rather pathetic.

But now the president has shown he can lead straight-on and that, unlike Jimmy Carter, he knows how to order up that all-important backup helicopter. He has said that those who call him a wimp are mistaken, that there is often muscular purpose beneath his diffident surface.

Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, who was so tacky that she didn’t mention Obama’s name in her congratulations, tried to draw credit to the Bush administration.

But there can be no doubt that justice for the families of the 9/11 victims was agonizingly delayed because the Bush team took a megalomaniacal detour to Baghdad.

A pigheaded Donald Rumsfeld, overly obsessed with a light footprint, didn’t have the forces needed at Tora Bora to capture Osama after the invasion of Afghanistan. To justify the switch to Saddam and the redeployment of troops to Iraq, W. and his circle stopped mentioning Osama’s name and downplayed his importance. When the White House ceases to concentrate on something, so does the C.I.A. 

The hunt got so cold by 2005 that the Bin Laden unit at the C.I.A. was disbanded and overhauled. Four years after the monster felled the twin towers, the Bush team finally put more officers on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In his East Room address Sunday night, President Obama made it clear that he had shooed away the distracting Oedipal ghosts.

“Shortly after taking office,” he said, “I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., to make the killing or capture of  Bin Laden the top priority of our war against Al Qaeda.”

Many famous invaders throughout history, from Genghis Khan to Tamerlane to Babur, have marched along the same route the Navy Seals took on their moonless flight, going from Kabul to Jalalabad to Peshawar.

The mesmerizing narrative stitched together by The Times’s Mark Mazzetti, Helene Cooper and Peter Baker begins with C.I.A. agents getting the license plate of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier in Peshawar. Peshawar is the ultimate mystery town, famous for secrets and falsehoods. It’s known for its bazaars, especially the Story Tellers Bazaar.

And that is exactly where President Obama now finds himself. He will now have to sort through the bazaar of Pakistan’s deceptive stories and deal with lawmakers angry about giving $20 billion since 9/11 to a country where Osama was comfortably ensconced. For years, top Pakistanis have said that Osama was dead or in Afghanistan.

Even Condi Rice proclaimed she was shocked to find “Geronimo” settled in Abbottabad for six years, living in plain sight in a million-dollar house in an affluent suburb near a military base and the Pakistani version of West Point. As one of Osama’s neighbors put it: “It’s the closest you can be to Britain.”

 At a House homeland security subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, Representative Patrick Meehan asked the question about Pakistan that is ricocheting through Washington: “Does it reflect to some extent some kind of divided loyalty or complicity in some part, or incompetence or both?”

Seth Jones of the RAND Corporation, who used to advise the U.S. military in Afghanistan on Al Qaeda, replied with equal bluntness: “Whether there was complicity, or incompetence, at the very least there has not been a high priority in targeting the senior Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. Based on the threat streams coming from this area, those interests have to change.”

Birds are chirping, Bin Laden's dead

BIN LADEN DEAD, U.S. OFFICIAL SAYS

By HELENE COOPER

Published: May 1, 2011

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in an undated photo.

WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden has been killed, a United States official said Sunday night.

President Obama is expected to make an announcement on Sunday night, almost ten years after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Dost thou mock me?

Op-Ed Columnist

The Power of Mockery

 

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

 

Published: April 16, 2011

The juiciest story behind the Middle East uprisings doesn’t concern Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s “voluptuous” Ukrainian nurse or C.I.A. bags of cash. Rather, it’s the tale of how a nonviolent revolutionary strategy crafted by Serbian students and an octogenarian American scholar came to challenge dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and many other countries.

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof

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This “uprising in a bottle” blueprint was developed by the Serbian youth movement, Otpor, to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. One of Otpor’s insights was that the most effective weapon against dictators isn’t bombs or fiery speeches. It’s mockery. Otpor activists once put Milosevic’s picture on a barrel that they rolled down the street, inviting people to hit it with a bat.

Otpor’s strategy mirrors one promoted by a rumpled Boston academic named Gene Sharp, who is little known in America but inspires tremors among dictators abroad. Sharp’s guide to toppling despots has been translated into 34 languages so far and was widely circulated in Egypt last year in Arabic.

After Otpor toppled Milosevic, it began to hold seminars for pro-democracy activists from other parts of the world, including many from the Middle East.

“About 15 of us went to Serbia from Egypt,” Mohammed Adel, one of the leaders of Egypt’s awesome April 6 Youth Movement, which helped lead the way in overthrowing President Hosni Mubarak, told me a few days ago. “The methods we learned from Serbia are what we are using in Cairo.”

A crucial lesson, he said, is the power of nonviolence: “If somebody is beating you, don’t attack him. Don’t use any violence against them. Just take photos of them and put them on the Internet.”

Toppling dictators is only one application of this kind of grass-roots movement. One of the most exciting trends in the struggle against poverty and social pathologies such as crime is the use of similar youth-owned movements to change cultural norms from the bottom up.

Tina Rosenberg, a longtime writer and journalist who contributes to the Opinion section of nytimes.com, offers a brilliant look at bottom-up initiatives to achieve social change in her new book, “Join the Club.” My favorite example has to do with teenage smoking.

From the 1970s through the 1990s, nothing seemed to work to dissuade teenagers from smoking. Television commercials warned that smoking kills you or turns your teeth yellow, but teenagers felt invulnerable. And with adults united in disapproval of teenage smoking, what better way for adolescents to rebel than to cough their way through a cigarette?

Then in the late-1990s, some frustrated anti-smoking campaigners showed teenagers how cigarette companies were manipulating them into addiction. Starting in Florida, the teenagers then designed a series of funny and withering commercials, many based on prank phone calls.

One depicted a couple of teenagers telephoning an ad agency that promoted cigarettes. The kids tried to give the agency a prize for killing teenagers in large numbers, flummoxing the staff.

In one multistate commercial, a young man calls a cigarette company and says that he is a dog walker. Then he explains his business proposition: He wants to sell dog urine. “Dog pee is full of urea, and that’s one of the chemicals in cigarettes,” he explains.

“It is likely that never before in the history of public health had anyone done a media campaign based on prank phone calls,” Rosenberg notes — but it worked.

The youth campaign spread to other states and avoided any goody-two-shoes message of “don’t smoke.” It channeled kids to rebel against tobacco instead of rebelling by using tobacco. Florida had the biggest one-year drop in high school and middle school smoking of any state in two decades. The high school smoking rate dropped in half in less than a decade.

The team effort to change culture isn’t new. It’s part of the model of Alcoholics Anonymous, Weight Watchers, microfinance lending groups and many initiatives to chip away at poverty, crime and gang violence. Rosenberg cites a housing project area in the District of Columbia, Benning Terrace, where 53 people had been killed in gang violence over two years. Then a group of local ex-convicts and former drug addicts intervened and began working with the gangs.

The ex-convicts had street cred that the police and social workers didn’t, and they worked with young people to make gang violence “uncool.” There wasn’t another gang-related killing for 13 years.

Another example is an extraordinarily successful effort to improve the performance of black college students in calculus. Started at the University of California, Berkeley, after black students there earned an average grade of D+ in calculus, it puts black and Hispanics into small groups to provide peer support, and participants by some measures now outperform white and Asian students.

Sometimes the most powerful force for social change is a bunch of irreverent and wise-cracking students, working together. 

 

 

Using religion as a sexist tool

Women Irate at Remarks by President of Yemen

By REUTERS

Published: April 16, 2011

SANA, Yemen (Reuters) — Thousands of Yemeni women protested in Sana and other cities on Saturday, enraged by President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s remarks that it was against Islam for women to join men in the demonstrations aimed at toppling him.

Gamal Noman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Women demonstrating in Sana, Yemen.

The women, many in black Islamic dress with full face veils, said their role in protests was religiously sound and called, again, on the president to step down.

“It seems that President Saleh failed in all his efforts to employ tribes and security to strike at those seeking his exit, and so he resorted to using religion, especially after he saw that thousands of women were taking part in protests,” said Samia al-Aghbari, a leader in the protest movement.

Mr. Saleh, who has warned of civil war and the breakup of Yemen if he is forced out before organizing an orderly transition, urged the opposition on Friday to reconsider its refusal to join talks to resolve the political crisis.

But he also struck a defiant tone, calling members of the opposition liars and appealing to religious sensitivities in this conservative Muslim country by criticizing the mixing of men and women in protests in Sana.

Around 5,000 women demonstrated against him in Sana on Saturday, with similar numbers in the industrial city of Taiz, south of the capital. The anti-Saleh protests have had the support of the main opposition coalition, which includes leftists but whose largest member is the Islamist Congregation for Reform, or Islah Party.

“Oh youth, the honor of women has been slandered,” the women chanted Saturday, referring to Mr. Saleh’s remarks.

Some women brought their young daughters to the protests. One young girl’s face was painted with the image of the Yemeni flag, and the word “Leave” was scrawled on her forehead.

“If Saleh read the Koran, he wouldn’t have made this accusation,” said one protester, who gave her name only as Majda. “We ask he be tried according to Islamic law.”

Saudi and Western allies of Yemen fear that a prolonged standoff could cause chaos that would benefit an active Al Qaeda wing operating in this poor Arabian Peninsula country.

More than 116 protesters have been killed in clashes with security forces since late January.

Fashion undercover

 

Looking Back | Oman Fashion Week

Women's Fashion

|

By JOSH WINTERS

| March 25, 2011, 5:00 pm

Mohammed MahjoubA look from Hanaa al-Wahaibi’s collection.

The Sultanate of Oman occupies the corner of the Arabian Peninsula nearest India, and lies between Dubai and Yemen. In broad strokes, this is a fair social description as well as geographical. The ancient city of Muscat is picturesquely nestled among a craggy collection of low mountains that run right into the sea. The bare rocky massifs yield occasionally to sandy beaches and the deep natural harbors that have made the city a hub of Indian Ocean trade for thousands of years.

Oman is an absolute monarchy that has been ruled by Sultan Qaboos bin Said since 1970. Unlike many of its counterparts throughout the Arab world, it had seen minimal unrest until February 25, when tensions flared in the port city of Sohar. (Despite the disturbance, respect for the sultan remains widespread, even among protesters.) As a part of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Oman is a peer of the fabulously wealthy and tyrannical oil states of the Gulf.

Oman under Sultan Qaboos has pursued an unusual path to modernization, having closed its borders for much of the 1970s to put its house in order. This attitude of carefully planned growth is most immediately visible in its urban planning, with the whitewashed traditional houses still holding pride of place along the capital’s perfectly manicured streets. Oman does, however, face many of the other problems as its GCC neighbors: low functional literacy, insufficient white-collar jobs to satisfy the expectations of an overwhelmingly young population and the strain of being a traditional Islamic society in an increasingly wealthy and cosmopolitan context.

I was recently in Oman for Muscat Fashion Week, which featured 12 designers from Oman and elsewhere in the region. The event was the first of its kind in the sultanate — the first of many, according to the organizer, His Excellency Sultan Hamood, mayor of Muscat Municipality. Just hours before Tuesday’s shows, we stood on the stunning outdoor runway, set halfway up a rocky promontory overlooking Muscat’s quiet harbor. His Excellency is an energetic man with ambitious plans for his city to become the region’s fashion capital. He told me how the whole idea had come together in three weeks, in the hands of a Danish group that is responsible for Copenhagen Fashion Week. Despite the short preparation time, the production was as strikingly beautiful as it was effortlessly punctual.

Mohammed MahjoubA look from Anisa al Zadjali’s collection.

The Gulf is perhaps the most gown-centric fashion scene in the world. The basic unit of socializing in conservative Arab societies is the wedding. Zeina, a 28-year-old Omani woman, said she receives two or three wedding invitations a week. She said the weddings have grown more lavish in the last decades, and now nearly all of them take place over several days. The weddings are strictly segregated along gender lines, meaning that Omani women are in a pitched and incessant fashion war, without many distracting social elements, nor men to get in the way of pure glamorous competition. The traditional black silk robe (the abaya) that is worn in public is shed in favor of lavishly embellished gowns once they’re inside the wedding venue.

The societal restrictions on dress make the logistics of runway shows a bit different from the usual fashion event. The first nine shows were open to ladies only. The models were Indian models from Dubai, as it would have been taboo for an Omani woman to be seen on a catwalk.

The opening show of the week was Robert Abi Nader, a designer whose flair for fabulous gowns has made his name in Beirut and Paris, producing outrageous event dresses and even a private jet interior for elegant clients whose fortunes are often of unconventional origin. Over double espressos at the Al-Bustan Palace, I asked him where most of his dresses go: “Central Africa, the Gulf, Russia, all over, you know,” he said. When I asked him if he dealt with any high-profile clients, he said, “I don’t name names, and I don’t work with Hollywood clients; my ladies don’t like that kind of attention.” In the audience for the Abi Nader show was Her Highness Sayyida Ghalya bint Fahar al Said of the Royal Family, whose presence created quite a stir among the other attendees.

Mohammed MahjoubA look from Dar Dibaj’s collection.

Also showing that night was the Kabul-based line Zarif, designed by Zolaykha Sherzad. It is the best of a few fashion lines based in Kabul, making use of the extraordinary silks, brocades and distinctive cottons produced in the subcontinent. This show was strong on the impeccably tailored silk jackets that define the label. Several new silhouettes on the runway Tuesday night were from the collection I had reviewed in its Kabul studio in Afghanistan in May. Emphasis remained on detail, with distinctive Kabul-made alloy buttons and complex cuts on the cuffs and collars of the striped jackets, which covered the spectrum from long swallow-tail cuts to high-waisted jackets.

Over the next two nights, eight designers sent collections down the runway. The glittery, gauzy Punjabi suits of the Omani designer Anisa al Zadjali demonstrated the cultural proximity to India; Fadi Nahle, a Lebanese wedding specialist, sent a parade of fabulous ruffles and glitter; Shrekahnth, an Indian label, showed custom print kurtas and separates with jarring colors. Meanwhile, Hanaa al-Wahaibi stood out from the other Omani traditionalists. Her brightly colored pants and kurtas had precise fit and tailoring, a rarity in a scene where drape dominates.

The event closed with Dar Dibaj, the vibrant joint effort of Afaf and Aida al-Farsi. These striking Omani sisters are sophisticated traditionalists, whose restraint with the shiny stuff and use of black and white endeared them to Dubai buyers, among others. The two were clearly the darlings of Muscat Fashion Week, and their elegant gowns were the best demonstration of Arab fashion taking a stride forward without sacrificing cultural mores.

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/looking-back-oman-fashion-week/