Yemen Quietly Being Killed
In this broad-ranging and incisive interview with journalist and filmmaker Safa Al Ahmad, she delves into her recent coverage of Yemen reflecting on the humanitarian disaster there, the various actors on the ground, and the gendered dimensions of covering this conflict.
Safa Al Ahmad is a Saudi freelance journalist and filmmaker. Her focus is the Arabian Peninsula, primarily Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Her first film ‘Al Qaeda in Yemen’ was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2012, and ‘Saudi Secret Uprising’ won best international investigative documentary at the AIB’s in 2014. Her essay “Wishful Thinking on Saudi Arabia and the Arab world post 2011” was published in the anthology Writing Revolution, winner of an English PEN award. – See more at: http://www.statushour.com/safa-al-ahmad.html#sthash.qdKbIRoR.dpuf
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Most Beautiful Comic Strip Ever Drawn
Nighttime was the right time for Winsor McCay, whose early 20th century comic strip about a little boy’s dreams proved forever that comics could be both mass entertainment and high art.
The trajectory of any new artistic genre—oil painting, the novel, video installation—is almost always to improve, or at least grow more inventive. Except in those rare cases when it might not. Edward Gorey, in one of his more esoteric opinions, once argued that cinema had reached its zenith before 1919. While it’s hard to agree, it’s equally hard not to concede the point at least a little once you’ve experienced some of that early riotous creativity. Another exception is the medium of newspaper comics, where two of the most towering peaks in the form date from before 1930: George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, the greatest tale of unrequited interspecies love and brick-throwing from any era, and Winsor McCay’s Nemo in Slumberland, possibly the most opulent feature of any kind ever to grace American newspapers and now available in an immense and immensely captivating Taschen edition, The Complete Little Nemo.
Nemo in Slumberland exists on a curious periphery of the cultural imagination; familiar enough for a charming Google Doodle but not quite for general awareness. Nemo is a flagrant favorite of many current artists from Alan Moore to Chris Ware to Neil Gaiman, but his broader impact is regrettably limited. There’s a 1989 Japanese animated feature collecting dust on VHS shelves. Tom Petty’s “Running Down a Dream” video borrows liberally from the strip. The name “Little Nemo” is often vaguely familiar even if its origins usually aren’t. So it’s difficult to call a $200 art book that boasts an Amazon shipping weight of 18.3 poinds a breakthrough for popular consumption. All that said, this is still the best opportunity to examine the strip literally since its original publication in the first decades of the last century, and given the relatively unknown quality of newsprint during the Taft administration, this may in fact be the best chance ever.
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A Revolution Devours Its Children
It takes about 30 minutes to drive from the teeming Cairo neighborhood of Faisal to what locals call “El Sijn”—Arabic for “the prison.” There are many in Egypt, but everyone seems to know the prison: Tora Prison, opened in 1908. It has housed a diverse assortment of the country’s dissidents, businessmen, Islamists, and statesmen—including the ousted president Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled Egypt for nearly three decades before his regime fell in the uprising that began almost exactly five years ago.
Since then, the upheaval hasn’t stopped, and it’s as much personal as it is collective. The country saw its first-ever democratic elections; another wave of protest over the rule of Mohammed Morsi, the Islamist president those elections brought to power; a military coup, led by then-Army Chief Abdel Fattah el-Sisi; and a reinstatement, under now-President Sisi, of the kind of authoritarianism protesters risked their lives to escape five years ago. The crackdown has ensnared liberals and Islamists alike, leaving the prison as a burial chamber for the aspirations of the revolution, in all their wide variety.
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Cartoon censorship in the Middle East
We’ve seen what happens when cartoonists try to tackle religious subjects in Europe but what about when they do it in the Middle East? One comic-book magazine in Lebanon did just that and quickly found itself on the sharp end of the law. Cartoonists have been getting into trouble since the early 18th century and this story brings that right up to date. Monocle’s Beirut correspondent Venetia Rainey reports.
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The Fate of a Joke in Lebanon
In the spring of 2010, three Lebanese comic-book artists were ordered to come to the Beirut headquarters of the Directorate of General Security, where the country’s censorship authorities are located. Omar Khouri, Hatem Imam, and Fadi (the Fdz) Baki were in their early thirties, and had known one another since they were kids. (I’ve known Khouri and Baki since then as well.) In 2007, they founded Samandal, a trilingual comic magazine based in Beirut, which became an important platform for Middle Eastern comic artists. “When we were first called in, we had no idea what was going on,” Khouri said. “We assumed that there was a problem with our publishing license or some missing paperwork.”
The three were told to sit on a bench and not to speak to one another. Then Imam was ushered into an office.
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“My Younger Sister Barely Remembers Me”
After spending three years in Jordan, detached from home and family, Somar was starting to get accustomed to life as a single man with minimum responsibility. “All I worried about in Jordan was my rent, but when I saw my sisters? My God! I realised how far removed from responsibility I was,” he told me. The journey started with reestablishing a connection with his sisters. “My younger sister barely remembers me, only through pictures she tells me”, he said in disbelief. Somar was committed to changing that reality.
The second big change Somar was learning to live with was the overwhelming size of Istanbul. Coming from a village where he used to know every family, he felt so small. He even said he already felt nostalgic to the simplicity of Amman and its cozy coffee houses. As he busily navigated the metro against the minaret-embellished cityscape, acknowledging he is one of the millions using public transportation daily, he trod along the start of what he now understood will be a long path ahead.
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Interiors: Art and war in Pat Barker’s “Noonday”
Early in “Life Class,” the first of Pat Barker’s three novels about a group of painters who meet while studying at the Slade School of Art, a young student named Paul Tarrant takes a girl to a music hall. Paul (based loosely on the British painter Paul Nash) prefers acrobats and jugglers to “one-act plays,” which “always struck him as being rather pointless—you’d no sooner worked out who the characters were than the curtain came down.” It’s a sentiment that Barker appears to share; she is best known for her “Regeneration” trilogy, set during the First World War, which follows the lives of several historical figures, among them the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and the doctor William Rivers, who worked with soldiers suffering from shell shock. “Life Class” and its sequel, “Toby’s Room,” initially seemed to be advancing in a parallel track, as Paul and his classmates—including Kit Neville, whose inspiration is the Futurist C. R. W. Nevinson, and Elinor Brooke, a distant analogue to the Bloomsbury-affiliated painter Dora Carrington—moved from their studies at Slade just before the First World War to the hospitals and fields at the front.
With “Noonday” (Doubleday), the most recent book, Barker breaks the pattern of her previous trilogy, shifting the action from the First World War to the Second. In “Toby’s Room,” Neville was already established as “the great war artist.” Paul, too, had made a name for himself with his war paintings, and Elinor’s work, focussing on themes less overtly war-related, was beginning to sell. When we return to these characters two decades later, in “Noonday,” Neville has become known mainly as a critic, Paul is considered the better artist, and Elinor—now married to Paul—has gained a serious reputation, and has paintings hanging in the Tate. As war artists, they all suffer from a “strange predicament, to be remembered for what everybody else was trying to forget.”
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Best Online Journalism & Storytelling 2015
Every year storytelling and journalism on the web gets better. For the past three years I have rounded up the most compelling examples of reporting online (here is 2014, 2013, and 2012). This year I had the good fortune to collaborate with Luis Gomez on this project.
This is a labor of love. Our hope is that by shining a spotlight on this important work, we can help you discover things you might have missed and that you’ll share them and support the journalists who made them possible.
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Ethical dilemmas in images of tragedies
If you looked across social media as news of the Brussels attacks unfolded, you would have seen that within minutes of the first reports of explosions at Zaventem airport, people were lashing out. At commentators for using the attack to make a political point. At Twitter for suspending the account of a Belgian expert on terrorism by accident. At a man who tweeted that he’d “confronted” a Muslim woman about the attacks. And plenty of the lashing out was at journalists, especially those contacting members of the public to see if images they had posted of the attack were available for re-use.
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The Challenge of Salafi Jihadists
The pre-emptive security operation against a suspected ISIS-linked cell in the northern Jordanian city of Irbid earlier this month was a rude awakening. That all members of the cell were Jordanians added to public anxiety. While praise of the security forces and Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID) came from all sides, starting with King Abdullah himself, a sense of unease permeates throughout the kingdom. This was the first armed confrontation with ISIS, called Daesh locally, within the kingdom’s borders. Until the Irbid incident, Jordan’s efforts to fight the militant group were centered on its participation in the U.S.-led international air campaign in Syria.
Since the GID published a terse statement on March 2 explaining the circumstances of the Irbid operation, a news blackout was imposed by the State Security Court general prosecutor. Those who were arrested in the operation were being interrogated. The little information that was made public indicated that members of the cell had machine guns, explosive vests, and were planning to hit unspecified civilian and military targets. An earlier raid resulting in the arrest of 13 suspects probably led to information about the militant cell. It was not clear if this cell was linked directly to ISIS or was composed of members sympathetic to it.
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Journey to Jihad: Why teenagers join ISIS?
In 2009, a fourteen-year-old Belgian named Jejoen Bontinck slipped a sparkly white glove onto his left hand, squeezed into a sequinned black cardigan, and appeared on the reality-television contest “Move Like Michael Jackson.” He had travelled to Ghent from his home, in Antwerp, with his father, Dimitri, who wore a pin-striped suit jacket and oversized sunglasses, and who told the audience that he was Jejoen’s manager, mental coach, and personal assistant. Standing before the judges, Jejoen (pronounced “yeh-yoon”) professed his faith in the American Dream. “Dance yourself dizzy,” a judge said, and Jejoen moonwalked through the preliminary round. “That is performance!” Dimitri told the show’s host, a former Miss Belgium named Véronique de Kock. “You’re gonna hear from him, sweetie.”
Jejoen was soon eliminated, but four years later, when he least wanted the attention, he became the focus of hundreds of articles in the Belgian press. He had participated in a jihadi radicalization program, operated out of a rented room in Antwerp, that inspired dozens of Belgian youths to migrate to Syria and take up arms against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Most of the group’s members ultimately became part of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, joining more than twenty thousand foreign fighters engaged in the conflict in Syria and Iraq. Today, ISIS controls large parts of both countries. With revenue of more than a million dollars a day, mostly from extortion and taxation, the group continues to expand its reach; in mid-May, its forces captured the Iraqi city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and, last week, they took control of Palmyra, in Syria.
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Molenbeek’s gangster jihadists
In the poor inner-city areas of Brussels, deprivation, petty crime and radicalisation appear to have gone hand in hand. The BBC’s Secunder Kermani has been finding out how drinking, smoking cannabis and fighting – combined with resentment towards white Belgian society for its perceived discrimination against Arabs – prepared some young men for a role as fighters in Syria, and terrorists in Europe.
Molenbeek is a place full of contradictions.
It’s just a few minutes away from the heart of the European Union, but this densely populated district of Brussels has 40% youth unemployment.
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Egypt’s dirty wheat problem
CAIRO – When Egyptian lawyer Ahmed Gad stepped out of a cafe on the outskirts of Cairo to take a call last October, a gunman on the back of a motorcycle trained a semi-automatic rifle on him and opened fire.
Three bullets ripped into Gad’s right side before his attackers sped off.
Gad, who survived, said the men were trying to silence him for his attempts to expose corruption in one of Egypt’s most important commodity markets: wheat.
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Hungary: At the Cutting Edge
As more European countries follow Hungary’s lead and fence their borders against irregular migration, Maria Margaronis explores Hungarians’ responses to the refugee and migration crisis.
“There’s real anxiety here that comes from ignorance, but also an insistence on seeing the refugees in the worst possible light.”
Listen to the radio story.
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Choosing the Hard Way Out of the Region
Somar Kreker is a movie junkie. He loves cinema for the space it allows people to reimagine the worlds in which they live. As a teenager, he dreamt of opening a film club in Damascus, where stories of ordinary and extraordinary lives could be brought to the big screen. But of all the possible impediments interrupting his vision, an Arab Spring erupting in the West Asia North Africa region and in Syria specifically, was the least expected.
Without warning, Somar found himself witnessing his fellow countrymen and women redrawing their lives, not in scripts, but directly in front of him, in the streets of Al Zabadani, Al Hameh and Qudsaya. The son of proud pan-Arab nationalists, raised on tales of revolutionary Arab leaders like Gamal Abdul Nasser, Somar joined the ranks of peaceful demonstrators, learning — city after city — to see his country in a new light.
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A Decade of Despair in Iraq
An op-ed by author Ahmad Saadawi, writer of the novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, published in March 2013
An Iraqi saying claims that those who endure one day just like the next have been dealt an unfair hand in life. During the 1990s, when I was in my 20s, this saying was frequently invoked. In those stagnant times, it seemed nothing ever changed, so much so that looking back, I can barely differentiate between 1997 and 1998.
Those days came to an end 10 years ago today, when United States forces invaded Iraq. The contradictions that had been contained under Saddam Hussein burst forth into the open. Lives were uprooted in the process. It is no surprise that, a decade later, some people find themselves yearning for the ’90s.
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The Truth About Syria
CNN Senior International Correspondent Clarissa Ward and Producer Salma Abdelaziz went undercover in rebel-held Syria, where few Western journalists have gone for more than a year. They worked with Syria-based filmmaker Bilal Abdul Kareem on a series of exclusive reports. Warning: Graphic images.
On a hill overlooking Ariha, our guard Abu Youssef seems to have located the jet in the sky and is following it with his eyes. “Russian planes,” he says.
Suddenly he ducks. The sound of the explosion rings out with a “thwoomp.”
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Annie Dillard’s Impossible Pages
It’s unclear what to call Annie Dillard, where to shelve her. Over more than 40 years, she has been, sometimes all at once, a poet, essayist, novelist, humorist, naturalist, critic, theologian, collagist and full-throated singer of mystic incantations. Instead of being any particular kind of writer, she is, flagrantly, a consciousness – an abstract, all-encompassing energy field that inhabits a given piece of writing the way sunlight slings to a rock: delicately but with absolute force, always leaving a shadow behind. This is an essential part of what it means to be human, this shifting between the transcendent self and the contingent world, the ecstasy and the dental bill. We all do some version of it, all the time. But Dillard does it more insistently. This month, she publishes “The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New,” a collection of pieces that spans her entire variegated career.
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Growing Stress on Jordan
In 2013, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Contingency Planning Memorandum “Political Instability in Jordan” warned that the biggest threat to the stability of the Hashemite Kingdom stemmed from local grievances eroding the regime’s core tribal base of support. Although economic privation, the slow pace of reform, and a widespread perception of corruption remain significant sources of popular frustration in Jordan, the palace has since vitiated its most potent tribal and Islamist domestic political opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood. But as the risk of domestic unrest has diminished, the potential for spillover from the Syrian conflict has grown, posing an increasing threat to Jordan.
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The Odyssey through the eyes of a Syrian
The Odyssey by Homer is an epic tale featuring moody gods, siren songs and even a cyclops — and in the mind of Richmond Eustis, it was once a fantastical treat.
But when the literary professor assigned the book to a group of students in Jordan, his framework changed. His pupils, asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories, saw their real stories reflected in the themes of death, danger and displacement.
Today, Eustis and one of his students, Isra’a Sadder, join guest host Talia Schlanger to share a new angle on the 8th century B.C. comic adventure.
Sadder says education and literature are her “only salvation”. She also shares what it feels like to lose home.
“It’s like your soul is heavy, and you are just a burden.”
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Award draws Amanpour comparison
CNN’s Nima Elbagir may not be a household name for most British television viewers, but the Sudanese journalist is making such an impact internationally with her fearless reports from Africa and the Middle East that she is being compared with the network’s veteran Christiane Amanpour, who shot to fame with her Balkans coverage in the 1980s.
Elbagir won an award for specialist reporting from the Royal Television Society and only narrowly missed television journalist of the year.
Her winning coverage was headed by a six-month investigation into people-smuggling from the Nile delta in fishing boats to Rome; undercover reporting of children for sale in Nigeria – she was offered two for $500; and an encounter with a mother and daughter who practise female genital mutilation.
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Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee
Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical. Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires. She grinned when she saw her first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose.
Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, but she decided to go by train from New York to Maycomb Junction on her fifth annual trip home. For one thing, she had the life scared out of her the last time she was on a plane: the pilot elected to fly through a tornado. For another thing, flying home meant her father rising at three in the morning, driving a hundred miles to meet her in Mobile, and doing a full day’s work afterwards: he was seventy-two now and this was no longer fair.
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Berlin Museum Tours Bridge to Refugees
Berlin – The Pergamon Museum is home to the famous Ishtar Gate, a monument of blue and white tile decorated with golden lions and daisies that was once the entrance to ancient Babylon. When Kamal Alramadhani, a 25-year-old Iraqi economics students, saw it for the first time this month, “I got goose bumps,” he said, pointing to his arm.
“It’s from Iraq,” he added quietly, through an Arabic translator. “My country.” A native of Mosul, Mr. Alramadhani studied economics at the University of Baghdad and came to Germany in October, part of a wave of asylum seekers that is stirring opposition here but also leading the government to look for ways to help the migrants adjust.
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History in Eyes of Bedouin Boy
The Jordanian movie Theeb has been nominated for a best foreign language film Oscar. It’s a beautiful, sweeping story set in 1916 in an area of western Saudi Arabia then known as the Hejaz. The film’s director, Naji Abu Nowar, says Theeb covers a pivotal moment in the region’s history.
“The First World War is kicking off … and the war is coming toward this area of Hejaz,” he tells NPR’s Kelly McEvers. “The British are … inciting the Arab tribes to revolt against the Ottoman imperialists. And so you’re on the brink of a massive change.”
The fall of the Ottoman Empire led to the borders of today’s Middle East being drawn. But rather than look at that moment from the perspective of Lawrence of Arabia, who famously helped organize the Arab revolt, or a grown Arab fighter, the film follows a young Arab boy. He’s the title character, Theeb; and like many in Hejaz at that time, he’s a Bedouin, or nomad. One day a British soldier comes to Theeb’s family tent looking for a guide to a well, and Theeb joins the trip across the desert.
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