Any questions this not so wise Palestinian should ask him?
Update:
Ok, I asked my own question after making some incoherent comment. I told him I found the way his book is being marketed frustrating--that he's being promoted as a voice in the wilderness and the only man of peace around. His attempt to tell a Palestinian narrative is being squashed and nipped and tucked to fit in the dominant narrative circulating in the US about Palestinian extremism. When the owner of the bookstore introduced him she said something to the effect that if we only have 100 people like him...Then what? There will be peace? So the issue is that the Israelis don't have a Palestinian partner! Wait! Where did I hear that one before?
I took issue with his talk which wasn't really about the book in any direct way but about Prophet Muhammad's journey to Jerusalem. The point he's getting at is that there is continuity of religious traditions, a continuity that we are blind to and that's why we continue to slaughter each other. But when it came to giving an example of how we are blind to it it was a story of Arafat shaking in anger when Barak asked him at the Camp David conference if he recognizes a Jewish claim to Jerusalem. What concerns me, as I tried to explain, is that the audience is going to understand what it already believes in: that the reason we don't have peace is that the Palestinians don't want peace and refuse to acknoweldge the "other." I also said that his talk is framing the conflict in theological and psychological terms, when it's about land, water, resources, and power. My final question was: Who are you addressing in this book?
Nuseibeh started his response to me by saying that he can see that I'm angry, which almost made me angry because I wasn't really angry. So I told him that I don't like that because now I'm going to be seen as the "angry" Palestinian while he's the "only good rational Palestinian." The fact that I was yelling that from the end of the room speaking out of turn didn't help my image.
Ok, you get the idea. Not a successful intervention. I still want to read the book because I want to see what exactly is he saying that may justify this framing. I'm also honestly interested in what he has to say.
He got only a few questions, which is interesting. There was the compulsory one, literally, "What about Hamas?" I liked that he didn't give the questioner what she wanted. He said that we need to remember that Hamas is not simply an ideology but human beings. Another question took issue with Nuseibeh's statement that Israel was established through force. He said that as far as he knew it was established as a result of a UN resolution and that it was attacked by Arabs etc. Before he answered him, Nuseibeh wanted to know if he really wanted to hear an answer or if he was being polemical. Nuseibeh's answer was that Israel, no matter how you slice it [my words not his], came into being through force regardless of who attcked first. He added that states usually come about through force and that he hopes that the Palestinian state will be the only state that will come into being through non-violence.
Ok. Enough mischief for one evening.
"Statistical studies showed that there is a huge increase in this sphere -- in beautification surgery," George Nasr, the bank's marketing manager, told Reuters. "This opens horizons. Clients included people disfigured by accidents and war and others simply looking to improve the way they look, he said. The bank has received more than 200 phone calls a day about the loan since the launch of an advertising campaign last week.
Nasr described looking good as part of Lebanese culture. "We like to look our best ... There are people who see this loan as their life raft," he said."
All I have to say about this is that borrowers should read the fine print, which states that if you fail to pay back the loan, the bank takes away your new nose. Or boob.
Un-Islamic Dress According to Iran's Fashion Police
This is a fence
Miss Mexico had to nix the dress she wanted to wear for Miss Universe pageant because it was deemed too violent and in poor taste. It is "belted by bullets and accented by sketches of hangings during Mexico's Roman Catholic uprising in the 1920s" in which tens of thousands people died. Among the images on the dress is a man facing a firing squad. The dress was chosen by a group of designers who defended it on the grounds that it represent Mexico's history and culture. Critics said it "glorified violence in a country were a battle between rival drug gangs has brought a wave of killings and beheadings."
Follow the Women in Beit Sahour
Some 17 people were killed in gruesome ways after that viewing, but only five deaths were linked to this group. The six accused, all in their early 20s, explained to the court that they had taken their victims outside the city after they had identified them. Then they stoned them to death or drowned them in a pond by sitting on their chests."
And what if you kill someone for being "morally corrupt" to find out later that he or she was a paragon of viture?
Rihab
Palestinian Minister of Culture Bassam al Salhi, left, during the opening of the Lettuce Festival, eating... you guessed it--lettuce.
One Israeli Jewish woman writes in YNet:
"The State of Israel chose to grant power to a religious-Orthodox minority, which determines the fate of the country's women, when it granted, by law, exclusive authority to religious representatives to rule on matters of marriage and divorce, where women almost never enjoy the upper hand. We must recall that those same rabbinical courts comprise men only; women can never be judges, even though every matter handled by the court involves women...
In our enlightened country, a Jewish man can marry another woman instead of his wife, as long as he provides a document that shows that his semen is adequate for making children, and then it can be said the problem lies with the woman. Then, the rabbis rule that as the woman is not fertile, the man can marry another woman."
No nice suit for Faye
The founder of "An Islamist eye for a woman's thigh" alerted me to Pelosi's skirt, which climbs when she sits to exactly 3 inches above the knee (more if she, god forbid, crosses her legs). Thanks to this tip, I'm suspicious now that the veil Pelosi donned yesterday was not a veil after all! But a chanel scarf to protect her hairdo from being messed up by windy weather! (ng was right!)
Shouldn't someone tell Nancy Pelosi she doesn't need to veil in Syria? (or Jordan, or Lebanon, or Palestine, or Tunisia, or Algeria, or Morocco, or Libya, or Egypt, or Kuwait . . . Not yet.
Minister Noureya al Sabeeh
