Please Take Me To Conflict Kitchen ...

The Conflict Kitchen is the brain child of art professors Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski. It's a restaurant that serves only traditional foods from nations which the US is at war with. The restaurant serves food from one nation at a time for a 6 month stretch. The change in cusine is celebrated with a small festival and music from the new nation. 

Since its opening in 2010, the cuisine of Iran, Afghanistan, Venezuela and Cuba have been featured. On a good day, the restaurant would serves between 100 to 300 meals daily. 

The first iteration, Iranian cuisine, was called "Kubideh Kitchen" and featured kubideh; during the Afghan phase, the restaurant was called "Bolani Pazi" and served bolani; theVenezuelan cuisine version was titled "La Cocina Arepas" and served arepas; the Cuban cuisine phase was called "Cocina Cuban" and served lechon asado and yuca con mojo. During a trip to Cuba for research, Rubin visited the North Korean embassy inVedado.He rang the doorbell, unannounced, and was given helpful advice on North Korean cuisine from a diplomat who answered the door.

According to Rubin, "Conflict Kitchen reformats the pre-existing social relations of food and economic exchange to engage the general public in discussions about countries, cultures and people that they might know little about outside of the polarizing rhetoric of U.S. politics and the narrow lens of media headlines."

To All The Girls Whose Thighs Touch...

To all the girls whose thighs touch, with stretchmarks laid like gold across their backside, with bellies too full for any inadequate hands, thank Goddess for your abundance. – Kim Katrin Crosby

“There isn’t a day that passes that I don’t have to think about my body – how much I’ve moved it (or not), what I’ve put into it, what it looks like in whatever outfit I’ve chosen to wear. But thinking about my body isn’t something particularly new, it isn’t something that came with adolescent insecurity or angst — it’s something that I’ve thought about for as long as I can remember. From the moment I realised that I was ‘bigger’ than most of my friends and certainly than most of the people I interacted with at school and at work – that I was in fact ‘different’. Today, weighing in at nearly 220 lbs and measuring in at just about 6ft 1 inch I recognize that my body occupies more physical space than many other bodies — and that that is in fact ok.”

http://loveinshallah.com/2013/10/25/to-all-the-girls/

10 Wars To Watch (And That The Media Ignore)

Bloodshed, famine, rape, internal displacement. There are truly few things as awful as the reality of living through modern warfare. The horror, suffering, and pain caused by war are acutely felt on an individual level—what it does to that woman, man, or child and their family can be as devastating as any large bomb that destroys a city. Often though, that pain is endured quietly, out of view, while the media focuses on bombs falling and guns firing.

The goal of projects like ours are to make public what has previously been private in order to create a world in which no humans are subject to or forced to witness that kind of secret horror. Yet while we strive for that, we live with the reality that mainstream media must pick and choose which stories to share, and politics—and profit—often play profound roles in determining which stories we get to know.

Here, we’ve assembled a list of 10 ongoing conflicts that we think you should keep your eye on—whether the nightly news is covering them or not. (And while we’re at it, media, here’s your cheat sheet.)

We assembled the list using three criteria: annual number of fatalities based on data from a variety of media and academic sources; the degree to which we perceive potential for escalation; and the degree of what we perceive as media neglect. The list is not exhaustive—ideally, one could pay equal attention to all wars—but with that said here are 10 to watch, in red (and five more to keep an eye on, in yellow). Click around below or here for a full-sized version of this map.

http://www.womenundersiegeproject.org/blog/entry/10-wars-to-watch-and-that-media-ignore

AIRBRUSH!

For Ashura...

                                           
Bahraini Shiite Muslim women stand in front of 
a portraits of detained political activists during 
a ceremony marking Ashura, which 
commemorates the seventh century slaying of 
Imam Hussein, the grandson of Prophet 
Mohammed, in the village of Sanabis, west of 
Manama, on November 9, 2013. 
AFP PHOTO/MOHAMMED AL-SHAIKH

Turkish Shiite women hold up chains as they take part in a religious procession held for the Shiite religious holiday of Ashura on November 13, 2013, in Istanbul. Ashura commemorates the killing of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, by armies of the caliph Yazid in 680 AD. Tradition holds that the revered imam was decapitated and his body mutilated in the Battle of Karbala. AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSE 

*http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/12/ashura-2013-dates-rituals-history_n_4262451.html?utm_hp_ref=religion#slide=3111665

The Rohingya Women Of Burma

                                                                    (Marta Tucci)

I travelled to Sittwe in the beginning of July 2013, with the intention of documenting the situation of the internally displaced Rohingya community. When I arrived at the IDP camps, I was struck by the overwhelmingly high number of women and children in comparison to men. Bearing in mind that conflict affects the life of women in a fundmentally different way, I decided to focus on how the Arakanese-Rohingya conflict had affected the livelihoods and role of women within their community. Their stories of humiliation, rape and loss where unbearably hard to listen to, but their strength of character and resilience in face of despair revealed an unparalleled degree of humanity.

Photographs are part of a photo essay entitled ‘Acts of Resilience’: http://www.dvb.no/photos/rohingya-refugees-a-womans-perspective/33610?fb_action_ids=10151853024813192&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%2210151853024813192%22%3A409535185838673%7D&action_type_map=%7B%2210151853024813192%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map

*Marta Tucci is a freelance documentary photographer and writer. Her work focuses on developing long-term projects that explore issues of identity and social exclusion, paying close attention to the plight of displaced and marginalized communities in the aftermath of war. 

Before They Pass Away...

(Himba Women, Namibia: Jimmy Nelson)

Jimmy Nelson wanted 'to create an ambitious aesthetic photographic document that would stand the test of time. A body of work that would be an irreplaceable ethnographic record of a fast disappearing world.' And did he ever!!!

Before They Pass Away, is much more than just a collection of breathtaking photography. It is a beautiful reminder of the sheer wonder of the indigenous miorities and their cultures and lifestyles. Their closeness to nature, community living and the non-existance of concepts like wealth accumulation stand as a stark contrast to how modern capitalism had trapped us into believing we have to live. 

I was speechless and in awe as I scrolled through the collection.  

Sadly as much as I would like to own it, 6500 euros is just too far out of budget for the next million years. 

So do your self a favour and make happy for the eyes and the heart...

http://www.beforethey.com/

Do Muslim Women Need Saving...

A moral crusade to rescue oppressed Muslim women from their cultures and their religion has swept the public sphere, dissolving distinctions between conservatives and liberals, sexists and feminists. The crusade has justified all manner of intervention from the legal to the military, the humanitarian to the sartorial. But it has also reduced Muslim women to a stereotyped singularity, plastering a handy cultural icon over much more complicated historical and political dynamics.

As an anthropologist who has spent decades doing research on and with women in different communities in the Middle East, I have found myself increasingly troubled by our obsession with Muslim women. Ever since 2001, when defending the rights of Muslim women was offered as a rationale for military intervention in Afghanistan, I have been trying to reconcile what I know from experience about individual women’s lives, and what I know as a student of the history of women and of feminism in different parts of the Muslim world, with the stock images of Muslim women that bombard us here in the West. Over the past decade, from the girls and women like Nujood Ali, whose best-selling memoir I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced was co-written, like so many of the others, by a Western journalist, to Malala Yousafzai, they have been portrayed as victims of the veil, forced marriage, honor crimes or violent abuse. They are presented as having a deficit of rights because of Islam. But they don’t always behave the way we expect them to, nor should they.

Take the veil, for example. We were surprised when many women in Afghanistan didn’t take them off after being “liberated,” seeing as they had become such symbols of oppression in the West. But we were confusing veiling with a lack of agency. What most of us didn’t know is that 30 years ago the anthropologist Hanna Papanek described the burqa as “portable seclusion” and noted that many women saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled them to move out of segregated living spaces while still observing the requirements of separating and protecting women from unrelated men. People all over the globe, including Americans, wear the appropriate form of dress for their socially shared standards, religious beliefs and moral ideals. If we think that U.S. women live in a world of choice regarding clothing, we need to look no further than our own codes of dress and the often constricting tyrannies of fashion.

As for Malala, she was subjected to horrible violence by the Taliban, but education for girls and Islam are not at odds, as was suggested when atheist Sam Harris praised Malala for standing up to the “misogyny of traditional Islam.” Across the Muslim world girls have even been going to state schools for generations. In Pakistan, poverty and political instability undermine girls’ schooling, but also that of boys. Yet in urban areas, girls finish high school at rates close to those of young men, and they are only fractionally less likely to pursue higher education. In many Arab countries, and in Iran, more women are in university than men. In Egypt, women make up a bigger percentage of engineering and medical faculties than women do in the U.S.

A language of rights cannot really capture the complications of lives actually lived. If we were to consider the quandaries of a young woman in rural Egypt as she tries to make choices about who to marry or how she will make a good life for her children in trying circumstances, perhaps we would realize that we all work within constraints. It does not do justice to anyone to view her life only in terms of rights or that loaded term, freedom. These are not the terms in which we understand our own lives, born into families we did not choose, finding our way into what might fulfill us in life, constrained by failing economies, subject to the consumer capitalism, and making moral mistakes we must live with.

There is no doubt that Western notions of human rights can be credited for the hope for a better world for all women. But I suspect that the deep moral conviction people feel about the rightness of saving the women of that timeless homogeneous mythical place called Islamland is fed by something else that cannot be separated from our current geopolitical relations. Blinded to the diversity of Muslim women’s lives, we tend to see our own situation too comfortably. Representing Muslim women as abused makes us forget the violence and oppression in our own midst. Our stereotyping of Muslim women also distracts us from the thornier problem that our own policies and actions in the world help create the (sometimes harsh) conditions in which distant others live. Ultimately, saving Muslim women allows us to ignore the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated and creates a polarization that places feminism only on the side of the West.

Read more: Lila Abu-Lughod: Do Muslim Women Need Saving? | TIME.com http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/01/do-muslim-women-need-saving/#ixzz2juDxPePV

For I Have Learned...

                                                                                         (image : google) 

For I have learned that every heart will get

                                                             What it prays for Most. 
                                                                                                        - Hafiz 

How Can Aung San Suu Kyi – A Nobel Peace Prize Winner – Fail To Condemn Anti-Muslim Violence?

I never thought I would write this, but Aung San Suu Kyi sent a shiver down my spine when she appeared on the Today programme this morning. Her equivocal attitude towards the violence suffered by Burma’s Muslim minority was deeply disturbing.

I’m sorry to say that she employed the standard devices used by people who want to play down – and avoid condemning – something utterly reprehensible.

The first common tactic is to draw a parity between perpetrators and victims. Suu Kyi duly said: “This is what the world needs to understand: that the fear is not just on the side of the Muslims, but on the side of the Buddhists as well.”

She went on: “Yes, Muslims have been targeted, but also Buddhists have been subjected to violence. But there’s fear on both sides and this is what is leading to all these troubles and we would like the world to understand: that the reaction of the Buddhists is also based on fear.”

Hang on a moment. Muslims are only 4 per cent of Burma’s population. The Rohingya Muslims, who have borne the brunt of the violence, are a smaller minority still. The idea that we should place the fears of the 90 per cent Buddhist majority alongside those of a small and vulnerable minority – and one that has been “targeted” for violence – is pretty extraordinary.

Suu Kyi then goes further by saying: “You, I think, will accept that there’s a perception that Muslim power, global Muslim power, is very great and certainly that is the perception in many parts of the world and in our country too.”

Global Muslim power? How powerful can a 4 per cent minority be, particularly when the Rohingya are explicitly forbidden from becoming citizens of Burma and therefore have no political weight whatever? What is Suu Kyi trying to say? That Buddhists in Burma are so terrified by “global Muslim power” that we shouldn’t be surprised when they turn on Muslims at home?

Suu Kyi also employs the second common device, namely to change the subject to something irrelevant. When Mishal Husain asked her to accept that 140,000 Muslims have been displaced by violence, Suu Kyi replied: “I think there are many, many Buddhists who have also left the country for various reasons. This is a result of our sufferings under a dictatorial regime.”

This is also completely irrelevant. If many Buddhist Burmese fled during the era of military dictatorship, this has no bearing whatever on the plight of the 140,000 Muslims who live in refugee camps today.

Suu Kyi then used the third standard tactic: uttering words of condemnation so general as to be meaningless. Asked to condemn a notorious Buddhist hate-preacher who compares Muslims to “dogs”, she said only: “I condemn hate of any kind.”

And then Mishal Husain asked her bluntly: “Do you condemn the anti-Muslim violence?” Suu Kyi replied: “I condemn any movement that is based on hatred and extremism.”

How could a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize fail to answer that question with a simple “Yes”?

Read more by David Blair on Telegraph Blogs