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Safeguarding Arab media heritage… in Israel

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By Khaled Diab

The world’s largest Arabic-language press archive is located in Israel. Should Arabs use it or boycott it?

Wednesday 6 June 2012

Some vintage Egyptian newspapers. Photo: ©Khaled Diab

After a lively encounter at Tel Aviv University with the renegade Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, author of the bestselling The invention of the Jewish people, I met a friend, the young Israeli Arabist and historian Ofir Winter who has a profound interest in Egypt and is researching Arab perceptions of Israel.

“I have a surprise for you. It’s one of the university’s hidden gems,” he told me as he led me to a poorly lit and rarely visited corner of the campus. Our destination: the university’s Arabic press archives which, its curators claim, is the largest collection of Arab print media in the world.

Pleasantly surprised by the unexpected visit from an Egyptian, the two Michaels who seem to be temporarily in charge following the untimely death of the archive’s founder Haim Gal proudly showed me around, including a couple of the seven massive halls containing some 24,000 boxes of publications of all sorts dating back to the 1950s. In the archive’s main hall was row upon row of leading and obscure Arab publications – not just newspapers and political journals, but also lifestyle and women’s magazines – not to mention Turkish and Persian titles.

Since the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions erupted last year, the archive’s resource-strapped team, mostly made up of volunteers, has struggled to keep up with the explosion in new publications that have emerged, especially online. “New titles are coming out all the time and we have to be fast in downloading them because some don’t stay online for long,” explained one researcher as she clicked away at her computer.

One of the Michaels showed me an item that seemed to hold pride of place in the collection, even though it was only a facsimile, the first-ever edition of Egypt’s oldest newspaper still in print, al-Ahram, dated 5 August 1876. Instead of the paper’s famous masthead featuring the three pyramids of Giza, the original showed only two pyramids and the Sphinx. Unlike today’s bulky version, issue one was one large sheet folded into four pages. It is also very difficult to read for the modern eye, because it contained no columns or headlines.

“The most exciting materials I found there were the October magazines from the time of Sadat’s peace initiative,” Winter tells me. “I was moved deeply when I saw images of Sadat arriving at Haifa port in September 1979, with happy Israeli children waving the flags of both Egypt and Israel.”

Of course, the very existence of this archive is likely to arouse suspicion in the minds of some Arabs, who are bound to view it as an intelligence-gathering apparatus. The archive’s management itself insists that it is a resource open to all academics, though the media and the government are welcome to consult it. Academics from Jordan, Iraq, Palestine and other Arab countries are also among its clients, despite the Arab boycott of Israel.

“I don’t know the exact motives of its founders,” admits Winter. “But maybe, just maybe, you can interpret this huge archive as an attempt to bridge the qualitative distance (or isolation) between Israel and the Arab world quantitatively.”

But this message of building bridges is likely to get lost amid the ding of the call for an international cultural and academic boycott of Israel. Omar Barghouti, who wrote a widely praised book on the subject of boycott, divestment and sanctions, calls on “every conscientious academic and academic institution to boycott all Israeli academic institutions because of their ongoing deep complicity in perpetuating the occupation and other forms of oppression”. Yet Barghouti holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Tel Aviv University, which he acquired after co-founding the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel – a contradiction he has refused to explain.

Although many Israeli academics are complicit in perpetuating the inhumane status quo, others are not. For instance, Sand, who I had come to meet, can hardly be described as an apologist for Israeli oppression, was friends with Palestine’s national poet Mahmoud Darwish, insisted that the Arabic version of his book should be published in Ramallah and not Cairo or Beirut, and advocates transforming Israel, in the framework of the two-state solution, into a truly democratic state for all its citizens.

Yet Sand finds himself in the bizarre situation of being effectively under boycott. “They will not invite me to Ramallah because I teach at Tel Aviv University,” he told me. “Any pressure that is not terror is welcome. But be careful. You have started to boycott the most liberal segment of the Israeli political culture.”

While I support a targeted economic boycott against Israel to ensure that the outside world does not bankroll the occupation and oppression of Palestinians, I find a blanket cultural or academic boycott to be unfair and counterproductive. Far better would be two parallel campaigns: one to boycott Israeli peacebreakers and another to embrace and engage with Israeli peacemakers.

This article first appeared in The National on 5 June 2012.

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Tags: arab world, arabic press archive, egyptian revolution, israel, media, palestine, ramallah, research, shlomo sand, tel aviv

Basque Country: In the eye of the financial storm

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By Eric Bienefeld

Although many Europeans associate it with political turmoil, the Basque Country is the only Spanish region where the economic outlooks is mild.

Tuesday 13 March 2012

In the summer months, the beachside cafés in the Sagües quarter of San Sebastián (Basque Country, Spain) are bustling. The surfers take their morning session, while tourists, local youth and middle-aged clientele take their mid-afternoon cañas, or small beers. Walking through the parte vieja – old quarter of the city – a sign reads: “Tourists beware you are not in Spain, nor France, you are in the Basque Country”. Something seems very different here.

You get the impression that the financial crisis has not taken hold here. Nevertheless, the winter months are hard for the service sector. Juan Ramon, a local taxi driver, confirms the difficulties of keeping one’s head above water in the ‘off-season’. Elena, one of the owners of La Consentida, a pintxos bar along the normally thriving coastal avenue, La Zurriola, notes the effects of the now four-year crisis. “Every day we are worried about business, but winter is always especially difficult,” she says.

Although things may be bad in the Basque Country, the situation is worse in the rest of Spain, especially in the south where mass tourism plays a huge role. But the Basque Country has a different background. Its research centres and traditional industries are still fairing well in the financial storm.

Amid soaring unemployment and fears of a double-dip recession in Spain, the Basque Country offers a contrasting picture. The Spanish situation is grim, with 5.3 million unemployed at the end of 2011, the Bank of Spain predicts that the country’s economy will fall into another recession, contracting by 1.5% in 2012, which would exacerbate the 22.9% unemployment rate reported at the end of 2011, according to the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (INE).

Meanwhile, the Basque Country has the lowest unemployment rate of all the Spanish regions, known as Autonomous Communities, and has maintained comparatively lower levels for decades. With a population of 2.16 million, the Basque Country’s unemployed is 159,667. That’s just 7.4% unemployment, way below the Spanish average.

But why is the Basque country weathering the financial storm better than the rest of Spain? It goes back to basic economic drivers… industry and production. Iron mining and steel manufacturing helped build this region and, unlike the UK and other struggling European economies, the Basque Country is not letting go of them without a fight.

Heavy mining at the turn of the 19th and well into the 20th century gave the Basque region a solid economic base and provided steady employment for skilled and unskilled workers, including economic migrants. Today, the Basque Country’s level of industrialisation is greater than the EU average.

The Basques have also been able to reinvent themselves, with EU backing and opportunities. Through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the EU has €241 million in co-funding destined for the Basque Country under the Regional Competitiveness and Employment programme (2007-2013). The funds are devoted to areas that are already highly developed in the Basque Country, including science and technology, research and development, environment, energy resources, and transport.

The tiny Basque Country punches above its weight politically as well, offering its expertise to the EU in such fields as taxation policy, health, the environment, transportation, e-democracy, agriculture, language and culture, and even fishing policy. According to one MEP from the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), “The Basque Government is in continual contact with the European Commission in formal and informal settings.”

But does all this direct contact between the EU and the Basque region create greater tension with Madrid? Yes and no.

In considering the absence of a Spanish central state-sponsored representation mechanism, an official from the Spanish Permanent representation to the EU notes, “It is a weakness of the system that the Autonomous Communities do not have the capacity to be able to negotiate and be represented here in Brussels,” at least through the central state.

As an autonomous region you would expect some, well, ‘autonomy’ in its dealings with the EU, but Spain can’t help but be envious of the Basque Country’s clout and strong ties to the EU. For the Basques, though, it is pure logic: why wait for Madrid – or negotiate a shared position with the other Autonomous Communities – when you can act directly at the EU level?

This thinking applies on many levels, including how the Basques fund their research. Tortuero Martin, a government expert, explains that funding is arranged through an agreement between the management agency or authority and those in charge of employment policy in the Autonomous Communities. “There is regional source of funding, and it doesn’t come from the budget of the state in Spain,” he stresses.

Moreover, the Basques have the means and institutions in place to lobby the EU directly, which is arguably a more robust form of negotiating than the sclerotic traditional power structures. This nimble, somewhat informal, approach could well be the Basques regions secret weapon, helping it weather the financial storm and defy the dire predictions for the Spanish economy.

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Tags: basque country, brussels, business, economy, employment, eu, europe, financial crisis, france, industry, research, spain, technology, tourism

The scientific handbook of love

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By Khaled Diab

For the perplexed this Valentine’s, The Chronikler offers this “scientific” guide to winning hearts and getting high on the “drug” of love.

Tuesday 14 February 2012

Photo: ©Khaled Diab

By some twist of fate, we arranged to go out this evening before we realised that it was Valentine’s Day. We found the coincidence unfortunate because we’ve always scoffed at this festival of naff consumerism and kitsch infatuation. People should strive to make love a year-round affair, despite the obvious risks involved – one scientist appears to have just classified love as a Class A drug.

“Intense passionate love uses the same system in the brain that gets activated when a person is addicted to drugs,” said Arthur Aron, the researcher behind the study in question. Of course, anyone who has been in love or has listened to rock music – the inimitable Alice Cooper even compared it to poison running through his veins – already knows this and does not need an expensive study to confirm it. In fact, “love addiction” is a recognised psychological condition.

Nevertheless, addicts will tell you that the highs of the love drug and its Rock’n'Roll are worth the potential downs and withdrawal symptoms. But for those perplexed who want to get hooked and start tripping out on love or infatuation, can science offer them any guidance? Well, according to numerous boffins who have tried to make a science out of the hitherto art of love and romance, it certainly can. So here is The Chroniklers “scientific” handbook of love, dating and courting.

As we are constantly told, first impressions count. Depressingly, according to one study, most people don’t even give each other the benefit of an exchange of words and form enduring impressions in a matter of milliseconds. Looked at romantically, though, it could be evidence of “love at first sight”.

If, like me, you are someone who needs time before people appreciate your finer points, what can you do to make the right first impression? Don’t despair, science is there with some suggestions.

If you want someone to find you attractive on the first encounter or date, a good scientifically sound strategy is to look them straight in the eyes and smile. Preferably, make sure your eyes are smiling, too. Also, if you’re a man, one study suggests that you should time your encounter not to coincide with your date’s period, because women are apparently most responsive to corny chat-up lines at the most fertile period in their menstrual cycle, although the scientists do not provide any tips as to how to extract such a delicate piece of information.

Oh, and don’t forget to turn up the smile slowly to enable the onlooker to bask in your warmth – a “long-onset smile”, as it is known in the literature – while tilting your head slightly. While you’re doing this, cross your fingers that you don’t come across as a weirdo with neck ache. The supremely confident – or arrogant – should be warned that, even if their interlocutor reciprocates, this may not necessarily be a “come on”. One group of researchers has found that some women chat happily and flirt, even if they have absolutely no interest in the man – which is bound to make the bashful and proud even more tongue-tied.

So, how can you tell if someone finds you attractive?

Research suggests that people tend to choose partners who look like their opposite sex parents. To my mind, this is not only troublingly Oedipal, I don’t think I’ve ever been attracted to anyone who looks like a family member.

More worryingly still, many seem to be drawn to partners who look like them – so much for “opposites attract”. In fact, there is even evidence that a surprising number of people are highly attracted to opposite sex images of themselves.

So, the self-centred among us can kill two birds with a single stone: increase their chances of finding a partner by seeking out someone who bears a resemblance to them and indulge their narcissistic impulses.

Of course, some people are fortunate enough to be widely regarded as attractive because they have the right facial and physical proportions. But old macho ideals are on the way out. In fact, most women, one study suggests, find a more “feminine” face alluring in men. This is good news for metrosexuals and might explain why many women are so drawn to the boyish good-looks of Johnny Depp. And for those who aren’t endowed with a baby face, it might be time to invest in that “guyliner” and “manscara”.

But you don’t have to be one of the beautiful people with a perfect figure to find romance or get laid. In fact, the best way to a man’s heart for women who do not fit the emaciated size zero is not through his stomach, but it is to make sure he doesn’t get enough food! Hunger, it seems, makes some men want to feast on their date. So, this Vqlentine, book a table at a nouvelle cuisine restaurant.

Besides, there are people out there, including good-looking ones, who prefer brains over beauty. The scientific evidence suggests that choosing intelligence is more common among women than men. Then again, other research points to the fact that there are plenty of women who go for looks.

A contradiction? Yes and no. Given the sheer diversity, complexity and individuality of human interactions, certain patterns are bound to hold true in certain circumstances, but the exceptions will at times outnumber the “rule”. So, the best strategy is to throw away the science books and embark on your own unique experiments in the laboratory of love.

This article is loosely based on an article published by Khaled Diab in The Guardian on 19 December 2008.

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Tags: addiction, alice cooper, courting, dating, drugs, love, music, research, researchers, romance, science, sex, valentine's day

Indiana Hawass and the pharaoh’s curse

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By Osama Diab

Zahi Hawass may liken himself to Indiana Jones, but the minister of antiquities is one artifact of the old regime Egyptians want to live without.

Sunday 7 August 2011

Zahi Hawass, one of Egypt’s top archaeologists, symbolises the point where our proud and glorious past intersects with a bleak and uncertain present. In the minds of many Egyptians, he is associated with Egypt’s modern corrupt rulers rather than the great pharaohs of ancient times.

In Arabic, the word ‘pharaoh’ always has positive connotations except when it’s used to describe an absolute and ruthless ruler or manager. This is exactly the kind of pharaoh Hawass was in the eyes of many of his compatriots.

Since Hosni Mubarak’s departure from office, protests that demanded the removal of Hawass from his position as minister of antiquities were uninterrupted. These were held by fellow archaeologists, the guards of heritage sites, or simply Tahrir Square protesters who see him as an antiquity that they have no interest in embalming from the era of Egypt’s most recent pharaoh, Mubarak.

This pressure has yielded results and Hawass did lose the job he was offered during the 18-day revolution in a cabinet shuffle that aimed, but failed, to calm down angry anti-Mubarak protesters.

If Egyptian archaeology was a country, then certainly Hawass would be its Mubarak. Just like his former boss, he is besieged by allegations about his business interests, accusations of turning Egypt’s archaeology into a one-man show by claiming credit for scientific findings and being the sole speaker about Egyptology in the local and international media. Of course, he’s also committed the unforgivable sin of being one of Mubarak’s favourite men.

Hawass is the epitome of the kind of self-centred, egocentric and possibly charismatic figure that the revolution has risen against, along with the kind of Mubarak-era politics he used to symbolise. Even though he’s been called Egypt’s Indiana Jones, the name that probably describes him best is his very own, Zahi, which means vain or conceited in Arabic.

Evidence of his narcissistic personality is not difficult to find. In April, he launched a clothing line named after himself in Harrods, and his latest book, A Secret Voyage, is Egypt’s most expensive book ever, carrying a price tag of 22,000 Egyptian pounds (about £2,300) with only 750 copies printed, and all signed by Egyptian archaeologists.

With his rock-star attitude, Hawass might have managed to bring archaeology more into the headlines – not necessarily because of his fine discoveries or first-class research, but mainly because of his rather eccentric behaviour. Even though the man was, or made himself, synonymous with Egyptian archaeology in the minds of many, whoever succeeds Hawass is certainly not going to be the media sensation he managed to be. Hawass will be missed by journalists searching for colourful and amusing stories, but unlike his ancestors, this pharaoh’s mystique might be short-lived as a symbol of an unpopular bygone era in Egypt’s history.

The sacking of Hawass, Egypt’s latest victim of the revolution, shows that the 18-day revolution was only the mother of numerous baby revolutions against little pharaohs or mini-Mubaraks in ministries, universities, factories, political parties and so on, and his departure marks another victory for those trying to clear the country of its deep-rooted authoritarianism.

This article first appeared in the Comment is Free section of The Guardian on 22 July 2011. Discussion of this article is available here. Republished with the author’s consent. ©Osama Diab. All rights reserved.

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Tags: africa, antiquities, archaeology, authoritarianism, egypt, egyptian archaeology, egyptian revolution, egyptology, harrods, history, hosni mubarak, media, pharaohs, research, revolution, tahrir square, zahi hawass

Mobile revolution in the Middle East

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By Christian Nielsen

“You won’t fool the children of the revolution.” Especially not if they’re Twittering away on their mobile phones.

Friday 18 March 2011

What started as a mobile-mediated youth movement has evolved into revolution and probably even war. The revolutionary wave hitting the Middle East and North Africa comes as no huge surprise to some scholars who predicted that the power of new media and instant communications would catch out unwary dictators and undemocratic governments everywhere.

In an article entitled ‘The blog versus big brother: new and old information technology and political repression (1980-2006)’, which recently appeared in the International Journal of Human Rights, the authors suggest that new technology features prominently in the current wave of globalisation which appears to be manifesting in widespread discontent, particularly among tech-savvy youth.

The authors, Indra de Soysa, director of globalisation research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and his colleague Lucia Liste Muoz, suggest that reliable information and free communication are something of a lifeline for fledgling opposition movements.

The authors note: “Sceptics of globalisation suggest that the new technology will hamstring governments from acting in the interests of ordinary people and for furthering communitarian values, leading to demobilisation of reform movements and empowering powerful capitalistic elites.”

Yet others, the authors continue, suggest that new technologies empower people at the expense of states, paving the way “for diversity of opinions and constraining the repressive tendencies of states and bureaucracies”.

Their December 2010 article – appearing rather forebodingly just weeks before the Middle-East/North Africa winter of discontent kicked off – appears to build on a 2009 paper by the same authors under the title ‘The blog versus big brother: information and communication technologies and human rights (1980-2005)’.

“TV is especially bad for human rights,” declares de Soysa in a statement, “because the government can feed propaganda to the population.” Evidence of which can be plainly seen in Libya today, as the world media are being harassed, obstructed and, according to some reports, even abducted by pro-government henchmen. Meanwhile Colonel Muammar Gaddafi maintains his defiant – many would argue delusional (see the Chronikler’s Defiantly delusional) – stand using traditional media like TV to misinform citizens.

Last week, as the country seemed to the rest of the world to be in the grips of full-scale civil war, a Libyan army captain said on Libyan state TV that security in rebel areas is at about 95%. “There are some rats that could be lying in some alleys and inside some flats. We are capturing them one group after the other,” he said. See Gaddafi in action on Turkish TV (BBC).

Young, sceptical and not into TV

That younger generations are turning away from traditional media (or “old technology”) like television in its basic form is well documented (check out the Nielsen report ‘Young people don’t watch TV on TV’). But what we are seeing, anecdotally at least, is that they are also increasingly sceptical about the one-way, lecturing approach to traditional media like TV. This is particularly true of countries where the media is state dominated, censored, or in dictatorships like Libya, just plain mouthpieces for the corrupt state to keep its people down.

So, this is really where the new technologies, especially mobiles and social media platforms, really shake the cage of dictators and questionable democracies. The internet and mobile phones make it harder for despotic leadership to feed the whole population with the necessary propaganda to prop it up. And social media also gives people access to information which might otherwise be censored or blocked on the internet (think China).

Technology as freedom fighter

In Egypt, for example, where a Google employee mobilised so many people in such a short time, social media really showed its potential as a political tool – a force for participatory democracy in some pure form.

Indra de Soysa points to the many eyewitnesses who sent pictures from mobile phones to media organisations like al-Jazeera, the BBC and CNN. “The authorities can no longer get away with attacking their own people. In Burma, the authorities can still shoot a man in the street, and get away with it. But there are beginning to be fewer and fewer countries where that is still the case,” he notes.

In Africa, mobile phones are spreading rapidly which also means that Africans will be connected to the world in a completely different way than before. “The world is becoming flatter because people communicate horizontally,” he adds.

Saddam first

De Soysa puts the current wave of enthusiasm for democracy and freedom in the context of globalisation and the way communications have changed in just a decade. The youth today, he suggests, perceive themselves as citizens of the world – no longer believing that old men should dictate how they should live. De Soysa suggests Tunisia and Egypt were not freak events: the start of the latest wave of revolutionary unrest in the Middle East and North Africa began with the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, he believes.

“The human cost was high, and many died. But it was an important symbol that encouraged people in other repressive regimes to believe that it is possible to get rid of a dictator,” he notes.

“I would not say that George Bush should get the Peace Prize, but in retrospect this was a very important event in initiating the change that is now rolling across the Middle East.”

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to take Marc Bolan’s advice: “you won’t fool the children of the revolution”… not anymore that is! If Bush helped at all, it was showing younger generations how wrong the old boys with their old technology got it.

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Not so simply red

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By Christian Nielsen

The Simply Red lead singer’s admission that he slept with thousands of women shatters one longstanding ginger stereotype, but discrimination against redheads goes way back.

10 December 2010

“A red-headed man,” Simply Red’s lead singer Mick Hucknall told the Guardian last week, “is not generally considered to be a sexual icon.” But he admits to bedding severalwomen a day during a three-year, well, purple patch between 1985 and 1987.

Married now with a young daughter, the 50-year-old singer is doing some soul searching, and perhaps a bit of guilt purging while he’s at it. He regrets the philandering and admits to getting caught up in the pop-star lifestyle.

“When I had the fame, it went crazy,” he said. “I was living the dream and my only regret is that I hurt some really good girls.”

Hucknall describes his sexual adventures as an addiction, a surrogate for the love of his mother who abandoned him at a young age. But the story here is not the middle-aged fading pop singer who gets the girls – truck loads of them – but that the oft-maligned gingers of this world really are something special.

Hucknall’s revelation has inspired me to follow up a story idea I had about what it means to be a redhead. Red hair appears in people with two copies of a recessive gene on chromosome 16 which causes a mutation in the MC1R protein. According to our friend Wikipedia, it is associated with fair skin, lighter eye colour and sensitivity to ultraviolet light. Cultural and societal reactions to the simple fact of having red hair range from ridicule to admiration.

Different is as different does

Delving a little deeper, I confirmed my suspicion that gingers really are super-human – though not in a red-cape kind of way. They apparently have different tolerance and sensitivity to pain than the rest of us mere mortals.

Research suggests that while people with red hair are more sensitive to thermal pain – something to do with lower levels of vitamin K – they are less sensitive to pain coming from multiple modalities, including “noxious stimuli such as electrically induced pain”. It has also been found that people with red hair respond to anesthetic and analgesics differently.

[Can you picture a battery of redheads hooked up to the mains for a series of lab tests followed by hits of morphine? No. Okay, just me then.]

The scientists put this unexpected relationship between hair colour and pain tolerance down to a genetic mutation in a hormone receptor that responds to melanocyte-stimulating hormone (the skin pigmentation hormone) and endorphins (pain-relieving hormone), and possibly others. This doesn’t mean redheads are mutants. We all have mutations (genetic or other) which give us our physical characteristics, like curly hair. [Mick Hucknall got the double-whammy mutation of red, curly hair.]

The number of talented ginger sportsmen and women belies the total number of redheads in the world – estimated at 1-2 % but as high as 6% in northern and western European populations. What separates the top 10 from the many others trying to make it in top-level sports is not necessarily raw talent. It boils down to mental strength and physical endurance or the ability to fight through pain and recover fast.

It’s pure speculation on my part, but the super-human pain tolerance trick could be useful in today’s physically demanding sports regimes [I’d be happy for the more scientific readers out there to blow this out of the water].

Fascination and prejudice

Red hair has had it’s good and bad times in history. During the reign of Elizabeth I, it was quite fashionable and regal to be a redhead. Many painters have depicted their red-headed women as alluring subjects in the vein of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Titian’s red ladies, which were so prevalent the term titian stuck for redheads.

But the redheaded were less favoured by history. In the Middle Ages, red hair was thought to be a mark of what’s been described as beastly sexual desire and of unearthly beings. The Brothers Grimm speak of a savage red-haired man in Der Eisenhans, while other fables and stories attribute red and green eyes to be the mark of a witch, werewolf or vampire.

In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift paints the redhead in Hucknallesque terms: “It is observed that the red-haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom yet they much exceed in strength and activity.”

Even today, you’ll hear a comment or aspersion almost every day in the media, with terms like ‘ginge’ and carrot-top aimed squarely at the hapless redhead. It’s like a long-running joke perhaps going all the way back to English resentment of the Celts (red hair is more prevalent in Ireland and Scotland) following centuries of independence battles. Again, this is all pure speculation.

It seems even with modern science on their side, the myths, lies and prejudices directed at redheads will not go away. Any wonder they’ve got such fiery tempers!

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Tags: discrimination, europe, genetics, ginger, hair, history, lifestyle, media, mick hucknall, multiculturalism, music, pop, pop star, prejudice, redheads, research, science, sex, sin, uk

EU: from soft to soft power on Israel

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Rather than quietly walking down the aisle with Israel, the EU should harness its formidable ‘soft power’ to promote peace.

3 December 2010

In Israel, the European Union is often regarded as too pro-Palestinian. And when compared with the United States’ usually uncritical cheerleading, the European position can seem more hostile. But it would be a mistake to see the occasional criticisms of Israel delivered by European politicians as a sign of anti-Israeli sentiment.

It may come as a surprise, for instance, to learn that the EU – not the United States – is Israel’s main trading partner, with a relationship worth a handsome €20bn (£17bn) per year.

Not only that, but Israel enjoys the status of a “privileged partner”. Recent years have witnessed the EU and Israel walk down the aisle towards a kind of urfi marriage in which the two discreet lovers have been striving to “develop an increasingly close relationship, going beyond co-operation, to involve a significant measure of economic integration and a deepening of political co-operation”.

When it comes to the Eurovision song contest and football, Israel is counted as part of Europe. But it doesn’t stop there. Israel “is a member of the European Union without being a member of its institutions,” as the EU’s former foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, put it succinctly.

In a new book, Europe’s Alliance with Israel, Brussels-based journalist David Cronin reveals just how cosy the EU institutions in Brussels and the capitals of numerous member states have become with Israel, although not comprehensively nor monolithically so, but without any democratic mandate to do so.

Despite the book’s occasional resorting to polemic and hyperbole, which sometimes weaken the case it is making, it is a welcome study of a reality that is under-reported and under-scrutinised. “The European Union has allowed itself to become a fig leaf for an illegal occupation,” Cronin writes.

Although he might have done more to set the relationship in a historical context, Cronin chronicles the depths of EU-Israel ties in all spheres, from the economic and scientific to the cultural. Among the most shocking revelations is how funding under EU programmes – such as the Seventh Framework Programme and the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme – is being awarded to Israeli defence and security firms and companies which profit from Israeli settlements.

These include Israel Aerospace Industries – a developer of both military and commercial aviation technology – which is leading more than 50 EU-funded projects, according to Cronin’s research.

Even European aid to the Palestinians can benefit Israel and help sustain its occupation. An estimated 45% of European aid to the Palestinians finds its way into the Israeli economy, Cronin says, citing unnamed UN sources.

A perversely destructive triangle has emerged in which the US provides Israel with military aid which it uses to destroy Palestinian infrastructure, while the EU foots the bill for cleaning up the mess. “Are EU taxpayers really happy to pay to reconstruct what US taxpayers have paid to destroy?” the progressive Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti asked MEPs.

So, what can be done? Although Cronin does a decent job of describing the status quo, he dedicates a mere seven pages, almost as an afterthought, to outlining a course of action. Obviously disenchanted and disillusioned with Europe’s political elites, many of whom do not seem to share their electorates’ concern with the plight of the Palestinians and the festering conflict which is damaging also to Israel, he advocates vigorous and robust grassroots action, namely the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

“A campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions helped end white minority rule in South Africa,” he argues. “Supporting this boycott is a practical act of international solidarity.”

Although I personally do not buy Israeli products because I do not know how much of my money will go to propping up the occupation or violating the human rights of Palestinians, any BDS campaign should tread very carefully. In order to be fair and just, it should be carefully targeted, as much as is possible, towards activities that directly fuel or profit from the occupation, so as to minimise the harm to ordinary Israelis and to avoid the further entrenching of a “bunker mentality” in Israel.

I also have major misgivings about a blanket cultural boycott. Instead, I favour a selective boycott of known extremists, apologists for the occupation and Israeli militarism, and those who advocate discrimination and stoke up hatred against Palestinians. But dialogue with moderates and ordinary citizens is crucial if we are ever to achieve the level of understanding and trust upon which a sustainable peace can be constructed.

In terms of policy, Cronin advocates that the EU should suspend its association agreement with Israel because Israel has violated the human rights conditions set out in the accord. Although Israel is in no moral position to criticise the potential application of sanctions against it, given its suffocating embargo on Gaza, suspending the EU’s trade and other ties with Israel opens up a huge can of worms.

One difficulty it raises is that if Europe starts applying the human rights clauses in its association agreements more strictly, then it would probably have to suspend or downgrade its relationship with much of the Mediterranean and other neighbouring regions, not to mention a couple of its own members. If Israel, why not Turkey because of the Kurds or Morocco because of Western Sahara? Another complication is that sanctions have proven so ineffective in the past and have often created public solidarity amid adversity and suffering even for vile dictators.

Nevertheless, Israel’s increasingly harsh treatment of the Palestinians and its policy of imprisoning them in ever-smaller enclaves needs a robust response, and certainly should not be rewarded.

For the first time, European leaders have, with the Lisbon treaty, the tools at their disposal, given enough political will and courage, to forge a common foreign policy on key issues like the Israeli-Palestinian question, whose resolution is not only in the interests of the parties to the conflict but also of Europe’s own security and safety.

This common policy would focus on a gradual, but systematic, downgrading of Europe’s relationship with Israel for as long as no progress is made to resolve the conflict. As a reward for a comprehensive and fair peace, the EU can provide Israel (and a future Palestinian state, for that matter) with the prospect of becoming a real, bona fide member of the union.

As European leaders are unlikely to make hard decisions on their own, public pressure will be essential. The Lisbon treaty also provides ordinary people with a tool to petition the EU, namely the European Citizens Initiative. If a broad civil society coalition can collect a million signatures from concerned citizens on a blueprint for change, then we stand a chance of redefining the EU’s role in this interminable conflict.

This column appeared in the Guardian newspaper’s Comment is Free section on 26 November 2010. Read the full discussion here.

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Tags: brussels, david cronin, eu, europe, europe's alliance with israel, european citizens initiative, european union, gaza, human rights, israel, lisbon treaty, research, technology, uk, united states, usa, war

From numbers to narratives

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Nikolaj Nielsen

Most journalists dread crunching data. But finding narratives among the numbers is part of journalism’s mandate. Luckily, there are tools to help.

27 August 2010

Mirko Lorenz, who organised a recent data-driven journalism event through the European Journalism Centre (ECJ), believes data-driven journalism may be the future. Lorenz explained that being able to visualise filtered data alongside a good story could provide an invaluable service to the public good.

Is this really the next big thing or is it just hubris? Another miracle fix to the glum outlook of journalism? Perhaps saving journalism (and the public’s trust in the profession) requires going back to the basics of a good, well thought out, and structured story telling based on compelling research. Take Florence Nightingale. In 1858, she produced a coxcomb graph showing how more soldiers died of sickness in the Crimean War than on the battlefield. The UK Sanitary Commission subsequently improved hygiene in both military camps and hospitals. In other words, data-driven journalism is not new. And neither is good storytelling.

Nonetheless, we are faced with an information overload that makes it almost impossible to single-handedly understand what is happening. What if Wikileaks had sent you its 75 000 + documents? Both The New York Times and The Guardian had three weeks to sift through files. The Guardian’s datablog was then able to create a graphical representation of the war logs. These were then linked to the articles. It’s great stuff. But not everyone is so lucky.

Wikileaks is an exceptional case. Most often journalists have to deal with one or several unstructured excel spreadsheets, text files and pdfs. Sensitive information on budgets are, for instance, often wrangled from some official who will then typically present the data in an unstructured manner. Trying to sift through hundreds of thousands of data sets is an exercise that taxes limited resources and takes too much time. How can one possibly make sense of a text file with millions of figures? And what exactly is one looking for?

“Always question government stats,” says Financial Times investigative journalist, Cynthia O’Murchu, adding that data is rarely user friendly. Ms O’Murchu, who was present at the EJC conference, expressed her frustration at having first to clean data before any attempt to decipher it. Even getting access is a quest. She demonstrated how her request to obtain UK government data through the Freedom of Information Act would come with a GBP3,400 price tag and months of delay. Information is not so free, after all.

Another tactic used by government officials is to dump massive amounts of unstructured raw data. This is known as data dumping, an exercise that New York Times interactive news technology whiz, Alan McLean, said not only fails to inform but is also distracting. Thankfully, there exist a number of free online tools that claim to make reading and finding narratives in data much easier:

Lippmannian device

Richard Rogers, a professor at the University of Amsterdam, compiled a list of 35 different online tools to help you make sense of data. He demonstrated one tool called the Lippmannian device – named after Walter Lippman.

This tool does two things: it can generate source clouds or issue clouds. Source clouds enable one, for instance, to find out which sites most often quote a particular source. So if you enter the terms ‘climate change sceptics’ you can visualise which sites source sceptics the most. Issue clouds enable you to establish quickly what a particular organisation actually does as opposed to what it says it does. For instance, you can find out the main issues of the top 50 human rights organisations and quickly visualise their relative differences. The Lippmannian device is a nifty little tool. Incidentally, Google is not too keen about it and is beginning to muscle-in on the operation.

The Guardian database

Simon Rogers is the editor of the Guardian’s Datablog and Datastore. This online data resource publishes hundreds of raw datasets and encourages users to visualise and analyse them. There are around 800 datasets currently available and they add three or four every day.

OUseful.info

Tony Hirst runs this blog. He’s a lecturer at the Open University. The blog is pretty detailed but provides how-tos on taking data from a website and visualising it in Google Map without having to code anything. You can then send your Google Map URL to anyone. This is a great feature if you want to locate poverty indexes using Eurostat datasets. You could, for instance, see the relative differences and intensity of poverty in Google Maps. Note, I haven’t tried doing this but he does provide a step-by-step guide.

Many-eyes.com

Frank van Ham was one of the developers of this useful tool that was quickly bought up by Google. His two partners now work there. Many-eyes allows you to visualise data and place it online for all to see and comment on. It’s interactive and enables others to manipulate and analyse it. Yes, there are people who actually do this for fun. Your graphic gets a direct URL that you can then share as well. Or you can also embed the graph into your own website.

Hackhackers and Storify.com

I’d also like to make short mention of this one. Hackhackers is developed by the former AP foreign desk bureau chief Burt Herman. Burt describes his tool as combining computer science with journalism – a still distant concept here in Europe but common in the United States. He took the concept and applied it to tool he calls storify.com. Storify will allow you (still in development) to make sense of twitter feeds and may be even find a story. Anyway, the guy was super interesting.

Qgis.org

This tool wasn’t presented at the conference. But I found out about it from a German journalist who uses it to better analyse Eurostat data. Quantum GIS allows you to visualise, manage, edit, analyse data, and compose printable maps. Sounds good.

Nikolaj Nielsen is a Brussels-based independent journalist. Published here with the author’s permission. ©Nikolaj Nielsen.

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Tags: brussels, cloud, computer, data, eu, europe, guardian datablog, hackhackers, journalism, lippmannian device, many-eyes.com, news, ouseful.info, qgis.org, research, statistics, storify.com, technology, twitter, wikileaks

The truth about Arab science

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By Khaled Diab

Can we look forward to a boom in Arab science or will poverty, bureaucracy and religion be insurmountable obstacles?

26 July 2009

Hannah Clark has certainly earned, both literally and figuratively, the title of the “girl with two hearts” bestowed upon her by the media. When she was just two years old, she had the dubious distinction of becoming the first person in Britain to possess a ‘piggyback’ heart.

For more than a decade, Hannah lived on a potent cocktail of medication designed to stop her body rejecting her second heart. But suppressing her immune system in this way made her susceptible to infections and, by the age of 12, she had developed cancer. During chemotherapy, her body began to reject the donor organ which led doctors to take the dramatic decision to remove it. Through all this, although she lost her second heart, Hannah didn’t lose heart. Now, aged 16, she has fully recovered, her doctors said in a recent article in The Lancet.

This is a truly heart-warming testament to the power of modern medicine to turn tragedy into triumph. And I could not help feeling a little rush of pride that the doctor who made all this possible was an Egyptian: Magdi Yacoub, who is actually also a neighbour of sorts, as his Cairo home overlooks my family’s.

Dishearteningly, and almost inevitably, Yacoub, the son of a surgeon, did not find his success in Egypt but in Britain, where he built up a career as one of the world’s most pioneering heart surgeons and researchers. Dubbed the “King of Hearts” by the Royal Society, this naturalised Brit did not usurp the throne but he did receive a knighthood.

And numerous other examples abound of Arab minds – such as the Nobel prize-winner Ahmed Zewail – deserting the Arab science desert and thriving elsewhere. Why is it that a region that was once the world’s scientific powerhouse has now become its outhouse? In an article last year, I explored some of the reasons which included: “The dominant patronage culture in academia, the shortage of research funding, the almost complete absence of private research, the difficulty of registering and protecting intellectual property, as well as the rote-based education system.”

Some experts observe that Islam’s scientific heritage equips Muslims to look positively upon modern science. In fact, many Muslims believe that modern science confirms the Qur’an. “In those countries where fundamentalism has taken hold among the youth in the universities, it is striking to observe that the fundamentalist students are in a majority in the scientific institutions,” says Farida Faouzia Charfi, a science professor at the University of Tunis. “[Islamists] want to govern society with ideas of the past and the technical means of modernity.”

But this selective interest in science is a double-edged sword because it encourages people to disregard inconvenient scientific truths if they conflict with or contradict their faith. Attitudes aside, another important factor that is often missing from the equation is the simple question of resources. I think it’s no coincidence that the start of Europe and the west’s golden age and the Arab and Muslim world’s gradual decline occurred at about the time when Muslims ceded their grip on global trade to Europeans who also “discovered” a resource-rich “new world” in the process.

But things are looking up, according to Nadia al-Awady, a freelance science journalist based in Cairo. Writing in Nature, she links the surge in science coverage in the Arab media with a related boom in Arab research and development activities. Since 2006, there has even been an Arab Science Journalists Association (ASJA).

“Although the science staff of media organisations in the United States and Europe face cutbacks, a survey of ASJA members in January 2009 indicated that full-time jobs for Arab science journalists have remained relatively stable over the past five years,” reports al-Awady.

However, quantity does not always mean quality, as al-Awady herself freely admits. “As I sit at my desk in Cairo, it is easier for me to know what is happening in American universities halfway across the globe than to know what is happening within the walls of Egypt’s National Research Centre just across the street… Another problem for science journalism stems from a more general issue. Many media platforms are government-owned and, as a result, many journalists provide uncritical coverage of government announcements.”

In addition, for someone whose role is to be a chronicler of science, al-Awady holds some pretty unscientific views. Writing for Islam Online, she goes against the scientific consensus and describes homosexuality not as a natural sexual orientation but as an individual lifestyle choice or a psychological condition that can be “cured”.

More tellingly and even less scientifically, she cautions her readers, in case her scientific arguments have failed to persuade them: “Islam is a way of life. It is a system of beliefs based on divine revelation… As a Muslim, one cannot choose to follow parts of Islam and disregard others.”

This illustrates well how scientific truth is sacred until it contradicts the holier truth of the Qur’an. During Islam’s scientific boom years, such an attitude could just about survive alongside scientific inquiry – although many of Islam’s greatest scientists were sceptics, theists or agnostics.

However, in the modern world, science fact increasingly contradicts religious myth and, for the Arab world to advance, it needs not only to invest more in research, it also has to hold universal truths above religious ones.

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 24 July 2009. Read the related discussion.

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Tags: ahmed zeweil, arab world, hannah clark, innovation, islamic science, magdi yacoub, middle east, muslim science, research, science

The love laboratory

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By Khaled Diab

Can science make us more attractive and appealing? Let’s put it to the test.

December 2008

In the game of love, like in comedy, timing, they say, is everything. And a new study seems to confirm just that. Blokes who have their advances repelled can take solace – or delude themselves – from the possibility that women are most responsive to corny chat-up lines at the most fertile period in their menstrual cycle and least so during their period.

Given the hormonal imbalances, headaches and pain many women feel during menstruation, this is hardly an earth-shattering discovery. In fact, it raises the question: what exactly is the use of this particular study?

It’s not much use to single men, unless some nifty gadget which discreetly gauges the menstrual cycle I’m unaware of has come on the market. And I very much doubt that “If you’ve got the right time of month, I’ve got the place” will catch on as a chat-up line. Stumped for any other explanation, my wife speculated that the only use of the study would be to help jealous boyfriends and husbands plan their agenda.

Of course, scientific inquiry is a valiant pursuit in its own right, yet I can’t help thinking that humanity has more pressing and important questions that need answering. So, in a modest attempt to make sure that all this relationship research does not go to waste, here is a brief empirical guide to courting.

If, like me, you are someone who needs time before people appreciate your finer points, what can you do to make the right first impression? Don’t despair, science is there with some suggestions.

The supremely confident – or arrogant – should be warned that, even if their interlocutor reciprocates, this may not necessarily be a “come on”. One group of researchers has found that some women chat happily and flirt, even if they have absolutely no interest in the man – which is bound to make the bashful and proud even more tongue-tied.

So, how can you tell if someone finds you attractive?

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 19 December 2008. Read the related discussion.

This is an archive piece that was migrated to this website from Diabolic Digest

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