Category Archives: Essays

Last night, I finished reading Fatema Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood about a girl growing up in a conservative 1940’s Fessi family at the time of the Moroccan nationalist movement and social change.

In one of the latter chapters, entitled “American Cigarrettes”, the girl describes the arrival of American troops with fascination. For the young Moroccan girl, it was hard to fully comprehend why Christians of different nations were at each others’ throats. Why did the Allemanes hate people with dark hair, and who were their Christian cousins that arrived by sea from the west? “The French and the Spanish were rather small and had black mustaches, while Americans were very tall with devilish blue eyes.”

The Americans arrived with Operation Torch handing out chewing gum, cigarrettes, and chasing all of the women. And so it was that the American occupation was much friendlier than that of the French and Spanish. As a matter of fact, there was a local folk singer, Hussein Slaoui, who sang “Al-‘Ain az-zarga jana b-kul khir”, meaning “the blue-eyed guys brought all kinds of blessing”. Continue reading →

Yesterday morning while eating breakfast, I listened to a podcast of the September 24th PBS NewsHour Vote 2008 interview with Democrat hopeful, Governor Bill Richardson. If you consider that the most important issues facing the U.S. are the War in Iraq, regaining the U.S.’s moral authority in the world, immigration, the U.S.’s dependence on foreign energy (and the environment), as well as balancing of the budget, then Mr. Richarson is your candidate. Why is he the best candidate on all of these issues: Continue reading →

Here is a New York Times article that explains what happened in a New Jersey town after it passed a law penalizing those who contracted with illegal aliens. Continue reading →

A recent Federal Court ruling has found what we have all known from the beginning: The Patriot Act is a slap in the face of our Constitution. Continue reading →

I just saw this article from the BBC News on a skin-lightening cream promoted by a Bollywood star. What is the world coming to? Doesn’t everyone know that light skin don’t taste like squat?

The “should I stay or should I go” and “is the surge working” debate in the U.S. have highlighted the U.S.’s untenable position in Iraq. Last week, The Economist published an article explaining why the U.S. should stay in Iraq. An obvious argument for leaving is that the situation in Iraq is so precarious already that it could hardly get any worse even if the U.S. pulled out. On the other hand, there is a geo-political and humanitarian argument (not to mention the economic reasons for not abandoning its presence) for maintaining a presence similar to the one that led to intervention in the Balkans in 1990s. While the U.S. faces its own Catch 22, I also think that the Sunnis will soon be facing a similar Catch 22. Here is my own uneducated estimation: Continue reading →

Here’s an article by Marjorie Cohn on how Erwin Chemerinsky was offered and then denied the deanship at the University of California at Irvine Law School due to his politics. Continue reading →