AL-Khansa’s Lament for Her Brother

In the evening remembrance keeps me awake,
and in the morning I am worn out by the overwhelming disaster that has befallen us.
In the case of Sakhr, and what youth is there like Sakhr to deal with a day of warring and skillful spear-thrust?


And to deal with tenacious opponents when they transgress,
so that he can assert the right of someone on whom oppression has fallen?
I have not seen his like in the extent of the disaster caused By his death, either among djinn or among men.
Truly strong against the vicissitudes of fortune and decisive in affairs, showing no confusion.


At times when people were suffering hardship most generous
In his endeavors towards those who sought help or towards
Neighbors or to his wife.
Many was the guest who arrived by night or the man who was
Seeking protection, peoplewhose hearts were alarmed at
Every sound.
He treated such people kindly and made them safe, so that
Their state was free from every pressing need.


Ah, O Sakhr, I shall never forget you until I part from my
Soul and my grave is cut.
The rising of the sun reminds of Sakhr, and I remember
Him every time the sun sets.


But for the multitude of people around me weeping for their
Kin I would have killed myself.
All the time I see the woman grieving for her dead child
And the woman wailing over the death of her husband on a day
Of misfortune.
Both of them weep for their lost ones in the evening of the
Day disaster befell them or after that.
Yet they are not weeping for the like of my brother; but I
Console myself with the example of those who bear grief
Patiently.


On the day that I parted from Abu Hassan Sakhr I said
Farewell to my pleasures and my cheer.
Alas for my sorrow for him; alas for the sorrow of my mother!
Does he really spend the morning in the grave and spend the
Evening in it?

Jabotinsky's ghost
Beyond the war in Lebanon lies the ultimate question of Israel's coexistence with a Palestinian state. To confront it, Ehud Olmert knows he must break with the political tradition into which he was born.
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft | August 13, 2006

EVERY DAY BRINGS more grim news of the conflict in Lebanon and Israel, with a mounting death toll from Katyushas and F-16s. But Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, knows that beyond this conflict with Hezbollah is another, still more existential one with the Palestinians, and that this war in Lebanon only postpones-though it makes more urgent-the deal he must one day make.

Olmert also knows better than most that in the background is the climax of a different long struggle, more than 80 years old now, for the soul of Zionism. It is a struggle in which he-much more than Ariel Sharon, his immediate predecessor and the father of the strategy of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank-has an acute personal interest.

Like his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, Olmert was born into the political tradition known as Revisionist Zionism, founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky. A brilliant and intensely controversial figure, Jabotinsky split the Zionist movement in the 1920s, preaching a ``Greater Israel," with a Jewish majority outweighing the Arab population, to be won by force and guarded, in his famous phrase, by an ``Iron Wall." In the words of the former State Department adviser Aaron David Miller, Olmert is ``one of Likud's princes from a prominent Revisionist family." And if Olmert is a prince, Livni is a princess: Both are children of the Irgun, the armed rightists who followed Jabotinsky and fought both British and Arabs. Livni is one of the few prominent Israelis who can still quote from ``Jabo's" works, and her father's gravestone bears a map of that Greater Israel.

Jabotinsky did not live to see the creation of the Jewish state-which was not, in any case, the one he had dreamed of. And indeed the situation today is paradoxical. In his lifetime, Jabotinsky's appeal to his followers was his apparent realism and rejection of compromise, rather than the evasions and denial of other Zionists. As it turned out, Zionism found, like any other political movement, that realism itself means compromise, and that it may be better to accept what you can get rather than hold out for what you want. It will be a supreme irony if the ultimate compromise-and the final abandonment of Jabotinsky's ideal-is made by his direct ideological heirs.

. . .

No Israeli needs to be told about this astonishing man, whose shadow falls across the country to this day-his legacy is found in the names of sports clubs as well as the platforms of political parties-but even among those Americans who count themselves friends of Israel there are many who have scarcely heard of Jabotinsky. Born in Odessa in 1880, he became an ardent Zionist as a young man, and an immensely prolific journalist, historian, and novelist who wrote and spoke compellingly in Russian, Yiddish, German, Italian, Hebrew, French, and English. His translations (including the Sherlock Holmes stories) helped create the modern Hebrew language, and there are still Israelis who abhor his political legacy but admire his literary genius.

Before the Great War he had proclaimed Zionism not merely a political creed but a psychological remedy, to cure the Jews of the ``mutilations of history." In his blunt way, he said that degrading exile had made the Jews into ``Yids"; now they should become Hebrews again. In an article from 1911 entitled ``Against Excessive Apology," he admonished the Jews to stand up straight, to stop cringing and making excuses, and to tell the goyim ``to go to hell."

During that war, Jabo and his comrade Joseph Trumpeldor helped raise a Jewish Legion among the settlers in Palestine to fight with the British and drive out the Turks. While the campaign was underway in the fall of 1917, the London government (having also made inconveniently contradictory promises to the Arabs) issued the Balfour Declaration favoring the creation of a national home for the Jews, and after the war the British took charge of Palestine. Violence broke out almost immediately between Jewish settler and indigenous Arab, with the British ineffectually standing between, and continued until the ignominious British departure in 1948, not to say ever since.

In 1920, Trumpeldor died a hero defending his settlement against Arab attacks; three years later Jabotinsky founded Betar, whose name was a Hebrew acronym paying tribute to Trumpeldor. This militant youth movement was intended to instill discipline and pride, and maybe-so some Betarim hoped-to prepare for ``armed struggle." They marched in uniform, they forswore alcohol, and they kept fit. Their athletic tradition as well as their name survives in the Jerusalem Betar soccer club, which by no accident Olmert supports.

What distinguished Jabotinsky wasn't an enthusiasm for sports, but his forthrightness, or his intellectual honesty. From Theodor Herzl onwards, other Zionists had never been clear in public-or even in their own minds-about their objectives and how they could be accomplished. Herzl said more than a little optimistically that the existing inhabitants of Palestine would welcome the Zionists bringing progress and civilization.

What the Balfour Declaration had promised-at a time when Jews were still less than a 10th of the population of the Holy Land-was a homeland, not a state, and the mainstream Zionists under Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, were very cautious about using that word. Although they naturally wanted Jewish immigration to the land, they were cautious also when it came to speaking of numbers or majorities.

Not so Jabo. Soon after founding Betar, he proclaimed the Revisionist Zionist organization in opposition to Weizmann, with a platform of admirable clarity: ``The revival of the Jewish state with a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan." ``When I was a child," Livni has said, ``all I ever heard about was that we Jews have the right to a state on both sides of the Jordan." But Jabotinsky knew very well that the Jews would not be welcomed: ``The native population, civilized or uncivilized, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists," he said, ``and it made no difference whether the colonists behave decently or not."

For that reason it was ``utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs," Jabotinsky wrote, and the Zionists must be ready to use physical force: An ``Iron Wall" was needed to protect the enclave while they established a majority as quickly as possible.

. . .

All of this dismayed Weizmann. In a phrase still apt today, he reminded his fellow Zionists that Palestine was ``a sensitive world nerve," and he called the Revisionist program ``midsummer madness," wanted by ``nobody except a few partisans of Jabo." Why raise ``this bogey" of a state with a majority, Weizmann asked? ``Why arouse our enemies?"

He went further. Today only the bitterest enemy of Israel would call its government fascist, but that was just the accusation once made-by other Zionists-against the Revisionists. In 1929, Weizmann even told a friend, the New York lawyer Morris Rothenberg, that the Jewish extremists displayed ``Hitlerism in its worst possible form." (This was before Hitler came to power, let alone showed what horrors he would inflict on the European Jews, and Weizmann would scarcely have used this phrase later. But it was startling even then.)

For his part, although he shared much of the rhetoric of the contemporary radical right, Jabo always repudiated the fascist label. He deplored political assassination, and he said that ``it must be hateful for any Jew to think that the rebirth of a Jewish State should ever be linked with such an odious suggestion as the removal of non-Jewish citizens."

For the last 10 years of his life, Jabotinsky was banned from Palestine by the British authorities. He traveled the world, speaking, organizing, and warning of the approaching catastrophe in Europe, before he died of a heart attack at a Betar camp near New York in 1940.

But his soul went marching on. He had founded one more group, the Irgun Zvei Leumi, which turned toward increasingly violent means to make Palestine ungovernable and force the British out. In July 1946 the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people, British, Arab, and Jewish, a deed whose 60th anniversary was celebrated recently with the unveiling of a plaque by Irgun veterans. The following year, in reprisal for the execution of Irgun men, they hanged two kidnapped British soldiers, and in 1948 they shot dozens of Palestinian villagers. The leader of the Irgun was Menachim Begin, Jabotinsky's sometime disciple, then rival, and finally successor, who never extenuated what he and his comrades had done, or apologized excessively.

As the birth of Israel approached, something close to civil war broke out. The Irgun had chartered a ship they called the Altalena, Jabotinsky's old pen name, to run guns, but by the time it made its journey the Jewish state had been born and David Ben-Gurion, its first prime minister, demonstrated vigorously that there would be only one legitimate source of power by ordering his forces to open fire on the ship. To this day, ``Altalena" is a fighting word in Israel. Depending on who you are, it means a brave display of authority or-as Olmert, the son of an Irgun gun-runner, and Livni, whose father was another Irgun leader, were brought up to believe-a bitter betrayal.

Shortly after the creation of the new state, Begin visited America, and was fiercely denounced in a letter to The New York Times from 28 eminent Jewish liberals, among them Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Einstein. Begin was a ``terrorist, right-wing chauvinist," they said, whose movement was ``closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties."

It seemed that those words had been heeded. For more than a quarter-century-a time Olmert and Livni must still remember-Revisionists, Betarim, old Irgun hands, grouped round the Herut party, were not merely excluded from all power but well nigh proscribed and anathematized by the Labor establishment. In 1977, both Weizmann and Einstein must have turned in their graves when Begin, now leader of the Likud block which had absorbed Herut, at last came to power. Likud went on almost to replace Labor as the habitual party of government, under Begin, Yitzhak Shamir (once leader of Lehi, a group even more extreme than the Irgun), and Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father had been Jabotinsky's secretary.

. . .

With Olmert and Livni in power, it could seem that Jabo's legacy has triumphed. But has it? Apart from his dazzling intellectual gifts, and what even enemies conceded was a leonine personality, what had seemed most attractive about Jabo was his honesty and realism. Today it is his inheritors who have been forced to accept a new reality.

As Tzipi Livni says, the old Revisionist creed of a Greater Israel ``had no provisions for a Palestinian state, but instead envisioned our living together with the Palestinians in one state." That was on Jabotinsky's assumption that enough Jews would immigrate to create a permanent majority, on both sides of the Jordan. Now the Israelis face the prospect that they will quite soon be a minority even between the Jordan and the sea.

And so today's realism is very different from Jabo's. For all his ferocious response in Lebanon, Olmert knows that, and so does Livni. ``If we want to preserve a Jewish majority and still remain a democracy," she has said, ``giving up the territories is the only solution." As the nightly news reminds us, Israel is still in no mood for excessive apology. All the same, when Livni says, ``My goal is to give the Jewish people a home, and that's why I must accept a Palestinian state. I had a choice, and I chose two states for two peoples," she is saying goodbye to her father's dream, and to Jabotinsky's.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of ``The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma," which won a National Jewish Book Award.

Last Stand of the Lubicon
Dawn Hill
The Lubicon are a small band of Cree in Northern Alberta. They have been struggling to settle their land claim for over fifty years. The Lubicon were missed when the government Indian agent signed treaty 8 with area Indian bands, in 1899. The Lubicon were recognized as a distinct band in 1939. The Indian agent C.P. Schmidt recommended a reserve be established between Little Buffalo and Lubicon Lake. This reserve has yet to be realized. Perhaps the federal government wavered when oil was discovered in the area around 1940.

In January 1989 the federal government offered a final take-it-or-leave-it deal, which the Lubicon refused to consider because it gave them no voice in area development or enough money to become self-sufficient. The $45 million dollar compensation would not begin to cover the expenses of building a new community in the Lubicon area. The Lubicon also shutdown oil wells operating in their area. At the same time the federal government poured over 500 million into the development of logging. Diashowa, a large Japanese Pulp and Paper Co., the main beneficiary of McKnight, completed their large plant in 1990.

To date approximately $400 million dollars per year has been extracted in oil from Lubicon land.

In 1988 Bill McKnight, minister of Indian Affairs was awarded the "Western Diversification Portfolio" by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Millions of federal dollars were poured into the oil and logging industry in Northern Alberta. Corporations such as Diashowa, Norcon, and Petro-Canada received grants worth millions by McKnight. Premier Donald Getty was quietly leasing out land in Northern Alberta the size of Great Britain. This included territory claimed by Lubicons. The Lubicon charged McKnight with "conflict of interest" since he was "supposed" to be the "trustee" of the Lubicon and all Natives. The Courts system stonewalled any attempts by the Lubicon to either settle the claim or stop the rapid development. They withdrew their 50 year old claim and erected a blockade to stop the oil and logging in their territory. Five days later the armed RCMP tore down their blockade and arrested 27 people. Two days later a deal was struck between Premier Getty and Chief Bernard Ominayak. the "Grimshaw Accord" promised the Lubicon a 95 square mile reserve and compensation. The federal government refused to sign or negotiate the terms in the Grimshaw Accord.

Diashowa had initially agreed to stay out of the Lubicon territory until the land claim was settled. However, in November of 1990 two logging companies contracted by Diashowa, began to log on lands claimed by the Lubicon. In fact, they started to log through Chief Ominayak's trap lines.

On November 24, Buchanan logging camp was mysteriously set afire. Approximately $20,000 worth of damage was done. Within days Little Buffalo was crawling with RCMP officers. Thirteen Lubicons were charged with arson, and minor offenses. Hector Whitehead claimed the RCMP prodded and frisked him during questioning. They also told him if he reported them, they would, "smoke him."

These Lubicons are charged are pleading "immunity." Their court dates are April 29, May 6, May 29. Ex-Chief Walter Whitehead (charged with arson, mischief) told me: "… even if they lock me up, lock all 13 of us up, they won't stop us, because we are right, and they're just puppets for politicians, doing their dirty work. My children will fight, and their children. They can't keep locking us up." (January 21, 1991)

The Lubicon Chief has requested those interested in supporting the Lubicon write: Premier Getty, Minister of Indian Affairs Tom Siddon, Diashowa, Petro-Canada, and P.M. Mulroney. For more information please write: Friends of the Lubicon, 94 Pinewood Ave. Toronto, Ont. M6C 2V1

Dawn Hill is a Six Nations Mohawk, and a Ph.D. Anthropology Candidate at McMaster University, corresponding from Little Buffalo, Alberta

Dog Slaughter Inquiry Debated in Canadian Parliament

Back in the 1950s to late 60s and early 70s, the Canadian government ordered many dog teams killed. It has been suggested that up to 20,000 dogs were destroyed across what is known today as Nunavut and Nunavik. Inuit leaders allege that this was done in order to "encourage" families living [and sometimes starving] out on the land to settle in developing communities so the government could "take better care" of them. To this day that act, commonly referred to as "the dog slaughters" has remained a long-festering wound, the source of much bitterness and sadness.  

Makivik Corporation, established in 1978 to represent the political, social, and economic rights of the Nunavik Inuit, has been attempting to have the governments of Quebec and Canada address this action in the form of a public inquiry. In January 2005 a documentary film on the killings, "Echo of the Last Howl", produced by Makivik, premiered at a meeting in Kuujjuaq to an audience of Nunavik residents including elders whose dogs were slaughtered, regional organizations, Quebec and federal government officials and the media. This gathering was another attempt to get provincial and federal governments to undertake a formal inquiry into the extermination of a significant component of Nunavik Inuit traditions and identity.

In addition to the documentary, this latest Makivik attempt included the creation of a brief entitled "The Slaughtering of Nunavik Qimmiit" which was submitted to government officials. The Inuit Sled Dog International (ISDI) received a copy of this twenty-seven page, ten-thousand word document and Makivik has granted permission to reproduce it in its entirety, roughly divided into three parts, appearing in this and in the next two issues of The Fan Hitch.

The reaction of the governments of Canada and the province of Quebec to repeated requests (since 1999) for a public inquiry had been to deny them.  It appears their response to this 2005 effort is different. A March 11, 2005 article in the Nunatisaq News  reports that the Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Committee in Canada's parliament is discussing the issue. While the Director-general of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's aboriginal police services branch, Kevin Vickers, was willing to apologize if the RCMP did anything wrong, he said there was no evidence of any systematic slaughtering of sled dogs and that, according to the article, "The killing of Inuit sled dogs was a legitimate part of the RCMP's job, meant to protect communities from [ravaging dog] disease and danger."  Vickers’ testimony was said to have been based on interviews of six RCMP officers who were in the North during the dog slaughter era. However, other police paperwork from northern detachments at that time has been destroyed. The article went on to say that Vickers "admitted that his presentation was based on incomplete records."

http://homepage.mac.com/puggiq/V7N2/V7N2News.html

Now you can understand why I don’t see any easy way out...?
My own personal view favors Localization and diversity rather then one single universal Globalizing monocultural monolith and I do put my faith on the potentials and possibilities of human mimicry and its ability to imitate strategies that favors and promises growth and power and which may and often does end up seeding conflict and wars.  
And this is where religious sense comes into play, a inner religious sense and what ever encourages and leads to it…and the various risks such a position involves one into.

I think legitimacy derives its logic from social consensus, a group can block membership and it can do it using what ever commonality pattern it wishes to identify itself with…so the Logic lies in the internal choices they make, In fact after lots of thinking and trying to find some perspective which is meaningful in itself and at the same time value neutral and transcends conventional reality, I only ended up wondering whether the sort of approach/logic is not itself artificial, but also inherently exclusive and given to violence and force.

Before the 2003 U.S. Attack on Iraq


Let them have their oil.

Let them have their mosques and holy books,

and the sun gleaming on the face of a woman

kneeling for the fifth time to pray.

Let her have the baby in her arms.

Let her bring from market the lentils, the lamb,

the bouquet of cilantro, piquant and exciting,

that tastes like the dusty grain of house-walls

bordering the street.

Let her have the woven rug red and blue

beneath her real feet.

Let her have the pot, and the wooden ladle,

and the quiet, happy ticking of a clock she no longer

notices.

Let her have the common bird singing from the olive

and the sound of a door opening as it should.



And let me have my farm.

Let me have small clouds of breath

as I rise into the winter house.

Let me have a fallen maple for firewood

and the fire itself an eager bed of coals.

Let me have bowls of oatmeal and cups of tea

sweetened with honey

steaming on the enamel table.

Let me have my husband pulling on boots

to plant potatoes, while the moon

rests in the sign for roots.

Let me have brown eggs

still warm from the hens.

Let me have the common bird singing from the oak

and the sound of a door opening as it should.

But when it comes to implanting it gets bogged down to principles.

Ragnarok
by Micha F. Lindemans
Ragnarok ("Doom of the Gods"), also called Gotterdammerung, means the end of the cosmos in Norse mythology. It will be preceded by Fimbulvetr, the winter of winters. Three such winters will follow each other with no summers in between. Conflicts and feuds will break out, even between families, and all morality will disappear. This is the beginning of the end.
The wolf Skoll will finally devour the sun, and his brother Hati will eat the moon, plunging the earth [into] darkness. The stars will vanish from the sky. The c*o*c*k Fjalar will crow to the giants and the golden c*o*c*k Gullinkambi will crow to the gods. A third c*o*c*k will raise the dead.

The earth will shudder with earthquakes, and every bond and fetter will burst, freeing the terrible wolf Fenrir. The sea will rear up because Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent, is twisting and writhing in fury as he makes his way toward the land. With every breath, Jormungand will stain the soil and the sky with his poison. The waves caused by the serpent's emerging will set free the ship Naglfar, and with the giant Hymir as their commander, the giants will sail towards the battlefield. From the realm of the dead a second ship will set sail, and this ship carries the inhabitants of hell, with Loki as their helmsman. The fire giants, led by the giant Surt, will leave Muspell in the south to join against the gods. Surt, carrying a sword that blazes like the sun itself, will scorch the earth.

Meanwhile, Heimdall will sound his horn, calling the sons of Odin and the heroes to the battlefield. From all the corners of the world, gods, giants, dwarves, demons and elves will ride towards the huge plain of Vigrid ("battle shaker") where the last battle will be fought. Odin will engage Fenrir in battle, and Thor will attack Jormungand. Thor will victorious, but the serpent's poison will gradually kill the god of thunder. Surt will seek out the swordless Freyr, who will quickly succumb to the giant. The one-handed Tyr will fight the monstrous hound Garm and they will kill each other. Loki and Heimdall, age-old enemies, will meet for a final time, and neither will survive their encounter. The fight between Odin and Fenrir will rage for a long time, but finally Fenrir will seize Odin and swallow him. Odin's son Vidar will at once leap towards the wolf and kill him with his bare hands, ripping the wolf's jaws apart.

Then Surt will fling fire in every direction. The nine worlds will burn, and friends and foes alike will perish. The earth will sink into the sea.

After the destruction, a new and idyllic world will arise from the sea and will be filled with abundant supplies. Some of the gods will survive, others will be reborn. Wickedness and misery will no longer exist and gods and men will live happily together. The descendants of Lif and Lifthrasir will inhabit this earth.

Ragnarök does not mean "Twilight of the Gods"; that phrase is the result of a famous mistranslation. "Ragnarökr" or "Ragnarøkr" means "doom of the powers" or "destruction of the powers" (where "powers" means "gods").

Above the lone Parnassian steep; I love
To walk the heights, from whence no earlier track
Slopes gently downward to Castalia's spring.
Now, awful Pales, strike a louder tone.
First, for the sheep soft pencotes I decree
To browse in, till green summer's swift return;
And that the hard earth under them with straw
And handfuls of the fern be littered deep,
Lest chill of ice such tender cattle harm
With scab and loathly foot-rot. Passing thence
I bid the goats with arbute-leaves be stored,
And served with fresh spring-water, and their pens
Turned southward from the blast, to face the suns
Of winter, when Aquarius' icy beam
Now sinks in showers upon the parting year.
These too no lightlier our protection claim,
Nor prove of poorer service, howsoe'er
Milesian fleeces dipped in Tyrian reds
Repay the barterer; these with offspring teem
More numerous; these yield plenteous store of milk:
The more each dry-wrung udder froths the pail,
More copious soon the teat-pressed torrents flow.
Ay, and on Cinyps' bank the he-goats too
Their beards and grizzled chins and bristling hair
Let clip for camp-use, or as rugs to wrap
Seafaring wretches. But they browse the woods
And summits of Lycaeus, and rough briers,
And brakes that love the highland: of themselves
Right heedfully the she-goats homeward troop
Before their kids, and with plump udders clogged
Scarce cross the threshold. Wherefore rather ye,
The less they crave man's vigilance, be fain
From ice to fend them and from snowy winds;
Bring food and feast them with their branchy fare,
Nor lock your hay-loft all the winter long.
But when glad summer at the west wind's call
Sends either flock to pasture in the glades,
Soon as the day-star shineth, hie we then
To the cool meadows, while the dawn is young,
The grass yet hoary, and to browsing herds
The dew tastes sweetest on the tender sward.