What's on the wall?

What's on the wall? I'm talking about Israel's separation or apartheid wall that is splitting an already split place into splinters. Construction began in 2002 after the intifada or "shake off" began in an effort to deter attacks from Palestinians on Israel.  As my colleagues and I travel from Jerusalem to Ramallah, to Bethlehem and Hebron we see breathtaking swaths of this barrier cutting through countryside, slicing cities, and intruding on towns. Bethlehem is a good example.  

The wall through Bethlehem (yes, the city of Jesus's birth) has become a mecca for public art. Fifteen to 20 feet high in some places it's covered in poignant graffiti and satirical comedy.  Huge murals depict the towns and villages from which Palestinians living in Bethlehem's refugee camp Aida have fled. Abu Ghosh, Beit Awn, Rafat ... They left home in the throes of war, expecting a short stay in UN emergency tents. WIthin three years the tents were replaced by clay and concrete.  Sixty years later there are schools, medical centers, grocery, antique and souvenir shops.  Vendors sell giant brass keys that used to open the doors of houses these refugees used to call home.

We were astonished and amused to see advertisements, too! Restaurant menus. Furniture stores. s. The Caritas Hospital promoting its excellent care. Sarcastic street signs proclaim "Wall Street" and "Apartheid Avenue." There are the requisite protest paintings. And then there's this little guy.  A cartoon character called "Handala," (accent on the first syllable) that has charmed this part of western Mesopotamia with its simple message of patience, resistance and resilience.  Handala is the creation of Naji Al Ali, an Arab Garry Trudeau, who used his art to core regional politics with acerbic intent. Handala's back is always to you.  His face searches his homeland.  "I drew him a child who is not beautiful; his hair is like the hair of a hedgehog who use hs thorns as a weapon," writes the late Naji Al Ali.  "He is barefooted like the refugee camp children … His hands are clasped behind his back as a sign of rejection at a time when solutions are presented to us the American way."

Handala "was born" ten years old Al Ali says. That's how old the cartoonist was when his family fled their town of Ash Sharjara to the Ein Al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon. Al Ali never shows us Handala's face; the cartoon won't turn around until he returns to Palestine. "When he returns, Handala will still be ten," says his creator, "and then he will start growing up." 

You'll be interested to know that the wall is about 60% complete. They say it will be 700-800 km long when it's done. That's 450 to 500 miles of wall in a country less than 300 miles long. Where do the extra 200 miles go? They wind in and out of towns, up and down hills, and ring circles around refugee centers. The wall runs through a gas station along its route, leaving the pumps on one side and lanes for cars on the other.  There are homes sliced in half. It's quite a feat of engineering. 

Naji Al Ali never saw the wall. Nor did he see Handala grow up -- not just because of the ongoing occupation. Al Ali was assassinated in London in 1987, just as the first "shake off" began. His little hedgehog-haired pencil drawing now stands sentry along the wall, as if waiting at a gate for an invitation.

More than a tour

We were enjoying nouvelle Palestinian cuisine at Jerusalem's American Colony Hotel when the text came from Huda.  "The checkpoint was horrible."

Silence descended on the table.

We'd spent the day together with Huda.  She was our interpreter and guide.  She'd set up our appointments for the day.  A teacher and interfaith activist, Huda was our friend and a core member of our team.  The checkpoint was horrible.

Huda, Palestinian, had to return home to Hebron that night.  Huda, Palestinian, was not allowed by Israeli law to spend the night with in Jerusalem without a special permit. It took three hours that Tuesday night for her to get through the check point between Jerusalem and Bethlehem -- crossing with thousands of workers returning at the end of the work day.  For years Palestinians crossing into "Area A" have had to take cars, cabs or public busses to a wall of chain link fences, then on foot get channeled like cattle through mazes of gates (picture a Disney-prison entrance), show identity papers and answer questions about who what where when and why, and once processed, then walk, or find wheels on the "occupied" side to finally get home.  It's a commute from hell.  A red sign posted on approach to the check point warns the that "The Entrance For Israeli Citizens Is Forbidden, Dangerous To Your Lives And Is Against The Israeli Law." (I didn't invent the capitalizations.)

Area A at checkpoint

Buried in newspaper articles on the Israeli occupation of Palestine are references to the checkpoints and concomitant indignities, but as any story to which one has a personal connection, it really hits home when your friend is subjected to a social injustice.

I get to be in Jerusalem for almost two weeks on a study tour with members of the Esalen Institute's Center for Theory and Research and TRACK TWO: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy. We are immersed in questions of the Abrahamic family and the role religious actors play in conflict resolution. Two weeks is not a long time to absorb the complexities and nuances of the people on this land but we're doing our best by scheduling jam-packed days of looking and listening. Huda is key to making this happen.

Beyond "fixing" our journey she is on a remarkable journey of her own these two weeks.  Like me she is one of Esalen's minority Muslim devotees. Several times she's been to Esalen's piece-of-paradise campus in Big Sur, California.  But it's 20 years since she's been to Jerusalem or Ramallah -- only 25 minutes as the dove flies from Hebron. These past three days she's seen the exclusive for-Israelis-only highways and the "separation" wall that cuts through townships in person for the very first time.  She was thrilled to return to Jerusalem's famous Damascus Gate; she bought us tea where she used to sit with her grandfather at a street corner cafe nearby.  She brought us to her mother's favorite bakery where the aroma of anise on a special pastry left her eyes shimmering with tears. "She used to buy those for us every week."

According to Abraham Maslow, the great social psychologist who spent time at Esalen Institute in the 1960s, only about two percent of the human population has the luxury of wrestling with the higher values of social justice, individual wholeness, and self-expression. The rest wrestle with finding food, clothing and shelter.  Huda's reality bridges those worlds.

Social madness like checkpoints, walls, and identity cards, is not sustainable. We're not in a brave new world -- not yet. And here, on the western edge of Mesopotamia, Huda is one of a growing number of Palestinians and Israelis that we are meeting who are determined to apply the luxury values of the two percent (self-awareness and social justice) while they stand with thousands of others who are dazed in the maze of a checkpoint, waiting at the bottom of the pyramid to put food on the table for their families.

Actually, this is a letter from South Orange, New Jersey.  January 14, 2013.  First day of classes this semester at Seton Hall University where I am teaching Documentary Film again.  It's a genre study course; a look at the history of this kind of filmmaking, from the silent black and whites of Robert Flaherty and Leni Riefenstahl to Thor Heyerdahl's "Kon Tiki," CBS Reports news docs, cinema vérité, and the mixed media films we see today.

We began today with a conversation about relevance.  Why do we watch these films? Why do we care? What can we learn?  What does, for example, Michael Moore's 2002 Academy Award winning "Bowling for Columbine" tell us about ourselves, our society, the events of 1999 and the events of December 21, 2012?

Granted, Moore wanders in the course of this two-hour film; some of his vérité seems to me vain and gratuitous.  He is charming.  Seeing his approach to journalism (soft opening leading to ambush) is useful for students of filmmaking as well as for viewers to appreciate the art.  And were I his editor 13 years later I would cut some of that and delete some redundancies.

On the other hand I wouldn't touch the clean, cold reality of the security camera footage inside Columbine High School.  Four squares of screen with the 9-11 audio actuality for extended time, drawing viewers in to the heartless horror of the event.

I wouldn't alter his breezy interview with James Nichols, the brother of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols.  Our home grown terrorists.  Moore never says a word of condemnation; the conversation does it all.

And his montage homage to Robin Williams' use of Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" ... spectacular.  My hands went involuntarily to prayer position: Please, Omnipotence, forgive our awful arrogance, our interference with other nations' birth and growth; forgive the death and carnage we Americans have caused in Kosovo, El Salvador, Iran, Japan ... My heart was racing at the end of that section.  I wonder: were my students so viscerally affected?

We discussed one of his recurring themes: we live in a society blanketed in fear, courted with fear, married to fear.  What are the benefits of a fear-based society?

Control, they said.
Increased consumption.  (Shop, President Bush told us.)
Capitalism
Conformity

(An alliteration!  I commended them.  I could write a book with your analyses!)

Brainwashing.

Ever hear of 1984 or Brave New World?

Maybe I won't write a book.

But I will write a blog.

They are wise, these young men and women.

And I want to share their wisdom weekly.

Dateline: September 19, 2001, Newark Star Ledger

What I wrote a year ago remains all-too-relevant today. On the 10th anniversary I am proud to have generated a great team and implemented a powerful step toward reconnecting the human family: www.911Walks.org

Date: 2001/09/19 Published in the Newark Star-Ledger, New Jersey's largest daily newspaper

We are Americans, too

Arab community and Islam are not to blame for attacks
By ANISA MEHDI

I sat on the left side of the NJ Transit train escaping New York City that Tuesday. Like so many of us, I needed to see the smoking towers with my own eyes to shake the disbelief from my senses.

Commuters, ordinarily strangers to one another, talked all the way home. The man next to me and I shared our astonishment and sorrow, wondering what the horrible events might portend. He asked why I had gone to New York that morning, and I said that, ironically, I was producing a television documentary aimed at helping Americans understand Islam better. He shook his head grimly and said, "This is going to help."

I asked why he thought everyone was pointing blame at Muslims at a time like this. "Racism," was his simple and precise response. I trembled involuntarily.

You can't tell I am Muslim just by looking at me. I do not cover my hair. My eyebrows are waxed back to dark, defined, dramatic lines, that don't shout, "I'm an Arab!" Not anymore.

Gone are the painful days of a schoolgirl called "terrorist." No one asks about the camels in my yard anymore, or about the bomb in my backpack. My friend's parents can't forbid me to play with them because now I'm grown up. Not that I ever was a threat. I was just a kid who happened to have a different background, trying to peacefully share the same American playground as everyone else.

I grew up in Queens, and there, as anywhere in the metropolitan area, people of Arab, South Asian or homegrown Muslim roots learned to steel themselves against prejudice.

Until last Tuesday I'd forgotten how much armor I'd been wearing in emotional self-defense. What started in school evolved into decades of explaining oppressed people's frustration in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iran. I'd get the evil eye when I suggested that maybe people in other countries might not see our government as the same "good guy" we may consider it to be.

But Sept. 11 shattered my shields and silenced my historical clarifications. Nothing explains this. Nothing justifies this outrageous attack. We are all horrified beyond expression at the evil we have witnessed. This assault is on upright people everywhere: Muslims, Christians, Jews, people of other faiths and people of no faith.

I join Muslims all over the world recoiling in disgust that anyone could remotely associate this brutality with Islam. With Arab-Americans I weep for the children of Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq who have already suffered extreme deprivation and stand now to suffer even more. I weep for the young Americans who will be taunted and ostracized, as I once was, for crimes they would never commit.

Americans, all of us, are stunned by this act of violence.

Yes, it's imperative to find the guilty parties, try them, convict them and punish them. But it's also imperative that we do not blame the innocent and curse a whole community unfairly. The world is home to 1 1/2 billion Muslims - an estimated 7 million in this country. The overwhelming majority are good, decent people.

Islam is a faith based on peaceful submission to the will of God. Muslims are commanded to respect the faiths of others. We are instructed to do what is good and avoid what is evil. Chapter 35, verse 10 of the Quran says: "If any do seek for glory and power, to God belongs all glory and power. To him mount up all words of purity. It is he who exalts each deed of righteousness. Those that lay plots of evil, for them is a penalty terrible; and the plotting of such will be void of result."

Islam allows no excuse for the killing of innocent people.

So why are some Americans reacting so forcefully against Muslims? To take blind vengeance on Muslims or Arabs is another kind of evil that we, as Americans, have been fighting for decades. That evil is bigotry, so starkly stated by my fellow commuter in the shadow of the smoke last Tuesday.

Bigotry and racism won't help: not locally, not globally.

It will take years, perhaps generations, for all the emotional and political dust to settle from the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. For Muslims the pain and politics are multilayered. We have not only suffered the loss of loved ones but also are suddenly suspect - guilt by association. Numerous acts of violence against Muslim businesses have been reported around the country. Mobs have menaced mosques; women in traditional Islamic dress have been beaten. Many shudder with the knowledge that their homelands may soon come under attack.

I am heartened by what I've seen in many New Jersey towns: calls for solidarity among all our diverse communities and measured military response. The guideposts for action are in our great Constitution and the prayerful words of "America, the Beautiful": "Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law."

What your Muslim and Arab neighbors, your doctors, your students and classmates, coffee-shop owners and gas station attendants need now is to be embraced, not rejected. We are not the "them" or the "they" that did it. We are part of "us." We stand with other Americans. Together we can build a more stable and understanding tomorrow.

###

Groundswelling

On September 6 an inspired audience sat in the Greene Space at WNYC, as Valarie Kaur and fellow panelists Hussein Rashid, Ari Wallach and Beth Zemsky laid out a foundation for a hopeful new social movement for the 21st century. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re already pumped, primed, and part of it … Certainly the 9/11 Walks project embodies it … Auburn Seminary, hosting of the event, took the brave step of naming it something: “Groundswell.” Kaur is the project director as it is conceived by Auburn.

The event was an opportunity for the audience, mostly from the “progressive left,” to learn how to make something of “collective intentional action,” as Zemsky, a social change strategy expert explained. It was a chance to c

onsciously frame a conversation for the future that goes beyond “rights” and “tolerance” to an age of welcome and partnership. It is a time for turning “campaigns” into lasting aspirational world views. It is also a time to include faith.

“Our generation, the Millennials,” said Kaur, “doesn’t see ourselves as black or white, Asian or American, Muslim or Sikh, straight or gay.” (I, who am of another generation with more years here deeply appreciate that sentiment, yet I wonder, who DO they see? We all see someone. Is it possible simply to see character and qualities like honesty, honor, intelligence and humility?)

I went to the microphone at the appointed time, and spoke of the 9/11 Walks. ”We are one way to connect with another person. we are decentralized. We ask people to ‘see no strangers,’” I said, referencing key points made by Hussein, Wallach, and Kaur respectively. ”And we are motivated by the enlightened longings and bold visions expressed here tonight. But we’re responding to one thing more that hasn’t been mentioned. Fear. An underlying fear of another, the other, existing today that makes all of our efforts essential. Fear of Muslims, fear of “crusaders,” fear of terrorists, fear of drones and fighters jets, fear of cyberattack, fear of occupation, fear of physical and cultural annihilation, fear of flying, fear of worshipping false idols, false leaders, and false pretenses. We, the 9/11 Walks, are taking our small steps as an act of hope and courage to make a mark of kindness on the face of fear. What else do YOU see as possible. What else can people do, what else can we do to face and diminish fear?”

One good answer was to make sure to tell your story to another and to hear the other’s tale, too. That makes the other person multi-dimensional.

Another good answer was to keep hope and your aspirational world view front and center.

What do YOU think we can do? We are already on this Walk together … Share what you think.

In synagogue speech, Anisa Mehdi recalls historic ‘compatibility’|

Originally published in the New Jersey Jewish News, March 30, 2011

Muslim journalist: ‘Use our common ground’

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

March 30, 2011

A Muslim journalist called on a Jewish audience in Livingston to “use our common ground as Muslims and Jews to make something positive in history out of something others will certainly use to spew hate and fear.”

Anisa Mehdi, founder and president of Whetstone Productions, a New Jersey-based production and consulting company, was guest speaker at Temple B’nai Abraham on March 22.

In an hour-long address, followed by a half-hour question-and-answer period, the award-winning reporter and filmmaker suggested that Judaism and Islam, as well as Jews and Muslims, had much in common despite centuries of hostility.

“Back to the basics,” she said. “Adam, Noah, Joel, Jonah, Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Isaiah, Elijah — all of these are considered prophets of Islam to Muslims and they are all mentioned in the holy book, the Koran…. We share values of education and respect for our parents, giving charity, and fasting.

“Islam, like Judaism, is a system of laws and rules — some of which we wrestle with, some of which we take at face value, and some of which we need to reinterpret so they are relevant to today,” she added. “The Protestant Reformation took a long time and was very bloody. I’m not sure this will be any different.”

Venturing into what she called “tricky territory,” Mehdi spoke of historic violence between Jews and Muslims.

“We have the right things and the profound faith that we share, but we also have very complicated politics, and these are the things that need to be discussed,” she said. “We have a long history of compatibility.”

She referred to the “great poetry, mathematics, exploration” by both Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain, as well as persecution and banishment by the Catholics during the Spanish Inquisition.

With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks coming up in September, she suggested a new Muslim-Jewish alliance in America “to create a productive future. We need friends,” she said.

“We can use your support because you know what it is like to be persecuted and to be a minority that is unfairly targeted.”

After her talk, Mehdi fielded questions about what some audience members suggested was a dearth of moderate Muslim voices.

“My heart breaks when I hear the anti-Muslim sentiment in this country,” said one woman in the audience. “Why aren’t there more moderate Muslims speaking out against some of the things that fundamentalists do and say?”

“Why does it seem like we don’t hear from these moderate Muslims?” interjected Rabbi Clifford Kulwin. “Is it that we are not hearing, or is it because it is not happening?”

“It is there and we’re not hearing it,” Mehdi insisted. “Every time there is a suicide bombing in Iraq on the Muslim side or in Israel, where Jews die, there are condemnations of that act of terrorism by imams and leaders of Muslim civic groups and individuals. They are automatically and regularly condemned, these acts of terrorism,” but mostly ignored by American media.

Later, in an interview with NJ Jewish News, Mehdi acknowledged that tension between Palestinians and Israelis “has been a biggie and will remain until there is a solution.”

“Will we ever see a solution?” she was asked.“Absolutely. I think it might be a two- or three-state solution with Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, not because of political differences between Hamas and Fatah, but because they are geographically separate — unless there is a giving of territory that connects Gaza and the West Bank.”

Her tone was optimistic.

“It will eventually get better. The Hundred Years’ War ended. We are now allies with Japan, even if the United States committed the worst act of terrorism and the only act of nuclear assault on this planet,” she said, referring to the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Anything is possible.”

Mehdi, whose reportage specializes in religion and the arts, has appeared on PBS’ Frontline, ABC News’ Nightline, and National Geographic Special. She is a resident of Maplewood and a flutist with the Livingston Symphony Orchestra.

SIDE BAR

Speaker’s family honored Thomas

One subject that was not raised at Anisa Mehdi’s March 22 appearance at Temple B’nai Abraham was a “courage in journalism” award her family presented to veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas.

The $1,000 prize was given to the 90-year-old Thomas at a Nov. 18 dinner organized by the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee.

“The story of Helen Thomas, like my father’s, is one of integrity, vision, boldness, and unflagging determination,” Anisa Mehdi said in an AADC release announcing the award.

The event took place six months after Thomas said in a videotaped interview at a Jewish American Heritage Month celebration at the White House that Jews “should get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Poland, Germany, and the United States. The comments cost the Lebanese-American reporter her job as a columnist for the Hearst Corp.

Mehdi’s family and the AADC presented Thomas with the 2010 M.T. Mehdi Courage in Journalism award after Thomas wrote that “I deeply regret my comments” and before a Dec. 2 speech in which she said the White House, Congress, Hollywood, and Wall Street “are owned by the Zionists.”

Asked by NJ Jewish News why her family presented Thomas with an award months after the correspondent made comments many considered anti-Semitic, Mehdi responded in a March 29 e-mail: “The Mehdi family honored Helen Thomas…in recognition of her long and laudable career in American journalism. Her personal comment at the White House Jewish Heritage Celebration last May does not invalidate 57 years of superb, professional journalism.”

Rabbi Clifford Kulwin of Temple B’nai Abraham said he had not been aware that Mehdi’s family had presented the award to Thomas.

“I don’t know if having this information ahead of time would have altered our decision to invite her,” said Kulwin. Nevertheless, he said, Mehdi “was informative, engaging, and absolutely thought-provoking. In any case, when we invite somebody to Temple B’nai Abraham to speak and share their views with us, we don’t require or expect that everything they say will be pleasing to our congregation. That is not how one learns.”

— ROBERT WIENER|

Anisa podcast

My March 1 keynote address for Women's History Month is now a podcast of Raritan Valley Community College. You can hear it here: Will the Revolution be Feminized? Arab and Muslim Women in the Public Sphere.