Shooting the Arabs: Hollywood’s latest ‘bad guy’
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The ‘Intifadah’ comes to stage
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To Seem is To Be

Apr. 23-- Due to the success of her show’s initial run (Apr. 11-13) VERBA, Asheville resident, transgender socialite, and Scandals house performer will once again be moving her talents off the dance floor and into the blackbox theater for a run of a slightly revamped version of her newest multimedia one-woman performance piece To Seem Is To Be. The show will run Sat. May 3 (10pm) and Sun. May 4 (3:30pm); it will again be at 35below. Tickets are $7 before May 2 at Malaprops or the ACT Box Office or $8 at the door. Come again discount tickets can are offered for $1 with a ticket stub from a past performance and a friend.

Hop-scotching between theoretical manifesto and personal experience, To Seem Is To Be uses storytelling and drag performance to communicate the often humorous and sometimes disturbing realities of radical gender politics in the early 21st century. Informed by feminist performance theory and contemporary body art movements, the work forces the audience and the performer to interrogate culturally assigned meanings given to human bodies and body parts; the piece explores the social processes through which gendered performances are constructed and maintained. As well, the show explicates how performer and audience quickly normalize variations and changes in gender expression and/or sexual form in a social context. It creates a commentary about personal and social memory and how memory functions, often inadvertently perpetuating normative gender ideologies.

To Seem Is To Be incorporates slide projections and aural elements to accentuate the stories being told and to create a dense meta-text. To Seem Is To Be is a concert collaboration of dandiest philosophy, transgender theory, and queer-sexual politics resulting in a delightful cacophony of artistic expression.

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Shooting the Arabs: Hollywood’s latest ‘bad guy’

Apr. 17— If Hollywood does take up the story of blond, blue-eyed Private Jessica Lynch, there’s at least one man who won’t be optimistic about the film’s treatment of her Iraqi captors. Professor Jack Shaheen has spent 20 years cataloguing Tinseltown’s portrayal of Arabs in over 900 movies. He’s found that, with very few exceptions, Arabs are presented in the movies as “subhuman” and instable to a degree that the studios would no longer dare with any other ethnic group.

Shaheen’s new book, Reel Bad Arabs, compares the case of Pocahontas — Disney’s Native American animation, on which Native American groups were widely consulted in order to produce an acceptable portrait — with that of Aladdin, one of the Arab and European world’s most cherished folk tales, which features “hook-nosed Arabs” singing of their milieu: “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” This, as Shaheen doesn’t point out, is a story set in the Baghdad Caliphate, the most culturally powerful and one of the most enlightened polities of its time.

“The tragedy,” he admits, “is that we’ve begun to unlearn other stereotypes” — about Blacks, Jews, Native Americans. “But we haven’t with this one. And 9/11 took it to another level.”

So why is it still acceptable to slander the Arabs?

“The stereotype is embedded in the US psyche,” Shaheen explains. “I think it reflects American policy in the region. Politics plays a dominant role, especially with the wars.” Shaheen takes “the wars” back as far as the Iranian hostage crisis of the 1970s, pointing out that many people in Hollywood cannot distinguish between Arabs and Iranians.

Shaheen even thinks the dehumanization of Arabs in Hollywood can affect the US public’s attitude to war in Iraq. “For instance,” he says, “we hardly ever see Arab suffering. Look at the war coverage — it’s almost invisible. It’s almost as if the bombs are falling on empty buildings. And that’s been true historically, when every news report that comes out of Israel rightly shows Israeli suffering, but wrongly passes over Palestinian suffering. We have not allowed ourselves to empathize with Arabs or see them as being like us.”

The importance of all this, Shaheen says, is also felt within US borders.

“Many people think this is a harmless question of entertainment — it’s ‘only a movie.’ But the dangers are real, and I think the dangers are taking place right now with the denial of civil liberties to people who are being rounded up because they have Arab roots. And there’s no outrage at all about what’s taking place.”

By contrast, there is rage in abundance within the Arab world itself. “Arabs to whom I’ve spoken love American movies. But one fellow I spoke to in the United Arab Emirates told me that some of these films make him feel like he’s been physically hit in the stomach, that he wants to go out and throw up.”

Shaheen sees clearly who’s to blame for this situation — he talks of Arab Americans increasingly changing their names to disguise their ethnic background, of his own lectures being cancelled by groups fearful of a backlash in their community. “As long as the Attorney General and this administration continue to single out and profile Arabs in this country I see this increasing. I don’t see an end to it...

“I think there’s been a reluctance on the part of Arab Americans and American Muslims to become involved in the creative process. We live in an open society. I think if we were part of the creative process ... if we had a few Palestinian film-makers in America we’d see Palestinians presented in a better light. The lack of presence comes from a failure to recognize the importance of becoming involved in the process of shaping their own images.”

The lessons for the makers of Saving Private Lynch are obvious. Unless they want to become involved in a conspiracy of indifference which is stereotyping millions of people, Hollywood needs to reach out to the Arab community. The models are there; Shaheen himself worked as a consultant on the Gulf war thriller Three Kings, and Brad Pitt reportedly demanded a screenwriter with Irish Republican sensitivity rework the script for The Devil’s Own. Who knows? If they get it right, “Saving Private Lynch” could even prove a box office hit in the free and prosperous Iraq we’re all being promised.

Source: Guardian (UK)

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The ‘Intifadah’ comes to stage

By Beverly Andrews

London, England, Apr. 19 (IPS)— These days mark the start of one of Israel’s most important trials in years: the court martial of Jonathan Ben Artzi, nephew of former hard-line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is charged along with nine others with refusing to do his compulsory military service.

He, along with a growing number of young Israeli men, are taking a stand in protest at the role of the Israeli Defense Force’s activities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The problem of “refuseniks” (as they are called in Israel) is the theme of Julia Pascal’s latest play entitled Crossing Jerusalem. The play not only examines the reasons why many refuse military service, but also holds up a mirror to a society which is divided not only along the lines of Israeli and Palestinian, but in many ways against itself.

The play focuses on the character of Gideon, a handsome Israeli who is happily married and the father of a young daughter. But beneath this apparent calm lurks a soul still haunted by memories from the past. Memories of his own military service during Israel’s occupation of the Lebanon, a pivotal time in Israeli history when many felt that the role of the army radically changed forever.

Gideon faces the prospect of being called up yet again to serve, this time in the occupied territories. He is forced to confront the demons of his past.

In examining the life of this young man, Julia Pascal also looks at the divisions which exist in his family. Married to a beautiful Arab-Jew, Gideon has to face the constant disapproval of his European mother, a mother still haunted by the Holocaust and who in turn refuses to see the injustices which are taking place daily in her own land.

As she sells houses and apartments to new Jewish arrivals she refuses to acknowledge the fact that many of these homes were formerly owned by Palestinian occupants. A chilling and ironic parallel to the European past of many Israeli Jews.

Crossing Jerusalem was written by Julia Pascal in 2002. She states, “I spent most of 2002 writing this play, a year which has been the bloodiest in Israeli and Palestinian post-1948 history. This is not a drama documentary but a fiction rooted in the everyday lives of Israeli and Arabs during the second ‘intifadah’.”

“I decided to set the play in March before the Israeli occupation of Jenin, and when it seemed wrongly, that life could never be bleaker,” Pascal adds.

The remarkable thing about Crossing Jerusalem is that its focus is not solely on the effect of the current crisis on Israelis, but the play also looks at the plight of Palestinians.

Sammy, another character and friend of Gideon, owns the restaurant the family goes to in order to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of Gideon’s wife. Sammy, an Arab Christian, tries as best he can to avoid the present conflict. He cheerfully says to Gideon’s stepfather, when asked about his life: “I work, I eat, and I make love to my wife; for me life is good.”

It is not a stretch of the imagination to realize that Sammy’s seeming indifference to the current political turmoil is perhaps a defense mechanism constructed to allow him as best he can to carry on with his life.

His young waiter Yusuf is not so fortunate, an engineer student forced to end his studies with the closure of universities by the Israeli authorities. He has to constantly face the problem of trying to persuade his hate-filled brother against the pull of martyrdom. For Yusuf’s brother Sharif, all Israelis are legitimate targets since in his eyes they are all responsible for the hardships in his life.

But Pascal acknowledges that this kind of fanaticism exists on both sides in this extraordinary play, a fanaticism which stems from years of bitterness and entrenched political views.

She says: “The prime minister’s life was taken by a young man of my age who grew up not far from my playground. Indeed Yigal Amir, with his murderous idealism, resembles the members of the young generation living opposite who wrap themselves in the Palestinian flag and girdle their waists with kilograms of explosives to commit suicide in crowded shopping malls.”

Hate is not the only emotion, which these two communities share. Crossing Jerusalem also highlights the possessive chauvinism directed at women in their community.

In light of the apparently liberated lives that Israeli women live, Pascal argues that Israeli men’s attitudes are perhaps not that different from their Palestinian counterparts. Gideon erupts in rage at the sight of his wife innocently talking to Yusuf. He then proceeds to demand to know about every relationship she has ever had, making it implicit that her past behavior matters where his is considered irrelevant.

In a land soaked in blood, it becomes almost impossible to overcome this wall of hatred, a wall that has been built on the corpses of victims from both communities over generation.

This is a point the play makes when Gideon’s wife tries to help Yusuf and promises to give him money, money he desperately needs to get his brother out of the country, and in his mind save his life.

But this brief flicker of hope is extinguished as the two meet again at a local hospital where Gideon has been taken after having been fatally injured by a suicide bomber. That bomber was Yusuf’s younger brother. So, the cycle of hate continues, this time in a younger generation.

Crossing Jerusalem is one of the most balanced and thoughtful works on the current tragedy of Israel to have been produced in recent years. Its humanity extends to all its characters, but ultimately its message reflects the tragedy of that land and it is a message devoid of hope.

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