this is very disturbing...i am trying to figure out how a knife got into the courtroom to begin with.

Egyptians cry racism in woman's slaying in Germany

By MAGGIE MICHAEL – 19 hours ago

CAIRO (AP) — Thousands of Egyptian mourners marched behind the coffin of the "martyr of the head scarf" on Monday — a pregnant Muslim woman who was stabbed to death in a German courtroom as her young son watched.

Many in her homeland were outraged by the attack and saw the low key response in Germany as an example of racism and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Her husband was critically wounded in the attack Wednesday in Dresden when he tried to intervene and was stabbed by the attacker and accidentally shot by court security.

"There is no god but God and the Germans are the enemies of God," chanted the mourners for 32-year-old Marwa al-Sherbini in her hometown of Alexandria, where her body was buried after being flown back from Germany.

"We will avenge her killing," her brother Tarek el-Sherbini told The Associated Press by telephone from the mosque where prayers were being recited in front of his sister's coffin. "In the West, they don't recognize us. There is racism."

Al-Sherbini, who was about four months pregnant and wore the Islamic head scarf, was involved in a court case against her neighbor for calling her a terrorist and was set to testify against him when he stabbed her 18 times inside the courtroom in front of her 3-year-old son.

Her husband, who was in Germany on a research fellowship, came to her aid and was also stabbed by the neighbor and shot in the leg by a security guard who initially mistook him for the attacker, German prosecutors said. He is now in critical condition in a German hospital, according to al-Sherbini's brother.

"The guards thought that as long as he wasn't blond, he must be the attacker so they shot him," al-Sherbini told an Egyptian television station.

The man, who has only been identified as 28-year-old Alex W., remains in detention and prosecutors have opened an investigation on suspicion of murder.

Christian Avenarius, the prosecutor in Dresden where the incident took place, described the killer as driven by a deep hatred of Muslims. "It was very clearly a xenophobic attack of a fanatical lone wolf."

He added that the attacker was a Russian of German descent who had immigrated to Germany in 2003 and had expressed his contempt for Muslims at the start of the trial.

At its regular news conference on Monday, a German government spokesman Thomas Steg said if the attack was racist, the government "naturally condemns this in the strongest terms."

The killing has dominated Egyptian media for days, while it has received comparatively little coverage in German and Western media.

A German Muslim group criticized government officials and the media for not paying enough attention to the crime.

"The incident in Dresden had anti-Islamic motives. So far, the reactions from politicians and media have been incomprehensibly meager," Aiman Mazyek, the general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims, told Berlin's Tagesspiegel daily.

Egyptian commentators said the incident was an example of how hate crimes against Muslims are overlooked in comparison to those committed by Muslims against Westerners. Many commentators pointed to the uproar that followed the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-born Islamic fundamentalist angry over one of his films criticizing the treatment of Muslim women.

Abdel Azeem Hamad, chief editor of the independent Egyptian daily el-Shorouk, said that if the victim had been a Jew, there would have been an uproar.

"What we demand is just some attention to be given to the killing of a young innocent mother on the hands of fanatic extremist," he wrote in his column.

An Egyptian blogger Hicham Maged, wrote "let us play the 'What If' game."

"Just imagine if the situation was reversed and the victim was a Westerner who was stabbed anywhere in the world or — God forbid — in any Middle Eastern country by Muslim extremists," he said.

The Egyptian Pharmacists' Association called for a boycott of German drugs. The victim was a pharmacist.

According to numerous interviews in Egyptian local papers with el-Sherbini family, the man who stabbed al-Sherbini used to accuse her of being a "terrorist," and in one incident, he tried to take off her head scarf. Mourners at her funeral called her the "martyr of the head scarf."

Laila Shams, al-Sherbini's mother, told the el-Wafd daily that her daughter said she'd difficulty finding a job in Germany because of her head scarf.

"One (employer) suggested she remove her head scarf to get a job. She said no," she said.

Officials from a German Muslim group and the country's main Jewish group made a joint visit Monday to the Dresden hospital where the victim's husband is being treated.

"You don't have to be a Muslim to act against anti-Muslim behavior, and you don't have to be a Jew to act against anti-Semitism," said Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews.

when i bake, i do not measure how much i am using; rather, i informally just 'know' how much of each ingredient is needed. also, no one taught me how to bake so this is all rather experimental. i just know i do not eat animals or animals products, nor do i want to use sugar other than that which is naturally derived from the bananas and this recipe fulfills those requirements. i hope this works out for whoever tries this. this recipe yields two 1-pound loafs using a pan with 6 x 3.2 x 3.4 inches dimensions.

• 5 mashed up bananas (make sure they are very ripe--the more ripe, the sweeter which eliminates the need to add sugar or honey)
  
• 4 teaspoons of raw almond butter
  
• 3 handfuls of whole uncooked oats
  
• 1 jar (24 oz) of unsweetened apple sauce
• 1 1/2 teaspoons of flax seed (the seeds or the meal)
  
• 1 1/2 teaspoons of raw wheat germ
  
• 1 handful of vegan chocolate chips
  
• 1 handful of raisins
• 1 handful of sliced almonds
• a squirt of vanilla

note: there is a lot of fiber in this recipe (oatmeal, flax seed, etc) which helps regulate digestive health (read: regular and more healthy bowel movements). my mom eats this loaf with her morning coffee or tea because it keeps her 'regular.' just something to keep in mind.

The source of every disobedience, indifference, and passion is self-satisfaction. The source of every obedience, vigilance, and virtue is dissatisfaction with one's self. It is better for you to keep company with an ignorant man dissatisfied with himself than to keep company with a learned man satisfied with himself.

-'Ṣūfī aphorisms' By Ibn Ata Illah (ch 3 #35)

ya haqq.

it is always best to go to sleep each night dissatisfied with oneself rather than to feel that you have attained perfection. satiated folks are lazy folks--physically, politically, spiritually. those of us who remain dissatisfied about the state of the world and the state of our spirit are those of us most likely to do affect change. the dissatisfied man is the courageous man. the satiated man is cowardly--fearful of his own imperfections and the work needed for collective betterment.

after obama's election and inauguration, many people were satiated. this is the most dangerous political and spiritual condition. it is dangerous because we relinquish responsibility and are deluded by a self-imposed myopia. it is an easily exploited condition when we surrender to a corrupted savior culture where all of our hope rests with a man rather than our earnest actions and the mercy of our creator.

south african anti-apartheid activist steve biko once wrote, 'the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.' part of this 'accumulation' of the minds of the oppressed is the propagation of myth--specifically the myth of hollywood revolution in which systemic change is magically created with a few select special effects, witty dialogue, new agey cinematography ... all in the matter of an hour and 16 minutes. systemic change takes time and must be nurtured by our collective dissatisfaction with the present.

connect this as you wish to the july 4th festivities.

a friend sent this to me and i really appreciate his gesture because i am enjoying the aphorisms a lot.

take a listen at my pandora. my favorite song, 'place to be' is below:

'a nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.'- isabelle eberhardt (thanks DHMA)

nothing makes me happier than wandering across Allah's earth with my camera and notebook, documenting moments and places. give me a bag a sticky summer fruit, my cameras, some expired film, a notebook and a plane ticket. some people call me a hippie. they assume i wander because i don't know what i really want or where i want to be. simply, i am just a person that believes that despite the ugliness we witness each day, there is immense beauty in the places we never look. i want to find those places and those people.

the summer's soundtrack includes heavy doses up nick drake, sufjan stevens, the shins, death cab for cutie, third eye blind, and jose gonzalez --these boys sure can conjure up a wicked bout of nostalgia. away we go. i have about 12 rolls of film, 2 loans 35 mm minoltas, and i'll be in detroit as well as storrs (connecticut) this summer, with the possibility of seattle. photo, photo, photo.

The Project: Fallen Princesses

Goldstein wrote

These works place Fairy Tale characters in modern day scenarios. In all of the images the Princess is placed in an environment that articulates her conflict. The '...happily ever after' is replaced with a realistic outcome and addresses current issues.

The project was inspired by my observation of three-year-old girls, who were developing an interest in Disney's Fairy tales. As a new mother I have been able to get a close up look at the phenomenon of young girls fascinated with Princesses and their desire to dress up like them. The Disney versions almost always have sad beginning, with an overbearing female villain, and the end is predictably a happy one. The Prince usually saves the day and makes the victimized young beauty into a Princess.

As a young girl, growing up abroad, I was not exposed to Fairy tales. These new discoveries lead to my fascination with the origins of Fairy tales. I explored the original brothers Grimm's stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues.

h/t @ DHMA

my favorite:

h/t to nowarian:

The year is 2033, and the story goes like this:

Europe has become underdeveloped due to acute economic and political crisis while Africa has experienced thriving development.

Olivier, an unemployed engineer, and Pauline, an unemployed teacher, are struggling to scrape by in France. They decide to migrate to the United States of Africa but are denied entry visas, and so try to sneak in by way of a smuggler.

Their lives are turned upside down as they face the grim realities of illegal immigration — arrest, detention, threat of deportation, economic exploitation, etc.





I don’t need to tell you how badly I want to see this film. It seems like fairly straight-forward satire, part of a table-turning “what if?” tradition of storytelling, but I’m still fascinated. Has anyone out there watched it?

One YouTube commenter points out that this scenario is already becoming reality, as many Portuguese wait overnight at the Angolan embassy for papers — but somehow I doubt my olive-toned bredren are being roughed up by Luandan police on arrival.

h/t to shadow of the bridge

“I choose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America—poverty, racism, discrimination.” —Gordon Parks

from the national institute of mental health.

Black American teens, especially females, may be at high risk for attempting suicide even if they have never been diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to researchers funded in part by NIMH. Their findings, based on responses from adolescent participants in the National Survey of American Life (NSAL), provide the first national estimates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors (ideation) and suicide attempts in 13- to 17-year-old black youth in the United States. The study was published in the March 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Background

Suicide is the third leading cause of death in all teens in the United States, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Historically, black teens and young adults have lower suicide rates than white teens, but in recent decades, the suicide rate for black youth has increased dramatically.

The NSAL is a nationally representative, household survey of African Americans and blacks of Caribbean descent. From the NSAL households, 810 African American and 360 Caribbean black teens, ages 13-17, were randomly selected to complete the NSAL-Adolescent (NSAL-A) survey.

via pambazuka news and abahlali basemjondolo:

The film is about the eNkwalini community’s struggle for land rights. It highlights the attacks by the local neighbouring farmer who has been trying to evict them since 2005 when he started to demolish their houses. The film tells a story of a rural community that is waging a struggle against ferocious tides of oppression. It is a story about a territorial war between the poor rural community and rich land owner. It is a story that reminds us that although South Africa may be celebrating 15 years of democratic rule, however, conditions under for those who are poor and marginalized, such as the rural and farm dweller communities, have hardly changed. For them it is not yet “uhuru” (freedom).

one of my students sent me the text message below. my kids are kind of awesome and cute. they have also witness me dancing to michael jackson in class. r.i.p. michael jackson.

i am a simple girl, but as i approach the age of 24 on august 1st there are a few things i am putting on my wish list:

+ harryette mullen works (particularly, 'recyclopedia: trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and muse & drudge,' and some jstor articles, 'Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Our Nig, and Beloved", The Culture of Sentiment, 1992 and/or "African Signs and Spirit Writing", Callaloo, 1996; reprinted in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, 2000, and The Black Studies Reader, 2004')

+ anything and everything sufjan stevens has created from 'enjoy your rabbit' to his 2006 collection, 'songs for christmas.'

+ and now that kodachrome film will be discontinued by december 2010, kodachrome film would also be nice

and note, i am very scared of turning 24 because 24 is mighty closed to 25 which is like being 30 and we all know 30 is a hop, skip, and a jump away from 45.

i am a harryette mullen fan. some folks get excited about musical groups and wait for their favorite group to tour. i get excited about writers and pray that they do a speaking tour in the area.

i just found a 1999 interview from index magazine and i wanted to share. it has some interesting commentary on slave narratives--'perverse pedagogy' and whipping (education through the whip), the performative nature of narratives (politics of editing, ghostwriting, and demands of white audiences), the dangers of misinterpretation and the editorializing of our own work (ie. making our writing so explicit that there is no space for audience interpretation because we fear misinterpretation.) i have a deep interest in slave narratives, and like the black women and reproductive rights paper i spoke of a few days ago, i believe this comparative paper on douglas and harriet jacobs was also lost. anyway, here is a snippet from the interview:

***HARRYETTE: So I had a whole chapter on flogging as perverse pedagogy. Because there's so many passages in slave narratives where they talk about the first whipping — "That was my education." They don't teach you to read and write, they write on your back with the whip. You become the text. You are prohibited from reading the text, but you become a text; a text that others will read.

I found this amazing quotation that I use at the end of that chapter. It's an obscure narrative and this man says: "I would like if I could to will the skin of my back when I'm dead, will it to the United States government. So that the skin of my back could be used to bind the Constitution, so that the Constitution will be bound in the hide of a slave." I couldn't make that up. That was there. I mean, it was a completely realized trope; at the same time, that was his reality. His back was marked with the whip. He was written on. He was the text.
[...]
HARRYETTE: Even with Douglass, they told him: "Don't analyze your experiences. Tell what it was. And we will interpret it." I think if anything it was kind of a solicitous performance. People were compelled to tell their stories, to prove that they were human. The problem that I have is when it seems we're still trying to prove that we're human after all this time.
[...]
***HARRYETTE: Those books show the trickster in the process of the slave trade. Because Brown had the job of making the slaves look young, dying their hair and everything. It's all about performance. Almost turning the auction block into a theater, a stage.
[...]
CHRISTOPHER: Do you feel like the kind of current vogue for African-American autobiography and this really overt politically agenda'd stuff is about not wanting to give it up? When you say, "I give my writing out and then it travels without me," I feel like so much recent work runs counter to that impulse.

***HARRYETTE: It doesn't leave much room for the imagination. However, I think that a lot of times we may feel that we don't have the luxury of giving out anything, because everything we have is so hard won. I feel that way about some things, but I don't feel that way about my writing. I can understand that impulse; that we still are put in a position to prove that we're human or to make claims that it seems to me we don't need to make, very basic claims that should be given but somehow they're not. And I think that when people feel themselves embattled in that way, I certainly can understand the need to say: "No, I'm going to stand over you and I'm going to tell you how to interpret this, because I don't trust you to do it properly."
[...]
CHRISTOPHER: I agree. When you're not willing to give your work up, I feel like you're really beating yourself on the head. You're not allowing for the doubling that is so much part of our culture.

back in high school, my latin american literature class took a trip to los angeles and we visited alex sanchez's organization 'homies unidos.' i was impressed and the more i work with many of my students who are gang affiliated, the more i am interested in the community work initiated by former gang members. i wont make any comment now. i am taking rumi's advice and prioritizing listening over speak: 'since in order to speak, one must first listen, learn to speak by listening.'

Arrest of Gang Intervention Leader Alex Sanchez Raises Questions, Concerns in Community
By Roberto Lovato

This post originally appeared on Of America.

Today’s FBI arrest of Alex Sanchez, one of the most respected gang intervention leaders in the country, has raised major concerns in Los Angeles and around the country. As his wife and children watched, Sanchez, who leads Homies Unidos, a violence prevention and gang intervention organization with offices in Los Angeles and El Salvador, was arrested and taken away by FBI agents this morning at his home in Bellflower.

The federal charges- being a “shotcaller (someone who manages narcotics operations) for Mara Salvatrucha (MS) and conspiring to kill Walter Lacinos, an MS member shot and killed in El Salvador in 2006- have raised fears and great concerns among the many who’ve known and worked with Sanchez over the years, including myself.

First and foremost among the concerns in the community are concerns for Alex’s immediate safety. As a former gang member who works to help others leave gang life, Alex faces great danger in whatever LA County facility he’s held in-even if he’s put under Protective Custody (PC). Law enforcement authorities have a Known as “Pecetas”, those held under PC are considered by many gang members to be informants and, therefore, legitimate targets for retribution.

For more reasons than I have time to enumerate here, I for one do not believe the charges. Rather, I think that these recent accusations are but the most recent in the long, rotten chain of attempts by law enforcement officials to frame Alex, who was regularly beaten, framed, falsely arrested, deported and harassed by the Los Angeles Police Department since founding Homies Unidos in 1998.

First and foremost, I spent the evening calling those who know and have worked most closely with him, and they ALL share that sense that, as one of his best friends told me, “He really is a good person.” I’ve known him for years and will be sending a strongly worded support letter like the many I’ve sent over the course of the many years and many frame-ups law enforcement has ravenously pursued. Those close to Homies and Alex know and are again feeling that cloud of anger and concern that comes with being harassed by authorities abusing the power delegated to them.

Thoughts?

beautiful.

i have four brothers, and here are two shot with the same expired super hg II 100 iso fujicolor film used for this shot.