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Today's
Stories
March 5 / 6,
2005
Alexander Cockburn
Arnold
vs. the Nurses
March 4, 2005
Frederick Hudson
Caught
in a Cage
March 3, 2005
Pat Williams
"Social Security Protects the Young as Much as the Old"
Brian Cloughley
Headlines, Beliefs and Deceptions
Dave Lindorff
Why Do the Democrats Pamper Greenspan?
Amira Hass
Oslo All Over Again
Greg Moses
In Oscar Texas: One Down, One to Go?
Lynne Landes
Exit Poll Madness
Nelson P. Valdés
Rapture Takes Leftists
John Ross
Mexico's
Fox Schemes to Jail Front-Running Leftist
Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
March 2, 2005
Saul Landau
/ Farrah Hassen
The
"Noble Liars" Attack Syria
Mike Roselle
The State of Oregon vs. Mike Roselle: Criminalizing Environmental
Dissent
M. Junaid Alam
Columbia University and the New Anti-Semitism
Suzan Mazur
Inside the Polygamy Cults of Southern Utah
Jackson Thoreau
Texas Congressman Calls for "Nuking Syria"
Michael Donnelly
No Love for Teresa Heinz; John Edwards Gets a Pass
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Uncle
Bucky Makes a Killing
Website of the Day
The Ghosts of Karl Marx & Ed Abbey
March 1, 2005
Scott Richard
Lyons
Million
Dollar Bigotry
David Lindorff
Stealing Workers' Pensions
Patrick Cockburn
/ David Enders
Bloodbath in Iraq
Ron Jacobs
The Last Poets Recalled
Tanya Garcia
USA Next: the Industry Front Group to Privatize Social Security
Joseph Pietri
The Drug Trail Ends in Kathmandu: Golden Tar Heroin and the Black
Prince
Kona Lowell
Woody: Broken in Vietnam
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Coming End of the American Superpower
Website of
the Day
Petition: No US Intervention in Iran
February 28,
2005
Gary Leupp
Year
4 in the Five Year Plan: a June Attack on Iran?
Bill Quigley
Haitian Police Open Fire on Nonviolent Marchers
Mickey Z.
The
Million Dollar Interview: Mary Johnson on Clinton Eastwood, Hunter
Thompson and the "Right to Die"
Paul de Rooij
Why
Ted Honderich is Wrong on All Counts About Israel
David Swanson
Basic Income Guarantee Versus the Corp Media
Mario Lamo
Jimenez
Maria
Full of Cultural Contradictions at the Oscars
Emma Perez
The Attacks on Ward Churchill: a Test Case in the Neocons Purge
of Academia
Diana Johnstone
Censorship
and the Empire
Website of the Day
Stop the War Campaign!
February 26
/ 27, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
An
American Jew Laments Decline in Jewish Influence
Noam Chomsky
Nuclear
Terror at Home
Rev. William E. Alberts
Rhetoric in the Air; Reality on the Ground
Fred Gardner
AARP Gets Pot-Baited
Gary Leupp
Bush and Camus on Freedom
Saul Landau
An Interview with Cuban VP Ricardo Alarcon (Part 3): the Miami
Mafia
Robin Philpot
Second Thoughts on the Hotel Rwanda
Yitkhak Laor
In Praise of the Facts
Ben Tripp
Out of Sight; Out of Mind
Justin Taylor
Zizek Seen Over the Handlebars
Jack Random
The Wounds from Wounded Knee
Rafael Renteria
Ward Churchill and White America
Jim B.
Reflections on the Eve of Fatherhood
Seth DeLong
Land Reform in Venezuela: More Like Lincoln Than Lenin
John Chuckman
A Season of Depressing Political Reruns
Alison Weir
Relativity, LA Times Style
Richard Oxman
Political Solitude: From Garcia Marquez to Maria Full of Grace
Dr. Susan Block
It Always Rains in California: All About Female Ejaculation
Poets' Basement
Landau, Lowell, Louise, Davies, Soderstrom, Norris & Albert
February 25,
2005
Roger Burbach
Murder
in the Amazon
Behzad Yaghmaian
Iranian Distrust of America: 50 Years in the Making
Kurt Nimmo
Conclave of the Brats
Joshua Frank
Diagnosing the Green Party
John Farley
How to Stop the War in Iraq: Punish Pro-War Politicians
Lawrence Reichard
The D'Aubuisson Memorial: Flowers of Evil
Pratyush Chandra
The Royal Coup in Nepal and Global Imperialist Designs
David Smith-Ferri
When
the Battlefield has No Borders
Website of
the Day
The 2005 Election in 3-D
February 24,
2005
Omar Waraich
The
Galloway Saga: Smearing an Anti-War Politician
Brian Cloughley
Bribing and Twisting Amerian Journalists: Valerie Plame &
30 Pieces of Silver
Tom Wright
Torture Nation: Abu Ghraib, a Year Later
Sharon Smith
The Anti-War Movement After Kerry: Learning All the Wrong Lessons
Dave Lindorff
Do These Roosting Chickens Have Flu?
Fred Feldman
Lynching Ward Churchill
James Reiss
On Hearing About a Plot to Assassinate President Bush
Diane Christian
Bad
Blood: Ritual & Sexual Torture in Iraq
Website of
the Day
The Gray Line
February 23,
2005
Werther
The
Poisoned Well: What the CIA's Nazi Files Can Tell Us About Iraq
W. John Green
A Salvador Option for Iraq? How Negroponte Changes the Ground
Rules
James Petras
A New Face to Bush Foreign Policy?
Conn Hallinan
Cornering the Dragon: the Return of the China Lobby
Joe Pietri
Cannabis: the Goose that Lays Golden Eggs (For Consumers and
Cops)
Louis Proyect
Hunter Thompson and the "New" Journalism
Alexander Cockburn
Hunter
S. Thompson and Gonzo
Website of
the Day
Did You Make the Blacklist? Why Not?
February 22,
2005
Naseer Aruri
The
Politics of the Hariri Assassination: Remapping the Middle East
Richard Manning
The
Economy of Hunger: Starvation is Part of the Economic Plan
William A.
Cook
Righteous
Racism Running Rampant
Paul Craig Roberts
The Agents of Instability
Ken Krayeske
Dr. Thompson is Out
Dave Zirin
How the Owners Destroyed the NHL
Kirkpatrick
Sale
Imperial
Entropy: the Collapse of the American Empire
February 21,
2005
Hunter S. Thompson
"He
Was A Crook"
John Ross
Mexico:
the Pentagon's Proxy Army in Iraq
Ward Churchill
What Did I Really Say? Why Did
I Say It?
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Military Recruiting on Channel One: Geometry 101, Brought to
You by the US Navy
David Swanson
Fighting for a Living Wage, State by State
Dave Lindorff
All the News That's Fit to Fake
Stew Albert
Fear and Loathing: HST
Michael Neumann
Strategies
in Palestine: a Shrinking Pie in the Sky
February 19
/ 20, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Back
to Salem: Paul Shanley and the Return of "Recovered Memory"
Kathleen Christison
Struggling
for Justice in Palestine
Ted Honderich
On Being Persona Non Grata
Gary Leupp
Self-Hating Gays: Welcome to the White House & Welcome to
Commit Suicide
Don Santina
Reparations for the Blues
Jennifer Roesch
John Negroponte: Dirty Warrior
Scott Richard
Lyons
Ward
Churchill and the Identity Police
Chris Clarke
Ward Churchill and Liberal Outrage
George Beres
Censorship in the Land of Wayne Morse: Gagging W. Churchill in
Oregon
Harry Browne
The Belfast Heist: the Plot Unravels
Manuel García,
Jr.
Who Killed Rafik Hariri?
Mark Scaramella
Lessons from the Hidden Afghan War
Michael Donnelly
Whatever Happened to John Edwards?
John Pilger
First, They Attack the Past
Norman Madarasz
Death Wish for Reform in Brazil?
Surendra Devkota
The Monarchy in Nepal
Deborah Rich
How Anti-GMO Ballot Measures May Miss the Mark
Fred Gardner
When Dr. Tod Met Merle Haggard
CounterPunch
News Service
About King Mswati: Political Developments in Swaziland
Richard Oxman
CounterPunching Arthur Miller
Poets' Basement
Albert, Giebel, Tripp, Engel and Orkin
February 18,
2005
Ben Moxham
In
East Timor, the Nightmare Continues
Dave Lindorff
The
Scum Also Rises: the Bloody Career of John Negroponte
Larry Birns
Negroponte: a Resume of Death Squads, Deceptions and Bribery
Gregory Elich
N, Korea's Phantom Nukes and the US's Subversion of Diplomacy
Samuel Logan / John Meyers
The Future of Colombia's Paramilitary Death Squads
Nicole Colson
Shock and Awe on Civil Liberties: From Lynne Stewart to Ward
Churchill
Suzan Mazur
Whose National Security Are We Talking About?
Mickey Z.
"One
Man Has Stopped Killing"
February 17,
2005
Joshua Frank
Hogtying
of the Deaniacs
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
Willing Sychophants: the Conservative Media
Robert Fisk
Under
the Shadow of Death in Lebanon
Christopher
Brauchli
Where
Time Stands Still: Kinsey and Darwin in Cobb County, GA
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Military
Recruitment TV: Why Send Them to College, When Your Kid Can be
Cannon Fodder?
Alison Weir
Russia, Israel and Media Omissions
Ahrar Ahmad
A Review of Shahid Alam's "Is There an Islamic Problem?"
Saul Landau
An
Interview with Cuban VP Ricardo Alarcon: "The US Tramples
the Laws It Wrote"
Website of the Day
Petition to Support Ward Churchill
February 16,
2005
Robert Fisk
Lebanon:
a Battlefield for the Wars of Others
Kevin Zeese
Creating a Real Ownership Society: Share the Wealth; Protect
Retirement
Gary Leupp
Meanwhile, in Nepal...
Ron Jacobs
Why the Iranian Opposition Should Not Trust the Bush Administration
Jessica Leight
Oil-Flush Chavez Begins to Strut His Stuff
Greg Moses
Houston, You've Got a Problem: Documenting Voting Irregularities
in Texas
Mark Engler
The Last Porto Alegre
Jack McCarthy
Where's the Outrage About Pat? Buchanan Does a Churchill
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy Dangerously Slanted Toward Israel
Website of the Day
The
World is Melting: a Photo Survey by Gary Braasch
February 15,
2005
CounterPunch
News Service
Dean
a "Safe" Moderate, Says NYT Citing CounterPunch
Robert Fisk
The
Killing of Mr. Lebanon
Uri Avnery
"Sharm-al-Sheikh,
We Have Come Back Again"
Stan Cox
Fighting Big Pharma in Little Digwal
Mickey Z.
Radio
Active North of the Border: an Interview with Chris Cook
Dave Zirin
Bashing Bush: Jose Canseco Comes Clean
Nadia Martinez
Ending
World Poverty? Opening at the World Bank, Apply Now
Lila Rajiva
"Little Eichmanns" and the 'Harijan': the Danger of
Magical Thinking in Politics
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
American Job Sell Out
February 14,
2005
Robert Jensen
Ward
Churchill: Right to Speak Out; Right About 9/11
Brian Cloughley
Kuwait's Freedom, Bush-style
Patrick Cockburn
Outcome
of the Iraqi Elections: Shortages, Corruption, Guerrilla War
Gary Leupp
Post-election Iraq: What Next?
Michael Donnelly
Sacred Nature: Just Another Commodity?
Dave Lindorff
When Bush Came to My Neighborhood
Elaine Cassel
The
Lynne Stewart Verdict
February 12
/ 13, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill's Genes
Saul Landau
Alarcon
Speaks: an Interview with the Vice President of Cuba
Paul Craig
Roberts
Nothing
to Fear But Bush Himself
Patrick Cockburn
Two Years After the Fall of Saddam, the Resistance Controls All
Major Roads into Baghdad
John Feffer
Bush
v. N. Korea: Round Two
Mickey Z.
Right to Remain Silent; Duty to Speak
Kurt Nimmo
Viva la Cucaracha!
Fred Gardner
Waiting for Raich
Dave Zirin
Fighting the New Republic(ans)
John Chuckman
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Ben Tripp
A Leftist on the Bush Payroll
Carol Norris
"Buddy, Can You Spare a Dwarf?"
Robert Fisk
No Middle East Peace Without Justice
Frank / Chowkwanyun
Muzzled Activist in an Age of Terror: the Case of Sherman Austin
Mike Whitney
Condi's Euro Tour
Deborah Frisch
A Psychologist's Defense of Ward Churchill
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Reading Khomeini in Colorado
Christine TenBarge
What's So Special About Ward?
Ron Jacobs
Curtis Mayfield's Train to Jordan
Dr. Susan Block
Chemistry of Love: a Valentine's Greeting
Poets' Basement
Louise, Smith-Ferri, Ford and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Free Sherman
February 11,
20055
Manuel Garcia,
Jr
The
Eight Percent War
Kurt Nimmo
Ann
Coulter's Racism: Where's Geronimo When You Really Need
Him?
Dave Lindorff
Guckert
or Gannon? The Perfect Plant; He Fit Right In
Larry Birns
War is Peace; Slavery is Freedom: Democracy According to Elliott
Abrams
Bill Quigley
Twenty Questions: a Social Justice Quiz
Tom Barry
Bush's State of Delusion
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Lynne
Stewart's Conviction Hurts Us All
February 10,
2005
Dave Lindorff
What
Academic Freedom?
Christopher Brauchli
The Love of Slaughter: From Rwanda to Iraq
Patrick Cockburn
In Baghdad, It's Easy to Get Killed
Nicole Colson
Have the Democrats Surrendered on Abortion Rights?
Suzan Mazur
More
on the Assassination of Lumumba from Mr. Garsin of Kinshasha
Michael Donnelly
Salvaging an Opposition
Mike Stark
Driving Ossie Davis: "Give Them a Little Truth, a Little
Hope"
Greg Moses
Taking
Jesus Back from the Hijackers
Website of
the Day
The Missionary Positions
February 9,
2005
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Duck
and Cover Redux: Bunker Busters and City Levellers
Mickey Z.
What Ward Churchill Didn't Say
John Ross
Hecho
en Mexico: the Iraqi Election
Tom Barry
Ambassador of Lies: Elliott Abrams, the Neocon's Neocon
Conn Hallinan
The
Coup in Nepal: Nursing the Pinion
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Vision for Iraq: Cricket is Fine, But Chess is "Absolutely
Forbidden"
Steen Sohn
Danish PM Says It's OK for Israel to Violate UN Resolutions
Tim Wise
Reflections on Empire and Uppity Indians
Website of
the Day
Support Antiwar.com
February 8,
2005
Patrick Cockburn
Shia/Kurd
Coalition to Dominate New Iraqi Govt.: "It's an Electoral
Pact, Not a Party"
Brian Cloughley
Out
of the Mouths of Generals: "It's Fun to Shoot Some People"
Steve Breyman
Against the Selfishness of the "Ownership Society"
Harry Browne
"Don't
Get on that Plane!": Soldiers Seek Asylum in Ireland
Doug Giebel
"We Love Free Speech in America": the People, the President
and Ward Churchill
Nate Collins
The Censorship of Ward Churchill and Dancehall Reggae: It's the
Same Beast
Dave Lindorff
It's Time for a Labor-Oriented Newspaper
David Smith-Ferri
Sanctions and the Health Crisis in Iraq
February 7,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
War on Jobs
Carolyn Baker
The New McCarthyism on Campus: Churchill and the Attack on Higher
Ed
Joshua Frank
Marc Cooper's Hit List: First Mumia; Now Ward Churchill
Mickey Z.
Warning: More Hate Speech from W. Churchill
Patrick Cockburn
The
Kidnapping Gangs of Iraq
Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman: Scribe for New Age Imperialism
Stacie Jonas
Pinochet: Fit to be Tried
Dave Zirin
A Miserable Super Sunday: Clinton, Bush and the FBI
Tariq Ali
Imperial
Delusions
February 5
/ 6, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill and the Mad Dogs
Kurt Nimmo
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day
Joshua Frank
Liberals Trash Ward Churchill
P. Sainath
Mumbai's Man-Made Tsunami
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Triumph; Allawi's Bust
Laura Carlsen
Bush, Rice and Latin America
Dave Lindorff
How the NYT Killed the Bush Bulge Story
Pamela Olson
West Bank Story
Behzad Yaghmaian
The Future of Sudanese Refugees in the West
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
A Threatened UN in King George's Court
Roger Burbach
World Social Forum: a Tale of Two Presidents
Robert Fisk
History by Laptop
David Swanson
James Forman and the Liberal-Labor Syndrome
Justin E.H. Smith
Gay Marriage: a Report from Canada
Cacie Hart
The "State" of the Union: More War and a Ban on Love
Ron Jacobs
Chairman Bob Avakian: a Revolutionary Life
Mickey Z.
Viewing America from the Outside
Ben Tripp
Republican Heroes: a New Breed of Good Guy
Ben Sonnenberg
France at the End of the Devil's Decade: Renoir's Rules of the
Game
Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Davies, Collins, & Albert
Website of
the Weekend
John Trudell: How to Earn a 17,000 Page FBI File
February 4,
2005
Brian Cloughley
The
Army Symphonist: "Sometimes the Only Way to Change the Behavior
of Someone Like That is to Kill Them"
Bill Christison
Election
Parallels: Vietnam, 1967; Iraq, 2005
Elaine Cassel
Did Zoloft Make Him Do It?
Jacob Levich
Chomsky and the Draft
Kanak Mani Dixit
Return of the Royalists in Nepal
Ron Jacobs
The
Downward Spiral in Iraq
February 3,
2005
Ward Churchill
On
the Injustice of Getting Smeared: a Campaign of Fabrications
and Gross Distortions
Sharon Smith
Resisting
Soldiers Need Our Support
Mickey Z.
Leslie
Gelb Asks Iraq: Who's Your Daddy?
Mike Whitney
President of Alienation: a Desperate State of the Union
Jenna Orkin
9/11 the Sequel: the Toxic State of Lower Manhattan
Saul Landau
Elections Won't Prevent Civil War in Iraq
Yitzhak Laor
Strange is the Silence
Dave Lindorff
The
Assault on Social Security: a New Campaign of Lies
February 2,
2005
David Domke
/ Kevin Coe
Bush's
Brand of Christianity
Noam Chomsky
Iraq
After the Elections
M. Shahid Alam
O'Reilly's
Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me
in Its Crosshairs
Richard Oxman
Ringing in 1984 with Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen
Joshua Frank
The Suckering of Howard Dean
Dave Lindorff
A History Lesson from the NYT
Nina Hartley
Feminists for Porn
Website of the Day
War is a Racket
February 1,
2005
Joshua L. Dratel
The
Torture Memos
Patrick Cockburn
New Doubts About Allawi
Robert Fisk
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"
Uri Avnery
The Stalemate
Col. Dan Smith
"W" Stands for Withdrawal
Alison Weir
Making America as "Secure" as Israel
Alan Farago
Heaven and Hell in the Everglades
Ray Hanania
Low Voter Turnout of Iraqi Expatriates: Less Than 10% of Qualified
Voters
Paul Craig
Roberts
American
Police State
Website of the Day
Statisticians Refute Official Rationale for Exit Poll Errors
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
Weekend Edition
March 5 / 6, 2005
Racism, Fairy-tale Wealth and Idi Amin
Memories
of Kawaggi, Saudi Arabia
By
JENNA ORKIN
Eighteen years ago my family and I moved
to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where my husband, Nick, had been sent
by his maritime law firm. [Names have been changed and, for
the record, the marriage, ended.] With last year's bombing of
a compound like the one we lived on and with the probable inclusion
of women in the Kingdom's next municipal elections, it seems
time to reflect on a lifestyle that's gone the way of the ha-ha
plant.
"A maritime law firm in
the desert?" exclaimed the pianist Rosalyn Tureck when I
told her where we were going.
But Jeddah is a port and anyway,
Nick's firm was expanding to include international law.
I didn't want to move to Saudi
Arabia. There'd just been a spate of hijackings and even if
we got past the improbable hurdle of never arriving in the first
place, I worried that a truck could barrel past the compound
guard and blow the place up.
"Nothing like that has
ever happened," Nick assured. "Saudi Arabia isn't
like the rest of the Middle East. It's a repressive regime;
no one dares even steal your pocketbook; they'd get their hand
cut off."
Ah, the upside of repression...
I called a former CIA agent who had written a book about the
Kingdom.
"If you hear of any trouble,
unrest among foreign workers, for instance, you should leave,"
he advised. He knew that all was not well in the state of that
Shangri-La we were moving to.
Then the hijackings stopped
so I agreed to go.
I bought a book to learn Arabic.
It was uphill work. For one letter of the alphabet the book
recommended, "Approximate the sound one makes when blowing
on one's glasses." Transliterations were crude; I showed
a certain word, written in Roman letters but translated three
unrelated ways on the same page, to an Egyptian friend. She
frowned and said, "I do not know this word. Why are you
studying Arabic? Everyone you'll meet will speak English."
"I figure if we get taken
hostage they might look more kindly on the family of someone
who knows a bit of the language."
"They'll think you're
a spy."
Jeddah airport: Gleamingly modern but for the black ghosts mingling
with the bustling crowd. Dressed like medieval executioners,
they were largely silent. So it was disconcerting when one of
them yelled, gesticulating that I was standing on the wrong line.
We moved to a compound I shall
call the Garden of Jeddah. Like an imaginary island I dreamed
up when I was eleven, it had one of everything: One grocery
store where if some esoteric product a resident desired was missing,
the eager-to-please Philippino manager ordered it from the supermarket;
one restaurant; one dry cleaner, one doctor. If the air conditioner
acted up or failed to, if the sink got clogged, the compound
sent over a Philippino worker to fix it, no charge. "Philippinos
fix everything," grinned a maintenance worker as he finished
tinkering with the T.V. These days they probably fix computers
too.
People ask if it took a long
time to get used to life in Saudi Arabia. It took two days.
After being shown around Jeddah by Laurie, the wife of the head
partner at the firm, (shopping malls downtown; a lovely Old Section
with delicately worked though not particularly sturdy wooden
balconies) every day was the same: writing in the morning while
our son was at preschool, childrearing for the rest of the day.
Some women complained about not being allowed to drive. I wondered
where they wanted to go. With its gardens and turquoise-tiled
fountains, the oasis of the compound approached one's deep-rooted
notions of Paradise, lending plausibility to the local legend
that Eve was buried nearby. The lifestyle of luxurious house
arrest suited my introspective tendencies at the time.
Still, when I ventured outside
preoccupations with my book or my husband or son and focussed
on the world we lived in now, it presented a disheartening picture.
Garden of Jeddah was Pleasantville, the women wafting inexorably
toward Stepford wifehood.
The noticeboard at the compound's
Information Center was gaily bursting with announcements of classes
in everything from quilting to crocheting; from flower arranging
to cake-decorating. Enough activities to gain the place instant
accreditation as a lunatic asylum. "It helps to have a
hobby," Laurie advised. One woman worked all winter on
a really big jigsaw puzzle.
You might think that in such
an environment, where we were thrown together as on an episode
of Survivor, gossip and intrigue would flourish. No such luck.
Conversation around the pool dwelt mainly on vacations and beauty
aids. In the two years we were in Jeddah I heard of only one
affair and of that, only that the new couple were unhappy. There
were three pool drownings of children too, one of them on our
compound: A five-year-old Sudanese boy, the son of one of the
maids. "He used to chase the ball when we played tennis,"
my friend Margaret reflected. The company that employed the
maid paid for her to fly home to bury her son. A week later,
she returned to work. No safety gates were put up around the
pools. Life went on as though nothing had happened.
No one talked about the news;
there wasn't any to talk about. The local papers had a couple
of pages of international news; one page devoted to Saudi achievements
including a Medical Column which might have been better described
as the kidney transplant column. The most entertaining section
of the paper contained reports from sources referred to only
as "Agencies" of events such as the birth to a family
in rural China of a twenty-third child; like all the other children,
a girl.
The news wasn't censored so
long as reports covered approved topics and with an upbeat angle.
"No news is bad news" seemed to be the motto, "unless
it's taking place somewhere else." Emily, a journalist
friend, said she was even told to write upbeat restaurant reviews.
The weather was censored too.
Newspapers downplayed the temperature - as measured on several
people's home thermometers - when it went above fifty degrees
Celsius since at that point a work stoppage would have to be
declared for outdoor labor. Although when the temperature once
hit 53 degrees Celsius (127 degrees Fahrenheit) no one bothered
to conceal the truth; you knew it as soon as you touched the
handle to the car door.
Foreign magazines which didn't
toe the line got the full treatment: References to pork, alcohol
and nudity were censored with a scribble of black magic marker.
The practice added a new dimension to crossword puzzles. Sometimes
ads were ripped out entirely so that you also lost the news on
the other side of the page.
One night we watched a movie
in which several women sat around a pool in bathing suits. A
black block covered each one like a literal body guard, bobbing
along in front of her when she got up to stroll languidly to
the house. Once the censor got distracted; the black block lagged
behind the woman so we got a glimpse of the forbidden bod until
the block caught up.
There was a wedding in that
movie too but since it took place in a church, I don't know what
happened.
T.V. news consisted at times
of graduations presented in toto. The high point of the news
cycle was the Today Show which, because of the seventeen hour
lag in airing overseas, was referred to by a visiting wit as
the Yesterday show.
Any interesting local news
travelled through the grapevine. This was how we learned of
a change in the law that was to affect Nick's client, Michael.
The new law said that henceforth, imported barley was to be
dyed red to distinguish it from the local variety and so protect
the market. The authorities had released a recipe for dyeing
the barley which Michael said resembled his grandmother's method
of dyeing Easter eggs. It involved boiling the grain, then dousing
it until the water ran clear. The law was effective immediately.
Michael had several tons of barley due to arrive in three days.
Even the beauty itself of Garden of Jeddah was unnatural. Thanks
to the regular 'fogging', in which a worker came by on a tractor
from which billowed clouds of pesticide, we never had so much
as a fly. The compound management downplayed any ill effects
to humans of the pesticide but at a neighboring compound, the
neurological symptoms of several residents led to the discovery
of elevated arsenic in their blood.
But not even the fog that saved
us from insects, vermin and birds could prevent a phenomenon
during our second year: The sky grew yellow; the next morning,
the trees were bare and locusts dotted the garden paths.
And what was it like to be
a woman in Saudi Arabia?
A neighbor who ventured downtown
during a religious holiday got hassled for not wearing a scarf.
The mutawwa (religious policeman) was stunned when she turned
around. For unlike her big blond hair, her face did not conceal
her seventy years. When the mutawwa were in top form and they
thought your skirt too short, she said, they hit your legs with
a stick.
My own encounter with Arab
antifeminism took place one afternoon when a teenager, rampaging
through the garden paths of the compound on a motorcycle, came
within a foot of my two-year-old son. The compound management
refused to act; I called the police.
"Your husband has to make
the report," they said.
"He's not here; he didn't
see the incident. He doesn't know anything about it."
"Your husband has to make
the report."
Then there was the quaint (and
by now obsolete?) criterion for testifying in court, relayed
to us by a reputed scholar of Shari'a law: Greater weight is
given to the testimony of an adult male Muslim who has never
urinated standing up; a criterion that would, of course, be easily
satisfied by an adult female Muslim or male Muslim baby.
More insidious than the overt
antifeminism of the Arabs was the patronizing attitude of our
midWestern compatriots, asking Nick about his 'better half' and
refusing to call me by my own last name. It was easier with
Saudis according to whose custom, I was told, women are not considered
worthy to take their husband's name.
As for the attitude that women
tempt men through their dress to commit rape, it wasn't so different
from the excuses one sometimes hears in this country.
"Guess what!" announced
a man at a cocktail party at the Consulate. "The X Company
won their fight with the Saudis. Remember how they wanted to
use female secretaries but the Saudis wouldn't let them? Well,
the Saudis backed down! The women secretaries can come over!"
"All right!" Everyone
raised their glasses. "Yes!"
I exchanged glances with Emily.
In their demand for female secretaries, was the X Company promoting
the cause of women? It was sometimes hard in Saudi Arabia to
know whose side to be on.
The other thing people say when I tell them I used to live in
Saudi Arabia is, "How exotic." They assume that Westerners
mingled freely with the Saudis so that it was possible to gain
insight into the local way of life.
But Saudis and Westerners were
mutually wary: The Saudis, afraid of becoming or even seeming
corrupted by casual association with us; the Westerners afraid
of violating some obscure tenet of Shari'a law and getting thrown
in jail. However the two groups socialized for appearance' sake,
each taking pains to be sensitive to the other's customs. ("In
Arab culture it is considered rude to sit in such a way as to
show the sole of the shoe," advised one company brochure.)
So these gettogethers were
dominated by awkward pleasantries, even as they waxed into the
night - dinner in Saudi Arabia sometimes not being served until
11 p.m. - since no one was getting drunk. Whenever we went to
the house of Nick's boss, his wife (whose limited English worked
to the advantage of maintaining distance) invariably said, "You
like Jeddah? Jeddah very nice." That was it for the rest
of the evening.
But even the most banal conversation
acquires panache when it's conducted in a palace.
One night Michael invited us
to dinner at the house of a Saudi. A few weeks earlier, he'd
invited us to another dinner which had been a raucous family
affair. So for this gathering I put on similar clothes, a cotton
skirt and blouse.
To get to the L family compound
we followed Michael's directions which, since most streets didn't
have names, relied on landmarks: "Make a right at the Fallopian
tubes;" (an abstract sculpture) "Another right at the
car in the wall." (Sculpture or accident? One couldn't
be sure).
A butler in a long white robe
and turban led us inside where two groups sat in silence, the
men in one part of the room, the women in the other.
Our hostess, dressed in an
expensive silk suit, looked me up and down disapprovingly.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I didn't realize this would be such an elegant party."
"That's all right,"
she said stiffly. "Next time you will be elegant."
Nick and I parted for our respective
circles. I sat with a group of five women who introduced themselves
grudgingly before falling back into silence.
I addressed one of the less
forbidding ones. "What do you do?" I asked.
She shrugged. "And you?"
"I have a son and I'm
trying to write a book. How about you?" I looked at the
woman next to her.
"I visit my friends.
Drink tea."
"Put that in your book," said the third.
An overweight young girl shrugged
and said, "I don't do anything. I'm lazy." There
was no reason to doubt her.
A college-age girl came down
the stairs in a yellow dress with black polka dots. She smiled
in an open, friendly way.
"And I study computers,"
she said. We talked for a bit but the silence of the others
sent such strong vibes of disapproval that we stopped.
Nick came over and whispered
in my ear. "You see that room over there?"
The small alcove held a low
sofa covered in embroidered pillows. The walls were painted
gold.
"It cost $200,000 to decorate."
The servant passed around a
contraption that hissed like an oxygen machine: The hookah,
containing a brew made from rotting fruit. I was tempted to
try it but shook my head.
The buffet spread - lamb, taboule,
mezzah - was exquisite.
Our hostess approached again,
still wearing an expression of disdain. After complimenting
her on the dinner, I asked her about the boutique she ran.
"We have the latest fashions
from Paris," she said. I wondered what part she'd played
in a fashion show in which an Australian friend of mine, Leslie,
had modelled since Saudi women weren't allowed to:
"We changed clothes really
quickly," Leslie had said, "so I didn't realize til
afterwards that I was wearing a huge purple bow on my bottom."
"Where are your servants
from?" I asked Mrs. L.. I'd counted four and that was without
going into the kitchen.
"I don't know,"
she bristled.
"From the Sudan," said her husband. "What about
you?"
Ah, someone to talk to!
As I answered his question,
an odd object caught my eye: the chandelier. It was pastel
colored and resembled a melting wedding cake.
"My wife did the decorating,"
Mr. L.. interjected, wanting to disassociate himself from the
eyesore.
We were getting along great
which was no doubt why after ten minutes he turned on his heels
and never spoke to me again. Conversation is for form only;
it must never become animated or gain substance.
The stiff atmosphere even in informal gatherings might have driven
Westerners underground for real R&R but for the godsend of
diplomatic immunity. Oases of Western law, Consulates became
the Studio 54 of Jeddah, the place everyone clamored to get in
since there you could drink with impunity so long as you didn't
"act drunk" once you left.
The Y Consulate held an Open
House every Monday night. The bar was a bare room, possibly
a converted garage, furnished with a few wooden counters on which
woe-begone or furtive-looking loners perched their beers. The
place had the air of the final outpost of the frontier, its habitues
mostly single men in their forties escaping failure back home
or, courtesy of a liberal policy towards overseas earnings, working
their way out of tax debt. The rest of the guests were career
expatriot couples, hardy souls who'd been making a home away
from home their entire adult lives.
Even here conversation followed
familiar lines: How long have you been in Jeddah? How long
are you planning to stay?
But one night after a couple
of drinks Emily told of an unusual encounter: Her radio station
had held a competition for Saudi students to write an essay in
English. One entrant's family name was Amin. Emily surmised
the boy might be the son of Idi Amin, former Ugandan President,
known for cannibalism and siccing rats onto the open entrails
of his enemies. Once he was ousted from power, Saudi Arabia
was the only country that would have him and then, only on condition
that he lie low and not make trouble.
"I couldn't resist,"
Emily said. "I gave the kid a prize.+He showed up with
his father who was huge; he blocked the doorway. No one recognized
him but me. 'I said, 'Well! Your son certainly speaks wonderful
English!' 'You will give him certificate,' he said." Emily
imitated his ominous voice.
"'Of course!'I looked
in the drawers for any official stamp I could find. Stamp, stamp,
stamp."
She replayed the frenzy with
which she had gussied up a certificate for Amin's son. Amin
and son left satisfied.
It was at the Y Consulate that
I met Margaret, a British woman married to a salesman. James
had been a gifted artist but the Gardners had spent their married
life in what Somerset Maugham would have called the "colonies."
I once asked James what was the strangest thing he'd ever witnessed
during those years. (I, too, couldn't shake the sense that living
abroad was exotic.) After thinking for a moment, he answered,
"A witch doctor making rain. I suppose he must have had
some knowledge of meteorology."
Margaret and I went to the
souk (market) a few times together. "I like haggling,"
she confessed in the back seat of the car as we were driven there
by James' company driver.
But as we spent more time together,
she said things that rankled. Speaking of riots in the London
neighborhood of Brixton she said, "They make their own ghettoes,
don't they?"
I was too taken aback to say
anything at that moment but after we parted I mulled over a response.
The opportunity to voice it
came soon enough. I asked her about a course she had taken in
teaching English as a Second Language.
"Not very good,"
she said. "But the teacher's name was Hannah Solomon so
what do you expect?" She rubbed her thumb and forefinger
together.
"I have to ask you to
stop making these comments," I said.
"Why?" She didn't
feign innocence. "Everyone talks like this, or at least
the honest ones do."
"No they don't although
maybe they do in the circles you're used to."
"I'm not talking about
you."
"I can't keep going places
with you if you talk this way with me."
"I have to be able to
speak the way I want in my own house. If this affects you personally,
tell me and I'll stop. Otherwise not."
"It does affect me personally."
"How?"
"They're offensive comments.
Lots of people in my generation would feel that way."
(Margaret was almost thirty years older than I.)
"Look, if this is about
you, that's one thing. Otherwise I'll speak the way I like."
We weren't getting anywhere.
But a few weeks before, Nick had learned that his boss had been
secretly negotiating with another firm; we were going home in
three months. I hadn't been allowed to tell anyone but this
change in our plans affected my willingness to say what I said
next:
"All right. My father
was Jewish."
This was a fact I kept close
to the vest in Saudi Arabia, since Jews were not allowed in the
country. "You could get deported," Nick had said when
we first went over and I stoutly said I wasn't going to hide
anything. Deported? I thought. Great! He read my mind: "Or
thrown in jail." That had done it. Cowardice prevailed.
"I'm so sorry," Margaret
said now, by which she didn't mean, "I'm sorry you're half-Jewish,"
but, "I'm sorry I said anti-Semitic and other offensive
things to you."
In the silence that followed
I could see her replaying our conversations, looking at my responses
in a new light.
"I think you think that
everyone's secretly racist except for maybe a few idealists like
me," I said.
"I do think that, yes."
She also understood that by
letting her in on what needed to be kept secret in Saudi Arabia,
I'd placed more trust in her than she'd earned.
"Well, it's very brave
of you, being here, isn't it?"
What she also meant was, it's
brave of you to have told me. Then, to 'repay' me in the currency
of confidences she continued:
"I have a black niece.
I don't tell many people that. My brother and his wife adopted
her to keep the marriage together."
"Did it work?"
"More or less but it's
a terrible reason to have a child, a terrible thing to do to
the child."
She sounded more angry than
was warranted by any moves her brother and sister-in-law might
have made to keep their marriage together.
She showed me pictures of her
family including her niece as a little girl.
"Do you make racist remarks
in front of your niece?"
"Of course not. It would
hurt her. But I'm not a racist. I don't do anything to black
people or Jews."
The confidences continued.
About her own son she said, "He's a bit of a pyromaniac.
Whenever we have a dinner party, it's always, 'Robert, would
you like to light the candles?'"
"I have the feeling I'm
waiting for something," she said one day. "You're
the only person I've told that to."
"Maybe you're waiting
for a grandchild."
"No!"
But I also had the feeling
in Saudi Arabia of the suspension of reality, an interruption
in my real life.
Another time she reported that
the wife of the Y Consul had said, "Jenna looks like Anne
Frank." (No one's ever said that before but in Saudi Arabia
any expat who wasn't blond looked like Anne Frank.) "Do
you think she might be Jewish?"
"Oh, I shouldn't think
so," Margaret had said.
Still, when Margaret and I
went back to the souk together, I refrained from bargaining.
Didn't want to feed any stereotype notions she might still be
harboring.
One day she gave a lunch at
which the subject of anti-Jewish sentiment in Saudi Arabia came
up.
"They're anti-Zionist,
not anti-Jewish," said Emily.
"They don't let Jews in
the country," I reminded her.
"Oh well, that, yes.
But they have a Jewish finance adviser."
She was not being ironic.
For the rest of our time in
Saudi Arabia Margaret tried to make up for having behaved like
a colonial boor. After a dinner party she said, "I wish
you could have been a fly on the wall and heard all the anti-Semitic
comments people were making." ("You see, it IS everywhere;
it's not just me.")
And when Nick and I went to
India she visited our son every day. He remembers the M&Ms
that she kept in an Easter egg for him.
Nick had won the India trip
in a raffle; in Saudi Arabia, whenever anyone wanted to offer
a reward or incentive, it took the form of a ticket out of the
country. Thus we also earned a trip to Bangkok over Eid, the
holiday following the abstinence month of Ramadan.
The plane was filled with young
Saudi men in Spring Break mode. One let his pet falcon out of
its cage; another set up a barbecue in the aisle; a third tried
to get into the cockpit. This was pre 9/11 and there was no
thought of malice. The exasperated stewardesses simply scolded
the men like children.
Bangkok: gold pagoda towers
against a blue sky; an illustration out of Scheherazade. In
the window of a tiny shop six people sat in two rows on the floor
watching T.V; at least until we came along at which point they
watched us instead.
From Bangkok to Hong Kong which
felt like New York only more so. Laundry lines hung out the
windows of forty storey skyscrapers.
We took one trip within the
Kingdom. As nonMuslims, we weren't allowed in Mecca so we went
south to Najran. Since our group of fifteen were the only guests
at the hotel, we made friends with the staff who wound up telling
us how much they got paid. Philippinos earned the most; Sri
Lankans, the least.
I took our son to the playground
until a band of baboons descended like a gang from neighboring
turf.
At the end of the return flight
the familiar dry, cracked dirt of the desert lay beneath us,
dotted with scrawny camels. My heart sank with the descending
plane.
When we moved back to New York,
I overheard a conversation on the subway:
"They tried to find a
way to keep the raccoons out of the garbage," a young woman
said. "But when they came up with a different lock on the
lid that stumped the raccoons, it also stumped the tenants."
A far cry from "Jeddah
very nice."
I was home.
Jenna Orkin is one of twelve original plaintiffs
in a potential class action lawsuit against the EPA. She is a
member of the World Trade Center
Environmental Organization and can be reached at: Jennakilt@aol.com
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