November 30, 2022
Iran might pose the greatest external threat to the State of Israel, but the relations between the IDF and the political echelon is going to be the greatest challenge for incoming Chief of Staff Hertzi Halevi when he takes office in January.
Halevi, who will replace Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kohavi, will have his work cut out for him from the moment he sits behind his desk at the Kirya Military Headquarters in Tel Aviv.
He will, of course, have to deal with Iran and its proxies, as well as the ongoing Operation Break the Wave in the West Bank while making sure that Gaza remains “quiet.”
In addition to all the well-known “regular” threats that a chief of staff must contend with, the complex problems that Halevi will have to handle will be on the internal front.
The Israeli political battle of the new IDF chief of staff
In addition to the erosion of public trust, the declining motivation of Israelis to serve and the ongoing struggle over IDF values, there are growing pressures by politicians, many of them set to handle key portfolios in the incoming government of Benjamin Netanyahu, who think that they can interfere in how the IDF handles itself and its troops.
The politicization of the IDF, as seen by the discourse surrounding the recent events in Hebron by Givati soldiers, is a dangerous slippery slope that can lead to a lack of legitimacy in the eyes of the international community- as if the international community already applauds actions by the IDF.
The incident in Hebron, where troops are seen physically and verbally assaulting left-wing activists, not only led politicians like Otzma Yehudit chairman Itamar Ben-Gvir (who despite never serving a day in the military) to blast the army and Kohavi himself.
Ben-Gvir, who is set to become national security minister, is a known instigator with a fiery past known well to the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) for his beliefs. But a high number of Israelis voted him into power, and Netanyahu will have to handle him.
Halevi, as chief of staff, will also need to deal with the fact that a large number of IDF soldiers voted for him and Religious Zionist Party chairman Bezalel Smotrich.
One of the Givati soldiers involved in the incident in Hebron was filmed saying that “Ben-Gvir will create order here. You’ve lost it. All you do here is finished. I decide what the law is and you are acting against the law.”
“Ben-Gvir will create order here. You’ve lost it. All you do here is finished. I decide what the law is and you are acting against the law.”
Givati soldier in Hebron
He will need to make sure that no matter the political leaning of a soldier, nothing will interfere with how he acts while in uniform.
Halevi is no fool. He is smart, calculating and can handle situations where he may not be in complete agreement with others. But he is not one to shy away from fights. And he will fight for what is right for the Israel Defense Forces.
Netanyahu cannot let politicians in his coalition blast the only entity that truly keeps the country safe.
Because should the Likud leader let people like Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, Maoz and their supporters call the shots, any legitimacy left for the IDF in the international community will be thrown out of the window. Soldiers will feel as if they can get away with violence against Palestinians and their supporters, a gift for Palestinian supporters who will hand more and more cases to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
But it is unlikely that Halevi will allow for such political meddling in the IDF. He will not let the IDF become a punching bag for politicians. It will be a fight that he will not give up on.
Flowers and football: 1998's Iran-US World Cup game
November 29, 2022
Amid harsh barbs and heated geopolitics, the last World Cup match-up between Iran and the United States began with an unlikely gesture - bouquets of white flowers.
The flowers, Iran's coach later said, were meant as a symbol of peace ahead of the 1998 showdown in France.
Two decades later, political tensions are again high ahead of the Iran-US game in Qatar.
The latest meeting, however, has so far gone without any friendly gestures.
The previous match, held in Lyon, France, came 20 years after diplomatic relations between the two nations were severed as a result of the storming of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 and subsequent 444 day hostage crisis.
Just one month before kick-off, the US State Department labelled Iran the world's "most active" state sponsor of terrorism, while several high-level Iranian officials kept up a steady drumbeat of anti-US rhetoric.
Despite the tensions evident in the halls of the United Nations and in the Persian Gulf, Iran's players - led by California-based manager Jalal Talebi - decided to start the match with a signal that the only competition between the two would be on the pitch.
"We decided to make something special," Mr Talebi said in an oral history of the match produced by ESPN.
"Let us go inside and give them nice flowers to say that we are here for peace. We are not here for fighting or anything."
The US team reciprocated, giving their opponents US Soccer Federation (USSF) pennants. Together, the squads posed for a group picture, with many of the players smiling ahead of the high-pressure match.
"I thought that was great," Cobi Jones, then a midfielder for the US team, said in the ESPN documentary.
"It's just like a sign of like sport trumping politics and all that. That was very important and having the mixed photo was great."
The days leading up to the World Cup rematch on Tuesday between the two teams were once again marked by tensions, coming amid widespread anti-government protests in Iran and just after the USSF removed the emblem of the Islamic Republican from the flag it posted in online graphics.
The pictures were later deleted, and US manager Gregg Berhalter apologised, saying that "sometimes things are out of our control" and that he and the US team were only focused on football.
The US team goes into the match hoping to avoid a repeat of the 1998 game, which ended with a 2-1 victory for Iran., though both countries were eliminated from the tournament after the game.
Alexi Lalas, a Fox Sports commentator who was a member of the 1998 team, told the Associated Press that the current US team would be well advised to not ignore the wider geopolitics surrounding the current match.
"Understanding the importance of this game, not just from a soccer perspective but from a cultural perspective, I think is crucial for the United States," he said, in helping to motivate them on the pitch.
Iranian woman trends on Twitter, after being spotted during USA vs. Iran World Cup soccer game
November 29, 2022
Currently, the United States’ soccer team that is competing for the World Cup is dominating the news. Normally, the US is known for dominating in international sports. However, if the United States did not get a win over Iran, today, they would have been eliminated. When asked if America will win the gold medal, most casual viewers have said “no.” But America did get the win over Iran. Despite this, Iran has people talking and it’s all because of one woman.
During the social media era, it has become commonplace for people to watch sporting events, and then make something random go viral. Normally, it is something to do with a person’s appearance, actions, or some kind of altercation. Every now and again, there is a situation with an extremely attractive person. This is indeed what has people talking, after the United States got their win over Iran. It is rare to see nations like Iran involved in anything aside from what the national news reports.
However, as America got their win over Iran, to continue competing for the World Cup, Iran got a symbolic win. A woman, who is a native of Iran, went viral when she was spotted in the stands. Nothing more, nothing less, the woman was simply enjoying the game. But as the viewers took her in, they realized how pretty she is. As a result, there have been casual fans playing down the US/Iran game in order to comment on the woman.
The post Iranian woman trends on Twitter, after being spotted during USA vs. Iran World Cup soccer game appeared first on Hip Hop Vibe.
Germany set to ban deportations to Iran
Christoph Hasselbach
November 30, 2022
In Germany, the interior minister, some regional governments, and refugee organizations want Iranian asylum seekers to be exempt from deportation. But the conservative opposition argues that criminals must be sent back.
No Iranian citizen seeking refuge in Germany should be deported — that is the view of German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser. The Social Democrats (SPD) lawmaker sees no other choice; given the violent crackdown on demonstrators by the government in Tehran, anything else would be irresponsible.
The current protests in Iran were sparked in September when 22-year-old Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini died after she was arrested by the morality police for not wearing the hijab as prescribed.
Some of Germany's 16 states have already decided to halt deportations due to the current situation in Iran — Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Bremen, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania — and the Interior Minister has called for the rest of the states to follow their example.
"The human rights situation is catastrophic, and the situation is becoming more dramatic by the day," said Lower Saxony Interior Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD)
The Minister of Social Affairs, Youth, Family, Seniors, and Equality for the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, Aminata Toure, recently told the state parliament in Kiel: "The people from Iran, who are living here, are desperate." She called for their "legal challenges with regards to residency status" to be "reassessed." For the Green Party politician, this can only mean a blanket ban on deportations.
Opposition: "no free rides" for criminals
But this is by no means a unanimous opinion. Many states are governed by the conservative parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU) and politicians from these parties are opposed to the idea.
The CSU politician Andrea Lindholz explained her objections to DW: "I take a critical view of a general ban on deportation because criminal offenders and people who pose a threat to public safety would also benefit from it. (…) Nobody should be put at risk of danger to life and limb [if deported], but there should also not be any free rides."
For example, the CSU-led state of Bavaria wants to retain the ability to deport people who commit criminal offenses or who pose a risk to public safety. The situation is the same in CDU-led Saxony.
Lindholz's fellow conservative in the German Bundestag parliament, Christoph de Vries of the CDU, added in a written response to DW that in asylum procedures, "the assessment of the danger each individual asylum seeker could face in the event of deportation plays a decisive role … even without issuing a blanket ban on deportations." Therefore, "government opponents, women and homosexuals currently have no need to fear being deported."
However, when it came to "people who traveled to Germany illegally for economic reasons," sending them back needs to be just as possible as it would be for people who had committed crimes.
"In the case of a general ban, it would not be possible, for example, to deport someone like the deputy leader of the Hamburg Islamic Center (IZH) to Iran. This person has had contact with terrorist organizations and would have absolutely nothing to fear in Iran because the IZH receives direct instructions from the Mullah regime," de Vries said.
Pro Asyl: Deportees threatened by torture
While opposition politicians want the Foreign Ministry to produce a new report on the situation in Iran, refugee aid organizations maintain that there is already enough relevant information. The organization Pro Asyl wrote to DW: "In the case of deportation to a country like Iran, which is known to commit torture, Germany cannot, in our view, ensure that there is no threat of torture there."
Germany must be able to ensure that the people it deports are not tortured upon their return. Pro Asyl also sees no room for exceptions: "This is a universal human right. (…) That means it also applies to criminals and so-called dangerous people." Whoever commits an offense in Germany, should "also be brought before the courts and punished in Germany," the aid group added.
Amnesty International takes a similar position, telling DW: "We consider exceptions to a general ban on deportations to be unjustifiable. A halt on deportations applies in principle to all people."
Hardly any Iranians are currently being deported
But how many people are we talking about? According to German Interior Ministry figures from October, about 12,000 Iranians who are facing deportation are living in Germany. In the first eight months of this year, however, only 31 were sent back to Iran. In all of 2021, there were 28, mostly people who had committed crimes. According to the Interior Ministry, these so-called repatriations are still possible in theory, but difficult in practice.
But CSU politician Andrea Lindholz is hoping for a European approach: "It would be helpful if the federal government would ensure a uniform and coordinated approach by the European Union states. But it hasn't done that so far, and I think that is wrong."
Reaching agreements at the European level on matters of asylum and residency is notoriously difficult. Even within Germany, it is unclear what the states' Interior Ministers will decide when it comes to the question of halting all deportations to Iran.
10 Informative Books That Will Help You Understand What’s Happening In Iran
November 30, 2022
Two months following the death of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who was arrested and beaten by police for not wearing her hijab properly, Iranians continue to protest.
Even as the Iranian government cracks down on them (especially Kurds, who are marginalized ethnic minorities), people of all ages continue to take to the streets across the country. These activists aren’t just calling for the hijab to be made optional; many are calling for an end to the brutal and repressive Islamic regime.
If you’ve seen the slogan “Woman Life Freedom” on your social media feed and want to better understand what Iranian women have experienced and what they’re pushing back against, here are 10 books of all different genres that will make you laugh and cry (mostly the latter — sorry!). These page-turners explore marriage, motherhood, sexuality, LGBTQ identity, exile, and more. Also, they’re just straight-up good books.
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, translated from Farsi by Anonymous
You know a book is powerful when the government bans it. That’s what Iran’s theocratic regime did with The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, a magical realist family saga set in Iran right after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The novel was first published in Farsi in 2017, and despite the ban, many Iranians have still found a way to read it illegally. Told from the perspective of Bahar, the youngest in a family of five, the story begins with the hanging of the narrator’s older brother without a trial, one of many traumas from which the family can never recover. The characters who die in the book come back as ghosts. For Azar’s characters, these ghost stories are a way to hold onto family and culture and in doing so, remember one’s humanity while living under a regime that is hellishly inhumane. (Plus, there’s romance!)
The Girl from the Garden by Parnaz Foroutan
In this historical novel published in 2015, an Iranian Jewish family is torn apart by jealousy when one man is able to have children but his brother is not. What are men and women willing to do in order to have a child? What happens to a woman whose child has been taken away? The book also explores antisemitism, polygamy, intergenerational trauma, child abuse, and the ability of women to misplace their anger and turn against each other when they’re placed under stressful and unjust conditions, or what one character describes as “the complications of womanhood.” Fans of The Handmaid’s Tale will find some similarities here.
Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi
If you want to know what it’s like to chill with a bunch of Iranian women while they’re chugging down chai and gossiping about sex, here’s your chance. I started and finished this graphic memoir in a 45-minute timespan, bursting out laughing at regular intervals. How do you fake your virginity? Boost your fertility? Escape a husband 56 years older than you? While the stories are wildly funny, this humor stems from the deep shared trauma of living in a patriarchal society under a tyrannical government — pain that is obvious to the reader, yet too mundane to be acknowledged in earnest by the women in the book who suffer from it. Instead, they laugh at the harebrained schemes they’ve concocted to survive.
Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate by Leila Ahmed
Published in 1992, this academic text by a Harvard professor takes an insightful look at Muslim women’s history, starting in ancient Mesopotamia — before Islam existed. For readers seeking to imagine a concept of modern feminism inclusive of Muslim women, Part 3 of this book outlines important Muslim feminists in the history of the Middle East and contrasts the reality and symbolic value of the veil. Head coverings sometimes have a kind of bogeyman status in the West, where what a woman wears is somehow supposed to signify whether she’s liberated. One important point that Ahmed makes is that, for many Muslim women, covering their hair is a way to actually feel more comfortable going into spaces where they might otherwise feel like they have to compromise their values or risk receiving unwanted attention. It’s important to remember that while requiring all women to wear veils is indefensible, banning head coverings and shaming people who wear them doesn’t help anyone, either.
Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznik
Poetry has been a huge part of Iranian culture for more than 1,000 years. This 2018 novel is a fictionalized first-person account of one of Iran’s most important poets ever: Forugh Farrokhzad. Darznik’s Farrokhzad rebels against a forced virginity test, joins boys for a urination competition, listens to family members recite classic Persian poetry, and demands to be allowed to marry the man she truly loves. In beautiful prose, the author imagines how Farrokhzad might have navigated feelings of rejection and self-doubt as she blazed trails as a female artist. Darznik also recreates the tragic car accident that brought the young poet’s life to a premature end in 1967, when she was 32. “Remember its flight, for the bird is mortal,” Farrokhzad once wrote. The same is true of poets.
Sin- Selected Poems of Forough Farrokhzad
Song of a Captive Bird captured Forugh Farrokhzad in Jasmin Darznik’s voice, but here, you can hear the poet in her own words (in translation, of course). Farrokhzad uses natural metaphors to talk about sexual love and despair in scandalous poems that caused great hullabaloo in 1950s Tehran, where they were initially published. Thanks to a careful translator who’s a poet in her own right, the poems maintain their poignancy even in English. In the titular poem, “Sin,” Farrokhzad tells the story of a drunken, ravenous affair. You can hear the poem performed in the original Farsi on YouTube.
Man of My Time by Dalia Sofer
In this 2020 historical novel, Iranian American author Dalia Sofer dives deep into the psyche of protagonist Hamid Mozaffarian, a man who stayed in Iran after the revolution even as his whole family moved to New York City and then began working for the Islamic government. Mozaffarian doesn’t actually believe in the theocratic regime; on the contrary, his evil actions seem motivated by a sense of teenage rebellion. Like many Iranians at the time of the revolution, Mozafarrian knows what he’s against, but he doesn’t know what he’s for. The book is fast-paced and thought-provoking. Careful, though, because Sofer sneaks in a warning early on in Mozaffarian’s voice against reading books in order to feel sympathy and nothing else. The narrator critiques the kind of art and literature “Americans love, affirming their self-proclaimed ability to see humanity even in their enemy, and in so doing, reassuring themselves of their own magnanimous heart.”
Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, translated from French by Tina Kover
Published in 2018, Disoriental is, as its title suggests, a whirlwind of a novel. It tells two stories at once, and maybe even more than that: One takes place in a fertility clinic in modern France, where a woman wants more than anything to have a child, and one takes place in prerevolutionary Iran, where her activist father’s acts of bravery against the repressive Pahlavi regime (the secular regime that held power before the Islamic Revolution) basically amount to suicide. The narrator’s relationships with her parents help raise questions about what connection may exist between someone’s gender and their sexuality, how one explores LGBTQ identity in a country where it’s so taboo, and how this identity intersects with experiences of exile. The narrator also wrestles over whether — and how — someone can put down roots in a country they weren’t born in without sacrificing their culture of origin.
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