Amadou and Mariam - Pauvre Type
So this has nothing to do with what I usually discuss on this blog, but since the few people that read it probably wouldn't mind a personal detail or two (or three), I'll go ahead and force such details upon y'all now: I've been getting ready to start my applications for grad school, and tonight I realized that I was afraid to even visit the websites to remind myself of exactly what I need to be doing. A bad sign for sure, but one I can push aside for at least another day or ten. In the meantime I've been doing some reading by potential future professors, and that's not always encouraging, either. I don't know which ancient, dusty tome of a thesaurus Hamid Dabashi is packing, but it's epic, and it's been making me feel pretty terrible about myself lately. Also, his grumbling about the Eurocentricity of a singular idea of modernity and predatory bands of white colonialists disenfranchising the whole of humanity is good, but 97 pages of it in a book that's supposed to be about Iranian history is a tad much. Hamid, anyone willing to read a book by you already agrees with you on that front; just make modern Iranian history happen for me already.
Anyway, mostly what's been grabbing my attention lately (other than phone calls at 9:30 in the evening asking me to explain a phone bill that's not due for another three weeks) is this story about France's ban on face veiling. The bill just passed through the lower chamber of parliament. The numbers: 335 to 1 with 241 abstentions. And one very awkward walk from the chambers out to the parking lot. The case now heads to the upper chamber of parliament, where it is expected to pass with similar ease, and then President Sarkozy, with one glorious, liberating stroke of his pen, will free all Muslim women in France from the chains of oppression by enforcing a dress code upon them. Sounds about right. When he's not busy fearlessly fighting for the dignity of French culture and humanity, President Sarkozy spends his spare time being involved in campaign finance scandals.
I posted this on Facebook a while back, but for those of you that didn't see it, I highly recommend reading this. Martha Nussbaum absolutely owns the (lack of) logic behind the veiling bans springing up across Europe. Read it here.
In other news, suicide bombers at a mosque in southeastern Iran killed more than two dozen people two days ago. Sunni militant group Jundullah has claimed responsibility, saying the attacks were revenge for the recent hanging of their dashing leader Abdolmalek Rigi, the handsomest terrorist I've ever seen:
Abdolmalek Rigi - without the two guys in ski masks, this is just another Abercrombie and Fitch ad.
Naturally, a cleric in Iran has already implicated the US in the whole thing: upset about this whole Shahram Amiri ballyhoo, the US must have somehow coerced Jundullah into carrying out the suicide attacks. Must have. Speaking of which, the Shahram Amiri story is one of the most perplexing things I've heard in a while; the pieces just don't go together. In short, Amiri (an Iranian nuclear scientist) disappeared from Mecca in mid-2009. The Iranians claimed that the US abducted him and the US claimed he simply defected. In early June of this year, Iran aired a video in which a person claiming to be Amiri said, "I was abducted in Saudi Arabia! Help!" Mere hours later, another video surfaced on YouTube, in which another man claiming to be Amiri said, "No worries, I'm living freely in Arizona." The New York Times has a nice piece on what it might mean now that he's gone back to Iran, and what his possibilities are for the future. Was he a double agent? Did the CIA really kidnap him? Could his life end in a matter of seconds if he now says the wrong thing to his Iranian interrogators? I'm certain of the answer to at least one of these questions. Here's hoping he didn't overplay Iran's nuclear capabilities to US intelligence officers, which could lead to a preemptive strike by Israel a la Osirak '81 (that's the surprise Israeli bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor many years ago, not a music festival), which would then lead to a whole lot of nasty stuff, the least nasty of which would be the US shrugging their shoulders and going back to business as usual. I mean, let's get real: if the Israeli military can kill nine humanitarian aid workers, including a US citizen, and Obama and co. can just sit on it, I'm having trouble coming up with any hypothetical situation that would provoke a real US response at this point.
*Knock on wood*
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