Today marks the 50th anniversary of the “French-Algerian Massacre,” when at least 200 Algerians living in Paris were killed by French police and another 11,000 or so were arrested while protesting for Algerian independence from France. Nabila Ramdani (in The Guardian) reminds us that “many of the killers had been Nazi collaborators who learned their crowd […]
Non-Arabic speaking peoples have a tendency to lump “Arabs” together, as though racial and economic hierarchies don’t impact us as they do the rest of the world. The fact is, orientalism is common even in SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) and it tends to be rooted in the same imperial racial and cultural […]
The first thing that comes to mind is our unquestioning admiration and obsession with wealthy people. Our newspapers and magazines are chock-full of personal interviews of rich people. In these interviews, people born with silver spoons in their mouths often offer the average Kenyan advice on how to work hard and make it to the […]
Very much in the fashion of other democratic states, some Israelis have decided to take up the cause against social ills such as unemployment, crime and disease. How do they plan to do it? Not by addressing the realities of Occupied Palestine and a bloated security regime, making schools and hospitals more accessible for Israelis […]
The Spring Issue of Middle East arts magazine, Bidoun, is about sports. This includes a piece on “Kenyan long- and middle-distance runners who have found infamy and fortune as Arabized athletes in the Gulf” on $1000 a month for the rest of their lives. This comes with the “standard complement of elite trainers and cutting […]
The documentary film, Blacks Without Borders: Chasing the American Dream on Foreign Soil (2008, directed and produced by Stafford U. Bailey. Co-produced by Judy Thayer-Bailey)–which tells the story of a group of African-American professionals who immigrate to South Africa right after the end of legal Apartheid–is now on Youtube in its entirety. (It’s been since February […]
Al-Jazeera follows Joseph, a Liberian man on his journey to New York City. He gets randomly selected in the US green card lottery system. The 22-minute film is currently showing on their English language broadcast station. (Most cable TV providers are coy about carrying Al Jazeera–they’re apparently terrorists–but you can stream the channel online on […]
