Bomb Story #1: The Arab, the Bomb, and the Website

This is about a writer in cyberspace, and telling it involves another confession: I play trivia games online. I play every morning at a website called Boxerjam. It’s how I start my day.

Now you know.

Boxerjam provides players with a range of free trivia and word games and supports itself by selling ads. The ads pop up while Boxerjam members are playing our games, and, although we try not to look at them, we can’t help seeing them, at least peripherally. Many are of the “hit a moving target and win a cell phone” variety.

One morning, I was on a roll when the moving target caught my eye and spoiled my game. The ad was offering me a free phone if I “hit Osama.” I was supposed to aim through cross-hairs at a target: a bearded man in a caftan and kaffiyeh, carrying a bomb with a lit fuse.

The thing is, the trivia games aren’t part of my real life. They’re not about writing or activism, which take up most of my time; they’re how I gird up for writing and activism. The last thing I want is for the boundary between them and reality to blur.

It had just blurred. I finished the game I was playing, then clicked on Boxerjam’s “report a problem” button and informed them that I found the ad offensive. I had done my duty. The boundaries could be firm again.

The next morning, I went back to the Boxerjam website and to the old rules: Play the games. Don’t look at the ads.

But I didn’t get a response from Boxerjam, and the bomb-wielding Arab was still there. I couldn’t persuade myself that I had done enough. A couple of days later, I fired off another problem report to Boxerjam, more strongly worded. It said, “Problem Description: The problem is the racist, offensive ad you carry with the caricature of an Arab holding a bomb. You wouldn't run an ad with a similar caricature of a Jew or an African-American, yet you feel free to stereotype Arabs negatively and offensively. Please stop carrying the ad!”

Within an hour, to my surprise, I got a response from Boxerjam’s Customer Support Manager, who told me that Boxerjam, like most sites, uses “third-party banner advertising.” She added, “We are limited in what we can specify will be displayed. I have forwarded your message to our Advertising Department.”

I thought, if the ad department is really getting involved, maybe they should have a more precise explication of the problem. I sent her another note. “Thanks for responding,” I said. “Please forward this to your ad department: Would you feel unable to refuse an ad showing an African-American behaving like Step'n Fetchit? Would you feel unable to refuse an ad showing a bearded man in a yarmulke caressing his money? The Arab-with-a-bomb ad is at least as bad--that is, all other things being equal, it would be morally equivalent, but all other things aren't equal, and at this moment both Arab-Americans and Arabs in the Muslim world are enduring real damage because of the credence given to such stereotypes. Thank you.”

Later that day, I was at a meeting at the office of the War Resisters League, where I used to be on the staff and where I now volunteer. After the meeting, I checked my email.

There was another note from Boxerjam’s Customer Support Manager. In its entirety, it said, “Just to let you know that we have disabled that particular banner ad.”

A writer’s life doesn’t get much better than that.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

The Water Is Wide (My Political Landscape)

The joint is jumping at the Clearwater Great Hudson River Revival Festival. It’s the Summer Solstice, Clearwater weekend at the riverside park in Croton-on-Hudson, the small town one county and 30-odd miles north of Manhattan that’s been home to the festival on and off since 1978. The Bluerunners zydeco band is rocking the dance tent, the wood floor packed with dancers of all ages, toddlers to graybeards (though of few colors, being almost all white), and I’m sitting on the grass, watching the dancing and beyond it the wide and mighty Hudson, at once keeping time and traveling through it, because, in more than one sense, this is where I’m from.

My answers to the question, “Where do you come from?” depend on context. “Brooklyn,” I often say, because I was born there. Or, “the Lower East Side,” because my first home was in Knickerbocker Village, a middle-income housing complex just south of the Manhattan Bridge. The first home I remember, though, was in Westchester County, on Radnor Avenue in Croton, about a mile from where I’m sitting at Clearwater, the festival.

Clearwater is a ship, a cause, a nonprofit corporation, and a “music and environmental festival.” The ship is the sloop Clearwater, conceived in 1966 as “a boat to save the Hudson” by veteran activist-folksinger Pete Seeger, who lived on the shores of the great but dying river. Then in his 40s, Seeger had been blacklisted during the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s; unlike many, he had remained committed to activism and the socialist ideal. When he realized that his beloved Hudson was in danger of irreversible degradation, he began singing for the money to build a ship that would sail up and down the river, helping to clean it up and raising consciousness about the environment. He called the ship the Clearwater, and it succeeded. Today, the Hudson is clean enough to eat from, and each summer, Hudson Sloop Clearwater, Inc., and Westchester County co-host Clearwater, the festival.

It’s a festival of many kinds of music—folk, jazz, blues, and dance music—and also of storytelling, children’s activities, environmental education and food and crafts. If, as noted above, the thousands who come are mostly white, they’re also almost all left-of-center, many of them activists in a wide range of good causes, most prominently peace and the environment. They come as families; many came in their youth and come now with their own children.

Me, too. As I said, this is where I’m from, in more than one sense. I was brought to hear Pete Seeger sing in my own childhood. The first time my son Adam heard him was just before Adam’s second birthday, at a Hiroshima Day protest. Today Adam and his family, are here, visiting from Maryland. My eight- and three-year-old granddaughters, too, have heard Seeger’s songs for children—

And this evening they'll hear him in person for the first time. Now 89, Pete doesn’t perform often anymore. He’s not scheduled to sing today, only to be interviewed live at 6:30 in the Children’s Tent.

It’s getting late. The girls are tired, and we have to get back to the city. But there’s a big crowd at the Children’s Tent, and as we pass it, we hear a familiar voice, and then a lot of voices, raised in song.

Pete is leading the audience in “Amazing Grace.” We sing along, of course. I take a blurry picture for the girls to have when they’re older, and we head home.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Lifta, Which Was His Home

Last summer, activist-journalist Ellen Davidson and I traveled the length and breadth of Israel/Palestine on a delegation with the California-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. We stayed at the Ibda’a Cultural Center guest house in the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem in Palestine; we talked with Palestinian and Israeli NGOs and grass-roots groups; we visited Palestinian homes, a Bedouin village in the Negev, and clinics in the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley; we walked around the ancient cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Ramallah, along with the newer city of Haifa and a very new suburb of Nazareth. We saw what Israel calls “settlements” in the Occupied Territories, new towns built by Jewish colonists in violation of the Geneva Convention that bars building by occupiers in lands under occupation; we saw the 30-foot-high concrete wall Israel is building, often between Palestinians’ homes and their farms and olive trees. We heard accounts of what Israel calls the “war of independence" and Palestinians call “al nakba”—the catastrophe—and its aftermath. This was one such account.

On a rocky hillside near Jerusalem, the shells of old stone houses cling to the steep slope. Once, they made up a village called Lifta. Yacoub Odeh points to one house: “This was my home,” he says. “Where I was born.”

At the bottom of the hill is the spring that provided Lifta’s water, along with the ruins of the village mosque and the communal oven and olive presses—two of them, so rich in olive trees was Lifta. The trees are there still, but no one has harvested their olives since the Palestinian villagers were chased away in 1948, during what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call al Nakba—the Catastrophe. Yacoub was a child then. Now in his 60s, he’s the human rights and housing supervisor with the Land and Housing Research Center, an international human rights coalition. For these 12 days, he’ll be our guide to the West Bank.

Yacoub lives in Jerusalem now. Jerusalem residency is a special status for Palestinians—they carry neither Israeli nor Palestinian passports, but rather Jerusalemite IDs. This gives them a little more freedom of movement than Palestinians have in the Occupied Territories.

But Yacoub can’t go back to Lifta. No one can, because to build or rebuild so much as a doorway would require an Israeli building permit—and Palestinians don’t get those permits. Ever. Sometimes they build without them, and then the police or the Israeli Defense Forces come with Caterpillar bulldozers and demolish what’s been built and fine the Palestinians for the cost of the demolition. Yacoub knows this all too well; everywhere we go, he shows us the sites of demolished homes. No one can build or live in empty Lifta now. Its olives ripen and fall and lie on the stony ground.

Yet Lifta isn’t quite a ghost town. The ancient spring has some religious significance to the Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem, and they come there to picnic in the shade of Lifta’s olive trees and bathe in its waters. They’re here today, staring as Yacoub walks us around what used to be his village. It seems they’re not used to seeing Palestinians here.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak
Versions of this story appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of WIN,the magazine of the War Resisters League and in the online journal World War 4 Report.

The Parisian Job

This embarrasses me, but I’ve eaten many a Paris breakfast at the McDonald’s around the corner from my favorite Left Bank hotel (the Résidence les Gobelins, since you asked).

I try hard to do as the Romans do when in Rome, and likewise in any other city, but I have a problem with breakfast in France. I don’t mind breakfasting on caffeine and carbohydrates, but I can’t bring myself to pay twelve dollars for a cup of tea and a piece of bread, even if the morning-fresh French bread is like no other.

The high price is actually due to a quirk of Gallic hospitality: When you sit down at a table in a French café and order anything, no matter how small, you have the table until you choose to leave it. You can read the paper or a whole novel, you can write postcards—or a whole novel—you can stare out the window at Paris going by outside all day and indeed into the evening and until closing time, if you care to. That’s the rules. They haven’t changed since the young, unpublished Ernest Hemingway was too poor to buy wood to heat his studio and used to write entire short stories over a single glass of wine.

Thus, if you arrive at the café first thing in the morning, it has to charge you what amounts to rent for the day—and thus the eight-euro breakfast (less if you eat it standing at the bar), which comes to something over twelve dollars at current exchange rates. A cup of tea and an Egg McMuffin at the aforesaid McDonald’s, on the other hand, costs two euros.

But if I have a problem with the French café breakfast, much of France has a problem with McDonald’s, which represents to many the worst of globalization. Farmer-protester José Bové actually did prison time for taking a bulldozer to a Mickey D’s in the south of France in 1999. So I was never comfortable with the Left Bank Egg McMuffins, but I kept eating them, until the Great McMuffin Heist, otherwise known as the Parisian job.

My sister and I were in Paris with a couple of teenagers in tow. We keep early hours when traveling, but the teenagers partied late and slept in mornings. So my sister and I took to starting the day with a walk around the quarter, then stopping at the very McDonald’s, picking up breakfast, and bringing it back to the hotel.

It was working fine until the morning that, carrying the bag with the caffeine, I pushed open the swinging door of the hotel and was holding it open for my sister when she screamed, “Voleur!” She said afterward she hadn’t even known she knew the word. I knew it—it means “thief.”

The concierge, who knows me—I’ve stayed there several times—dove out the door to chase the voleur. My sister and I stood staring at each other, realizing slowly that her pocketbook was still hanging from her shoulder, but that in her hand was only the stub of the paper bag that had held the Eggs McMuffin.

After a couple of minutes, the concierge returned, crestfallen. He hadn’t caught the thief. We all laughed a lot when we told him what had been stolen.

We never knew whether our breakfast had been stolen by a hungry thief or an anti-McDonald’s prankster, but I haven’t had breakfast there since. I eat it like a Parisian now, grabbing a croissant and a cup of tea standing at the bar of the café across the street.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak