Showing posts with label Education and Communication. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education and Communication. Show all posts

Friday, June 23, 2017

Full text of the list of demands submitted by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, and Egypt to Qatar

    June 23, 2017   No comments
ISR comment: Four Arab States want Qatar to close down Aljazeera, a sign that the current crisis is in fact a reaction to and fear of the protest movements popularly known as the Arab Spring. It was on the pages of ISR that the role of Aljazeera in galvanizing social change in the Arab world was thoroughly explained and it was on the pages of ISR that the first prediction that the Gulf States will implode from the inside as a result of the change initiated by the protest movement that overthrew Ben Ali (now living in Saudi Arabia) and Mubarak (now back from prison after Sisi regained power).
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A summary of the demands submitted by the Saudis, Bahrainis, Emiratis, and Egyptians to Qatar through Kuwait:
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1. Reduce diplomatic ties with Iran and close its diplomatic missions there. Expel members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard from Qatar and cut off any joint military cooperation with Iran. Only trade and commerce with Iran that complies with U.S. and international sanctions will be permitted.


2. Shutting down the Turkish military base in Qatar and stop any military agreements with Turkey inside Qatar


3. Announce the cutting of ties to “terrorist organizations,” including the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic State, al-Qaida, and Hezbollah. Formally declare those entities as terrorist groups.


4. Stop providing financial support to entities and individuals list on the list previously provided by the four nations.


5. Handover all persons accused of terrorists and seize their property.


6. Shut down Al-Jazeera and its affiliate stations.


7. Stop interfering in the affairs of neighboring states, stop offering citizens to persons from neighboring states, and provide a list of citizens of neighboring states who were offered Qatar citizenship.


8. Pay for all damages caused by Qatar policy and practices in neighboring states.


9. Assure full compliance with Arab decision and agree to honor the Riyadh agreements with Gulf nations of 2013 and 2014.


10. Submit a list of documents by and about opposition figures supported by Qatar.


11. Shut down news outlets that Qatar funds, directly and indirectly (i.e., Arabi21, Rassd, al-Araby Al-Jadeed, and Middle East Eye).


12. Agree to all these terms within 10 days or it will be considered void.


13. the agreement shall consist of clear mechanism of compliance, including monthly audits for the first year after agreeing to the demands, then once per quarter during the second year, and annually for ten years thereafter.

Monday, March 27, 2017

Academic Integrity and the Problem of Profiting from Slavery and Racism

    March 27, 2017   No comments
by Ahmed E. Souaiaia*

Abstract: Teaching future generations is indeed a costly endeavor, especially when governments allocate little or no money to higher education. Universities’ administrators are always under extreme pressure to keep their institutions afloat. However, as learning and training institutions, universities instill values and norms that guide future citizens and professionals towards a better future. Therefore, the source of money is just as important as the amounts of money for universities and for the people they serve. It has been revealed that Georgetown University would not have survived if it did not profit from selling hundreds of human beings and participate in the cruel slave trade. Ostensibly, Georgetown is unable to totally break from its legacy of profiting from slavery and racism. Its dependence on money provided by Muslim individuals and/or Islamic regimes with a history of human rights abuses, sectarian, and racist practices raises questions about its ability to overcome and dispose of both Catholic and Islamic legacies of depravity and decadence.
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About 200 years ago, to save Georgetown College, priests sold human beings thus fully endorsing and profiting from the brutal, dehumanizing institution of slavery. To date, we've learned of the existence of records documenting at least 272 human beings, like Mr. Frank Campbell, who were sold so that that college would survive to become the institution we now call Georgetown University.  Evidently, for these priests, the survival of an educational institution outweighed the abuse of the dignity of hundreds of human beings. Today, to gain prominence as an elite university, Georgetown has established financial ties to individuals and governments with social and ideological affinity to racism, sectarianism, and absolutism. Georgetown's connections to Wahhabism and individuals who are interested in whitewashing that sect adds to the University’s legacy of exploitation in pursuit of elitism and financial advantages. Recently, Georgetown’s dark history with slavery was brought to the forefront once again when one of its faculty members used dubious logic and absolutist interpretation of ancient texts to argue that slavery is morally justified in Islam, a position that conforms to that held by groups like ISIL and al-Qaeda.



Friday, March 10, 2017

Association representing Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies scholars join efforts to legally challenge the Muslim Ban

    March 10, 2017   No comments
Civil rights and refugee groups today asked a federal court in Maryland to block the Trump administration’s revised executive order, arguing that it would cause irreparable harm for their plaintiffs. The order, which still maintains the suspension of refugee resettlement along with banning entry of nationals from six Muslim-majority countries, was issued on March 6.

The groups that brought the case include the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Maryland, and the National Immigration Law Center on behalf of the International Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center, HIAS, and the Middle East Studies Association, along with individuals, including U.S. citizens, affected by the ban.



Representatives from each group gave the following statements:

Beth Baron, President, Middle East Studies Association

“The Middle East Studies Association joined this case because the new executive order cuts at the very core of our mission as a scholarly association — to facilitate the free exchange of ideas. The order directly harms our student and faculty members by preventing travel, disrupting research, and impeding careers. The order hurts us as an association intellectually and financially. It is incumbent upon us to support the interests of our members and stand up for the peoples of the region we study and our colleagues.”

Becca Heller, Director of the International Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center

"The exemption of Iraq from the (Muslim and refugee) ban is nothing but a weak attempt at righting one of the many egregious wrongs of the original order. The majority of Iraqis who have worked with the U.S. in Iraq arrive via the refugee resettlement program, which the new order attacks just as viciously. By suspending the program for 120 days and slashing the resettlement slots by 60,000, more than 50,000 Iraqis will still be affected, many of whom have worked for the U.S. or have family in the U.S."

Karen Tumlin, Legal Director of the National Immigration Law Center

“A repackaged Muslim and refugee ban is still a Muslim and refugee ban. This version may be tweaked to work its way around the courts, but the intent remains the same. Trump has a clear and well-documented record of animus and discrimination directed at immigrants, refugees and Muslims, either from his tweets, stump speeches, or statements made to the media. There’s just no way to work around that fact. The courts have overwhelmingly rebuked the administration’s attempt to legalize bigotry and religious discrimination, and we are confident they will do so again."

Mark Hetfield, CEO and President of HIAS

“As with the first executive order, President Trump has once again ignored the Constitution in order to fulfill his campaign promise of a Muslim ban. We are asking the court to intervene in order to protect thousands of refugees’ lives. HIAS is a Jewish organization that has worked since 1881 to protect and resettle refugees based on the Torah’s command to welcome the stranger. We cannot be bystanders as our own government turns away and discriminates against tens of thousands of refugees who have played by our rules and already subjected themselves to ‘extreme vetting.’”

Omar Jadwat, Director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project

“Putting a new coat of paint on the Muslim ban doesn’t solve its fundamental problem, which is that the Constitution and our laws prohibit religious discrimination. The further President Trump goes down this path, the clearer it is that he is violating that basic rule.”
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CONTACT
Juan Gastelum, NILC, 213-375-3149, media@nilc.org
Inga Sarda-Sorensen, ACLU, 212-284-7347, isarda-sorensen@aclu.org
Henrike Dessaules, IRAP, 646-459-3081, hdessaules@refugeerights.org
Gabe Cahn, HIAS, 212-613-1312, gabe.cahn@hias.org
Geoffrey Knox, MESA, 917-414-1749, gknox@geoffreyknox.com

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Thursday, August 27, 2015

41 Directors, Chairs, and Executive Officers at University of Illinois -UC call for the reinstatement of Steven Salaita

    August 27, 2015   No comments

Dear President Killeen and Acting Chancellor Wilson,

We the forty-one undersigned Executive Officers and campus leaders from departments and academic units across the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign urge you to help end the crisis that has plagued our university for more than a year. It has increasingly become clear that the decision to rescind Dr. Steven Salaita’s appointment as an associate professor with indefinite tenure in the American Indian Studies Program violated the principles of shared faculty governance and may also be legally liable. The decision has also inflicted harm upon the reputation and standing of our university.

The AAUP has censured the Urbana-Champaign campus for the violation of academic freedom. An ongoing academic boycott against our campus continues to adversely affect an important dimension of our intellectual livelihood. More than 5,000 scholars around the world, many of them prominent intellectuals, refuse to participate in talks or conferences at the University of Illinois. Such events are part of the exchange of ideas for which our campus has always been known, and their cancellation impoverishes the conversation on campus to the detriment of students and faculty alike. Over the long term, it threatens our competitiveness in bringing in external funding and recruiting distinguished scholars.

We are therefore
asking you to use the authority of your offices to recommend to the Board of Trustees that they reverse their previous decision and reinstate Dr. Salaita at the next board meeting in September. We firmly believe that this step will help put the university on track toward ending AAUP censure and regaining its place among the most respected public institutions of higher education in the country. The decision to reinstate Dr. Salaita will also make it easier to resolve pending litigation and save the university community and state taxpayers from the high costs of defending a wrong decision in the court of law.

We ask for a meeting to discuss our request to restore the rightful stature of the University of Illinois.

Sincerely,

James Anderson, Head, Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership

Matthew Ando, Chair, Department of Mathematics

Antoinette Burton, Interim Director, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities

C.L. Cole, Head, Department of Media and Cinema Studies

David Cooper, Director, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center

Clare Crowston, Chair, Department of History

Jerry Dávila, Director, Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies

Anna Maria Escobar, Director, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Michael Finke, Head, Slavic Languages and Literatures

Stephanie Foote, Chair, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Interim Director, Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Greg Girolami, Head, Department of Chemistry

Waïl Hassan, Director, Center for Translation Studies

Stephanie Hilger, Head, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Valerie Hoffman, Head, Department of Religion

Valerie Hotchkiss, Director, Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Jonathan X. Inda, Head, Department of Latina/Latino Studies

Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, Head, Department of Theatre

Lilya Kaganovsky, Director, Program in Comparative and World Literature

Brett Kaplan, Director, Program in Jewish and Culture and Society

Marcus Keller, Head, Department of French and Italian

Edward Kolodziej, Director, Center for Global Studies

Susan Koshy, Director, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

Soo Ah Kwon, Head, Department of Asian American Studies

Jean-Philippe Mathy, Director, School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics

David O’Brien, Chair, Art History Program

Robert B. Olshansky, Head, Department of Urban and Regional Planning

Andrew Orta, Head, Department of Anthropology

Jesse Ribot, Director, Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy Program

Michael Rothberg, Head, Department of English

Kirk Sanders, Chair, Department of Philosophy

Spencer Schaffner, Director, Center for Writing Studies

Douglas Simpson, Chair, Department of Statistics

Anna W. Stenport, Director, European Union Center

Eleonora Stoppino, Director, Program in Medieval Studies

Andrew Suarez, Head, Department of Animal Biology

William Sullivan, Head, Department of Landscape Architecture

Jonathan V. Sweedler, Director, School of Chemical Sciences

Ariana Traill, Head, Department of the Classics

Robert Warrior, Director, Program in American Indian Studies

Assata Zerai, Director, Center for African Studies

Monday, April 15, 2013

On the need to balance endowments and academic integrity

    April 15, 2013   No comments


by Ahmed E. Souaiaia*

The article in The Atlantic, The Emir of NYU (MAR 13, 2013), touched on a very important issue: academic integrity. It came on the heels of the no-confidence vote NYU’s faculty in the College of Arts and Science delivered against the president, John Sexton. Sexton is renowned for creating satellite research and teaching centers around the world through a strategy he called The Global Network University. Specifically, the article pointed to the full degree-granting campus in Abu Dhabi and to faculty’s concerns “about academic freedom, diluting NYU's brand, human rights violations in Abu Dhabi, and discrimination against gay and Israeli students.”

The article did not address the critically important issue of striking a balance between the need for funding higher education and preserving academic and scientific integrity. This problem is not new. Research scholars and institutions in some STEM (exact/hard) sciences faced similar ethical and legal issues since they first took money from pharmaceuticals, agricultural companies involved in GMOs, defense industries, and government security and intelligence agencies.


The current economic conditions are forcing universities to cut programs and/or raise money. These trends are likely to have an immediate and disproportionate impact on liberal arts and humanities programs--hence the vote from NYU’s College of Arts and Science faculty. Moreover, creating liberal arts and social sciences programs in places like the Persian Gulf States requires more scrutiny. The limitations on freedoms, the lack of transparency and shared governance, and the treatment of minorities in those countries are addressed through disciplines within liberal arts and social sciences. For this reason alone, establishing campuses or taking money from governments and private individuals from that region ought to be done with extreme prudence.


GCC countries do not operate according to the same rules enjoyed in American institutions (See the statement about banning a scholar from entering UAE). For instance, early this year, the editor of prominent magazine from one of the GCC States asked if I could write a short essay predicting that the Arab Spring will reach the GCCcountries. Presumably, another scholar was asked to argue the other point of view. Aware of the restrictions on freedom of expression in that country, I insisted that my article not be edited. With that understanding in place, I wrote what was, in my opinion, a restrained 250-word piece (see article below). A day later, the editor wrote back saying, “thanks very much for your honest and well-written article. However, because of legal constraints […], we can’t publish anything that criticizes the ruling royal family.”

If a government is threatened by a staged prediction written by a professor more than 6,000 miles away, can this same regime (and the regimes like it) allow a center of critical scholarship to thrive within its territory and in contact with its population? I doubt it. The same concern might apply to endowed chairs in many American universities. Can a researcher, whose position is funded by a prince from Saudi Arabia or the government of Bahrain, for example, provide critical and unbiased research about social and religious issues in one or all those countries or relating to Islam in general? I doubt that, too. 

Some of the most apologetic works about Wahhabism came out from institutions and by researchers who received considerable money from donors from GCC countries. Even if one were to assume that the holders of endowed chairs funded by princes from GCC countries have the integrity to tell scientific truths, their email signature and titles will always function as an implicit endorsement that polishes the names of the donors. Every time they introduce themselves to an audience they become engaged in gratuitous character rehabilitation and/or public relations endeavor on behalf of regimes and individual donors.

Islamic studies endowments created by ostensibly Muslim individuals and governments are even more suspect from the point of view of Islamic law and cultures. According to Islamic ethical practices, charity and gifts, including endowments, are supposed to be given discretely to the extent that when “it is given by the right hand, the left hand would not notice.” In Islamic cultures, advertising the name of donors nullifies its rewards. 

Endowments are given with a purpose and some time that purpose conflicts with the stated aims and mission of educational institutions. During the past decade alone, enough dubious endowments have been discovered to give administrators and faculty members pause. For instance, after the fall of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, a formal inquiry uncovered that the London School of Economics had accepted at least £1.5m donation from Saif al-Islam. If receiving money from the son of a dictator was not marring enough, the origin of such money should be: the investigation uncovered that the donations “may have been money paid to the dictator's son as bribes.”

Harvard, the institution that produces the ruling elite in the United States, unashamedly collected money from individuals and governments from GCC States, too. In 2004, the Boston Globe reported that Harvard returned $2.5 million from the ruler of the United Arab Emirates. The university returned the money because the donor had ties to “an Arab League think tank with alleged anti-American” views. Apparently, Harvard, which shared with Georgetown University more than $40 million donation from a Saudi Prince in the last decade alone, refused money from a person who might have connections to an organization that might criticize U.S. foreign policies. But Harvard leaders see no harm in taking money from members of the ruling families of some of the GCC states, who are known for their wanton abuse of foreign workers, minorities, and women. 

Another Ivy League school needed to address its ties to donors who were on the wrong side of history, Brown. The University is now attempting to polish its own image after it had become known that it had ties to slave traders. It was revealed recently that “some of the University’s early benefactors were involved in the slave trade.” Specifically, a reportproduced by a commission established by the University confirmed that “slave labor was used to construct the oldest building on campus and said many of the university's early benefactors were slave owners.”

The conflict between supporting education and polishing donors’ image is not new. However, now, the need for a new paradigm that could encourage people to give to education without risking academic integrity is paramount. For long, private universities have enjoyed limited restrictions on their efforts to raise money from private donors. Many state universities are now forced to adapt and administrators are aggressively seeking alternative sources of funding. Research grants and private endowments are two attractive streams of revenues. However, endowments do come with strings attached--some strings are obvious and others are subtle. Balancing the need to raise money and preserve academic integrity is a difficult challenge but it can be overcome if administrators and faculty members work together on drawing up sound policies.
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* Prof. SOUAIAIA teaches at the University of Iowa. Opinions are the author’s, speaking on matters of public interest; not speaking for the university or any other organization with which he is affiliated.
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Are the Gulf countries in danger of facing an Arab Spring?

Will the GCC countries face an Arab Spring? The answer is simple: Yes. In fact, the Spring has already bloomed in the Gulf region. When powerful Emirs are threatened by poets, multi-billion dollar military is mobilized to crush peaceful protesters, and official muftis find it necessary to issue fatwas prohibiting protest at home while their governments are involved in arming opposition groups elsewhere, I would say the Spring is already in the Gulf.
In the past, the Gulf States’ rulers shielded themselves from change by seeking shelter behind world superpowers, and by amassing sophisticated weaponry. At that time, they feared the specter of foreigners invading their lands.
Today, they face a threat that cannot be defeated by international alliances, exclusion walls, arbitrary borders, and Patriot missiles. Some groups of their people are already calling upon them from within to end clan privilege, cruel sectarian and ethnic supremacism, boorish double standards, demeaning gender discrimination, and flagrant disregard to common decency, because these attitudes are an affront to dignity.
The first and second rounds of protest in Tunisia and Egypt tell us—in no uncertain terms—that the Arab Spring is not about economics, democracy, or ideology. It is about reclaiming human dignity and ending fear. It is not about who governs; it is about how they govern. These continued struggles tell us that no context can excuse the abuse of human dignity. Therefore, I am as sure that the people will rise up for dignity in the Gulf region as I am sure that the sun will rise from the east tomorrow.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Turkey's lost and future opportunities in Syria

    March 27, 2013   No comments

by Foti Benlisoy and Annalena Di Giovanni

Turkey
A few months ago, in January 2013, an accident in a steel factory of Gaziantep, a bordering town in southwest Turkey, claimed the lives of seven workers. Under normal circumstances such news would have passed unobserved and eventually forgotten; Turkey is after all a country in which workplace accidents in factories are a daily, albeit silent, occurrence. But this time two among the seven workers were Syrians. And like most Syrians, they were unregistered, insecure, and deprived of any protective measures while on duty.

Syrian refugees, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, are the new source of manpower in southern factories. Employed outside any state regulation, they are desperate enough to accept work for any pay and condition. In a word, they are cheaper than local labour and Kurdish seasonal workers. Another very telling episode is that of a factory in Adıyaman where employees on strike are voicing concerns that they face the sack and replacement by cheaper and more submissive Syrian refugees. In a war of poor against poorer, local workers already uneasy with aid and facilities provided by the government to the refugee camps are now afraid to lose their jobs, while traders and merchants lament their plummeting revenues from exports and tourism in Syria. For the population of southern Turkey, the struggle against Bashar Al-Assad is simply a catastrophe. And for this catastrophe they are blaming the ErdoÄŸan government, and his support to the Syrian opposition. 


But while ErdoÄŸan's on-going endorsement of the Syrian opposition is more than obvious, it is also clear that toppling the status quo was not previously a pressing necessity for the Turkish leadership. Since the opening of trade with Syria in the early 2000s, exports towards Syria tripled in the space of 7 years to more than two billion USD and - right before the uprising started - they were forecast to double again by the end of 2015. Now exports in Syria dropped by 66.5% in 2012, with peaks of 100% losses in cities like Hatay and Gaziantep. If trade was skyrocketing, direct investment was just about to start, as well as ties between the business elites supporting both governments. Although the liberalizing reforms of Bashar had so far attracted a mere figure of 18 private firms opening their business in Syria - mainly in pastry manufacture, cement production, and hospitality – by 2011 the stakes had been raised. 

One example was the massive Taj Halab project, a giant mall of a 150,000 square meters area directly outside Aleppo. This would have been a 180 million USD joint venture between the Syrian Sham Holding, and the Turkish Rönesans İnşaat - a construction company active in countries like Ukraine, Turkmenistan, Libya and Russia. Major contracts for the water system too had just been awarded to Turkish companies. Needless to say, all plans and construction have stopped. The issue now is how to salvage the business interests they represent.

When discussing a Turkish role in post-conflict Syria, it is important to keep in mind that it is not a ‘neo-Ottoman’ ideology or ‘imperial’ nostalgia guiding Turkey's foreign policy; nor will mere Islamist solidarity be driving what we can expect to be Turkey’s consistent role in war-battered areas.

Simplified media narratives tend to borrow the argument that the AKP’s Islamist roots inevitably sustain a dream to revive the Ottoman Empire and, eventually, support its Arab Sunni brothers. But behind Davutoglu's assertive regional strategy, there is a wealth of Turkish capitalists who are increasingly investing abroad and looking for new opportunities to expand Turkish capital. This is because of the very nature of the AKP, a party that emerged as a winner in the late nineties after a decade of short-term governments and political instability. It was the AKP that solved the crisis of power for a new capitalist class without political representation by securing new investors who needed new policies suitable to their business interests. And one has to look at these years of economic integration and the promotion of a Turkish cultural image to consolidate a material base abroad as measures on behalf of the business class. 

Turkish soap operas, Fetullah Gülen's schools teaching African or Central Asian kids Turkish language and culture, even the Turkish Language Olympics; the rising profile of Turkey simply means that Turkish investments abroad can eventually entrust their expansion on a receptive, Turkish-educated local business class. However, it was the issue of marketing a cultural image in conjunction with the needs of the Turkish political class that was missing. This changed with Erdoğan. It is with very pragmatic eyes that we must evaluate his role as the rising Turkish star among the Arab masses buying into the aesthetics and values he promotes.

From the 1990s it seems that Turkey decided that with respect to the Balkans, the Caucasus region, and its Arab neighbours, it was going to engage in a policy of investment to enable Turkey to leverage its crucial geostrategic location at the crossroads of the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Turkey also has pursued a very aggressive set of policies of investment in both Africa and Central Asia. So, reengagement with Syria and the Arab world was one piece of a much larger project, one which should not be mistaken for any kind of reinvention of the Ottoman Empire. Rather it allows Turkish government to expand on what it had already been doing domestically: a neoliberal economic strategy of investment as a basis for growth, the development of constituencies, and foreign relations.

Whatever ErdoÄŸan and DavutoÄŸlu had in mind when they started pushing Assad for reforms, they would not have expected this to take so long - and at such costs. This is the irony of Turkey: they were trying to transform Syria into a safe market haven, but it is now just a lost market. Of course, Turkish capital will recover, and that business class so at ease with AKP policies will benefit from whatever will come out of the current crisis. But while they are right in expecting that they will eventually have the lion's share in the upcoming Syrian reconstruction, the AKP might in fact find itself paying a high price for its regional policies. Because beyond bigger business interests, there are the smaller entrepreneurs who have lost trade, there are the seasonal labourers and the factory workers who have lost work. They are the larger electoral basin of Southern Turkey. And they will hardly forget the catastrophe that hit them, the day ErdoÄŸan decided to take sides on the Syrian issue. And they might remember it when it is time to vote.


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