Federal Judiciary

Historic, holy cuffs, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

You remember the historic arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., right? And you remember President Obama?s statement that ?the Cambridge police acted stupidly.? And you remember the great ?beer summit? between Obama, Gates, Sgt. James Crowley, and Vice President Biden.

Well, you may have read this: Gates has now donated the handcuffs used in the historic arrest to the Smithsonian Institution -- to its National Museum of African American History and Culture. How did he come into possession of these historic, holy cuffs? After the beer summit, Crowley gave them to him. (Did the Cambridge police ?act stupidly? then?)

The Smithsonian has Archie Bunker?s chair. It also has the Hope Diamond. The Gates Cuffs do not add much to the Smithsonian?s luster. Black Americans have endured a hard, horrible history: The incident in Cambridge last summer does not belong to that history. In my view, Gates?s handcuffs are not shackles worth remembering.

Come on.

I wanted to let you know about Orlando Zapata Tamayo. He is one of those Cuban prisoners of conscience, and he is in very bad shape. As this report tells us, he is ?in the 76th day of a hunger strike in protest against beatings, harsh treatment and other abuses he endures as a prisoner under the Castro regime, and demanding respect for his human rights.?

His mother said, ?I appeal to the world to place a firm hand on Cuba so that my son may not die.? An interesting, heartfelt phrase: ?place a firm hand on Cuba.?

I continue to quote from the report: ?Zapata Tamayo?s case has received important demonstrations of solidarity in different parts of Cuba, including a national sit-in chain in December and vigils in February, both organized by the National Civic Resistance and Civil Disobedience Front. In recent weeks, several demonstrations and marches took place in Camagüey championing Zapata Tamayo?s cause.?

More from the mother: ?So that the world might hear me, I ask for solidarity from our brothers [fellow Cubans]; that they launch themselves along with this mother; that they call for Orlando Zapata Tamayo?s freedom; that they not be afraid of blows, because it is worthier to die upright than to die kneeling.?

I have long been of two minds about hunger strikes -- about the rightness of them. There are important questions to consider. But I remember reading Armando Valladares?s now-classic memoir, Against All Hope. (Valladares is sometimes called the Cuban Solzhenitsyn.) I saw the effectiveness of hunger strikes then. And I hope Zapata Tamayo lives and prospers, and that the country he obviously loves does too.

Back to Henry Louis Gates for a moment. He did a Q&A with the New York Times. One of the Q?s was, ?What will America look like in our increasingly mixed-race future?? Gates?s A was, ?I?m looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.? That?s a striking line, and I know what he means -- but he expressed a racialism against which I rebelled long ago. I couldn?t give a fig what we look like. What shade or shades we are. I care about who and how we are.

In the current National Review, I have a piece on Internet freedom -- and I expanded a little on this piece in my Tuesday column, here. In that column, I spoke mainly about China. Now I would like to say a few words about the Arab world.

There are bloggers all over. Longtime readers may remember a report I did from Jordan four years ago. I moderated a panel on new media, and their effect -- and I met a young Jordanian named Ahmad Humeid, who had co-founded a blogging network called toot. You can find it here. Why that name? Well, it has a meaning in Arabic and a meaning in English. Here is what toot?s homepage says: ?toot is the sound you make to draw attention to yourself. toot is a fruit that consists of little bits that make up a whole. toot belongs to a tree. toot is sweet. toot comes in different colors.?

You can sense the enthusiasm, and the newness -- a sense of new possibility -- in those words.

Have more from these guys:

We witnessed something amazing and decided to start this site! Across Arabia and all around the world, intelligent, passionate, interesting, funny, knowledgeable and courageous people are using the web to make their voices heard. It started with a few, then a few hundred. Now, thousands of them are taking to their keyboards and starting to write blogs, share their knowledge, pictures, opinions, emotions and life. This is big!

 

At toot, we want to provide you with a window and a link into an exciting new universe of people-powered opinions, information, dialogue and entertainment. From politics to sneakers. From culture to technology. From boys and girls!

 

We are bloggers, readers, designers and technologists ourselves. We are excited to build a new medium in which intelligent voices from and for Arabia are brought together and presented to a wider community; where passionate readers and writers can share and communicate without filtering.

I think, not for the first time: It?s amazing what we in the Very Free World can take for granted.

Of course, some bloggers attract the attention of governments, and things do not turn out too well for them. Pay a visit to Cyberdissidents.org, if you have the stomach. As I say in my NR piece, the details given there are not for the squeamish.

The site quotes an article in the Christian Science Monitor headed, ?Politics on Facebook brings trouble for young Egyptian.? An excerpt: ?Maher says he was shackled, blindfolded, and stripped. He says the police dragged him across the floor and beat him for almost 12 hours. They demanded to know the password to his Facebook account and asked for information about the 60,000 people in the group, then threatened to rape him if he would not comply, he says.?

Yup. This is utterly common. You can read a thousand stories like this.

Want to know a little more about Egypt? Here is an article by David Keyes, the director of Cyberdissidents.org. The article, published last August, is titled ?Mubarak?s Virtual Enemies.? And here is a portion:

. . . the Egyptian regime showed its true face again this month when the official telecom body threatened legal action against those who text ?inappropriate words.? What exactly constitutes ?inappropriate words? is anyone?s guess, but young Egyptians are not exactly emboldened when student bloggers such as Kareem Amer are sentenced to years in prison for criticizing Mubarak. Under the guise of moral concern, the regime implements one of the most immoral of actions -- the suppression of liberty.

 

But few things are as resilient as the human soul; it is incredibly difficult to crush. As in all unfree societies, a brave few fight back with a vengeance. For example, two weeks ago 28 year-old Egyptian blogger Hani Nazeer commenced a hunger strike to gain back his freedom. Nazeer is a Coptic blogger who authors the ?Love Cherries? blog; he has been held without charge for over a year. Nazeer?s family members have also been detained. As is so typical of tyrannical regimes, an unlucky few are made examples of to intimidate the rest. The idea is not to silence every blogger, but rather to instill just enough fear in society so that people censor themselves. 

Very well put.

An unusual number of Egyptian bloggers have been arrested lately. Hillary Clinton noted this in her big Internet-freedom speech last month. One of those seized was Wael Abbas. He is probably the best-known Egyptian blogger, more like an independent journalist, really. He gives Egyptians information that they are otherwise deprived of. Over the years, he has done much good. Abbas favors human rights and democracy for his country -- and the police have harassed and threatened him endlessly.

They have accused him of being a Zionist agent, a Christian convert, a homosexual. Understand that these are very serious charges in Egypt.

You want to see a compilation of recorded threats against Abbas? (I say ?see,? because the recordings are transcribed, in English.) Go to this video, here. It has a soundtrack: weirdly chipper music, seemingly incongruous. But the music is bizarrely effective, almost mesmeric. In the threats, you hear repeated references to Abbas?s mother -- references of the most vulgar kind. Repeated references to homosexuality. References to the shame that Abbas has allegedly caused the country.

Very, very typical. See David Pryce-Jones?s The Closed Circle, to get it all.

Here is something of minor interest: In their threats against Abbas, the Egyptian police refer to President Hosni Mubarak as ?The Man.? They do so positively, of course, perhaps reverently.

Until January, it seemed that Abbas was too big to arrest: too well-known, too admired, too counted on by ordinary Egyptians. But they arrested him anyway. Just yesterday -- February 18 -- he was acquitted in court, to the rejoicing of liberal Egyptians and their well-wishers. (For a story, go here.)

By the way, Egypt?s prime minister is a man named Ahmed Nazif. I have written about him before, and interviewed him. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from McGill. He is a co-founder of the Internet Society of Egypt. He was the country?s first-ever minister of communications and technology, before becoming prime minister. He is a serious computer intellectual, as well as a public official. And no one, anywhere, talks a better game about democracy and openness than he does. Honestly, he could outdo anyone at Freedom House.

Granted, a PM in Egypt does not wield much power. That lies with Mubarak (excuse me, The Man). But what must be in Nazif?s head, as he sees freedom-loving bloggers jailed and abused? Anything?

I will return to the subject of Internet freedom in my next columns, discussing other regions.

I learned a new expression: ?customer of size.? It refers to an airline passenger who is, or may be, too fat to occupy just one seat. At first, I thought the expression was a joke -- kind of a play on PC language: you know, ?person of color,? ?customer of size.? But it is quite real. Maybe I?m the last to know. I learned the expression from this article, about the actor-director Kevin Smith, who was booted from a Southwest flight.

Surfing the Net, I found a story -- a proper short story, called ?Customer of Size.? It is by Mary Jones, and it appeared in Carve Magazine, the Spring ?08 issue. I had never heard of the author, or the magazine (or the expression, as you know). But what a superb story. It is about a man who is a ?customer of size,? and his wife, and an episode. It is so well done, it is fairly painful to read, and impossible not to read, once you start. (I hadn?t intended to read it -- I was just surfing.) I wonder whether the author was involved in a customer-of-size episode. Or maybe she just has a good and sympathetic imagination.

Anyway, I haven?t made a literary recommendation to you in a long while: I do now.

Wanted to publish a fun letter for you! It responded to something I wrote about conservative Christians and Israel. 

Hey Jay,

 

My parents live in the Texas Hill Country, about ten miles outside of Fredericksburg specifically, and on the road to their place is a house that has three flagpoles out front: flying Old Glory, the Texas flag, and the Israeli flag. Every time I?m in the Hill Country and we drive by that house, I think of a Texan I heard who admiringly described the Israelis as ?bad-ass Hebrews.? God bless Israel and God bless Texas.

To end, let?s have a little language. This responded to something I had in Tuesday?s column:

Hi Jay,

 

My kids used to talk about the future as ?tomorrow.? The distant future was ?way tomorrow.? Seemed cool to me.

And to me too. Even way!

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on February 19, 2010 (boomark / email).