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Use of all images is governed by an Attribution / Non-Commercial Creative Commons License.

I maintain four fotologs:
/anomalous
/anomalek
/homage
/avenuea

I am also on flickr:

<A HREF="http://www.flickr.com/photos/anomalous" TARGET=_top>http://www.flickr.com/photos/anomalous</A>

"To say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are practiced in its name." --Marshall MacLuhan

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TWO RULES:

1. No racist comments about Jews or Muslims or anybody else will be tolerated here. Any posts from user names like "muslims_r_evil" or "HitlerWasRight" will be immediately deleted.

2. This is my fotolog, not yours. That means:

(a) If you disagree with me and are interested in polite and respectful discussion, I`m usually open to it up to a point, but I owe you nothing. I enjoy healthy debate, and I abhor unhealthy debate. Either way, you have no rights here: If I don`t want to talk to you, I won`t talk to you. If I don`t like what you are posting, I`ll delete it. This is not censorship: it`s good housekeeping. Anyone who start squealing about censorship or taunting ("If you delete my post it just proves you are a _____", etc.) will have every post deleted from my flog, regardless of content,for the rest of eternity.

(b) If your posts are interfering with my own enjoyment of this flog or making it an unpleasant or discouraging experience for others, I will simply delete your posts.

(c) This is not an open forum for every offended Israeli to spam me every day with dozens of insulting posts about how evil I am. If you want to call me names and insult me, do it on your own flog. Any posts containing personal mockery or personal attacks and insults will simply be deleted.

(d) If you disagree with me and want to write 20,000 words on a subject, do it on your own fotolog. If it`s longer than a few hundred words, or more than a single post, its too long. If you are serious about dialogue, I will consider responding at length in your own fotolog. If I don`t have time, or don`t feel like it, I won`t. If you are behaving like a stalker, I will delete everything you post regardless of content.

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ABOUT ANOMALOUS

Some people have asked about me and my motivation in talking so often in my fotolog about what is being done to Palestinians. I have also heard some depressing chitchat from fellow floggers, some of whom insist that I should be kicked off fotolog and that what I say are simply lies and propaganda calculated to make people hate Jews. So clearly a little introduction is in order.

I live in New York City and work for an environmental organization. I am a peace worker and a Buddhist. In addition to launching a local chapter of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, I have also started and worked within and alongside many Palestine solidarity groups such as Jews Against the Occupation, Al-Awda, the International Solidarity Movement, Palestine Media Watch, Women in Black, & many others. I ONLY work, without exception, in groups in which Jewish and Israeli activists are a welcome presence. We work together to combat the multiple forms of ethnic hatred and racism which cynical players on both sides of this dispute encourage in order to further their respective agendas. Central to our work is the understanding that all Jewish people and Judaism itself - not just Palestinians, and not just Israelis - are being exploited and victimized by what I would call Zionism and what they would prefer to call the Israeli government. (On the little things, we agree to disagree.)

I am not Jewish or Muslim, Palestinian or Israeli. Besides the fact that really pissed-off people from the Mideast murdered a few thousand people less than a mile from my home because of American support for Israeli crimes, the main way that American-Israel policies against "Arabs" personally impact me is in terms of responsibility: i.e., my taxes pay for almost everything Israel does. Another way this conflict touches me is that I have a lot of friends in Israel, and a lot of Israeli friends in New York, who I love dearly. It`s unbearable to me that they may end up paying with their own lives the terrible price for Israeli injustice in the nauseating lottery of war against civilians. My concern is with them, the real Israel, the only Israel that matters - which is the people, the human beings who live in Israel - and what needs to happen before they can have any plausible hope of surviving in the long-term where they are.

The violence of armies and troops engaged in military combat is bad enough, but in this conflict only one side has an army. One of the great ironies and tragedies of Israel`s relentless attempts to militarily "pacify" the region is that it consists largely of systematic and indiscriminate violence against civilians, attacks which kill friend and foe alike, murder allies as well as enemies, dragging everyone into misery. Israel`s enormous violence against non-Jews is now, occasionally, beginning to trickle back against ordinary Israelis in small but terrible ways.

And finally there are my many friends, Palestinians and internationals, who are living and working on the ground in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in a terrifying situation and subjected to relentless violence from Israel, trying desperately to remind Israel that its security can not really require the elimination of an entire people, that the best security comes from cultivating justice with ones neighbors and being open to the sometimes painful understanding of what their experience looks like.

Israeli racism and ethnic fundamentalism is among the greatest obstacles to any kind of peaceful co-existence in the region. It is a problem that is getting worse, not better. This militant ideology of Jewish ethnic supremacism - Zionism - is an obsolete throwback and offshoot of some of the ugliest elements of 19th-century European colonialism. But the ultimate engine of Mideast violence is the White House and the US Congress, whose bankrolling of the conflict and whose consistent obstructionism on behalf of Israel have for many decades prevented the rational and peaceful resolution which would otherwise have taken place long ago. So if you feel like launching into finger-pointing, as always the best place to start is with yourself. You yourself are not so different from this Israeli doctor, that Palestinian rapper, the settler who cultivates roses, this suicide bomber, that bulldozer driver.

As for my flog, it gives a pretty good glimpse into my personal life, much of which has been invested for a long time in Palestine solidarity work. It moves without easy transitions between a lot of different worlds. And this is one of the things that is so exciting about Fotolog to me - I am used to keeping the different parts of my life separate, and I have only recently picked up my first camera. So it is truly thrilling to be able to bring together the conflicting and complicated pieces of my life in this way, simultaneously creating myself sharing my world with so many new friends all over the world. When I joined Fotolog I hadn`t anticipated doing it, but it feels good to share here some of the images of Palestine. They are a heavy burden to carry around and the claustrophobic and microscopically detailed knowledge of what is happening on a daily basis has given me many sleepless nights and caused me a lot of pain and grief. In my practice as a Buddhist and as a human being, trying to figure out what, if anything, might be the right thing to do about all this terrible suffering is a constant labor. Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I fail. But at least I try.

Most of my fotolog is about me and my life. But my goal in sometimes posting images of Palestine here is to offer an informed glimpse of a perspective which is simply unavailable in the American media. I am trying to do this in a way which honestly expresses my own horror at what is taking place, but also my optimism that a greater and more compassionate understanding of what we are doing to those Others Over There will inevitably end this violence. I try to do this in a way which will not exacerbate the suffering on either side, inflame an underlying problem with anti-semitism here in America, or add to the unfortunate history of misrepresentations which have been fomented about Israel & the Palestinians.

I am confident that all of the information I am providing is correct, or I would not be posting it.

But to highlight the fact that people, like pictures, can lie, I have called my fotolog "The Use of Fiction." I want to invite people to question their own beliefs about this conflict and to ask themselves who and what they believe, and how they came to believe what they believe. Above all I would like people to ask themselves "What if this guy is telling me the truth??" -- and then take responsibility for it: not to swallow every word I say, but to find out for themselves what is really going on.

The conflict, ultimately, is not that complicated, despite Israeli efforts to make it appear that way. "We can`t just end the occupation", they say - "it`s complicated." Once you slice throught the ocean of nonsense, there is nothing difficult to understand here. Israeli is engaged in gross violations of international law and in outrageous human rights crimes. Every now and then, Israel`s victims fight back. What`s complicated about that?

Understanding this conflict is made extraordinarily challenging only because so many of the essential truths of the story have been replaced by fictions designed to serve only one side.

Pictures are routinely put to use to foment racism, to stoke easy hatreds, and to distort the reality of what is happening. Much of what takes place in Occupied Palestine does so under the watchful eyes of an enormous concentration of journalists and observers of all kinds. In many cases, that poignant image of a child crying in isolation would be shattered if the camera were to back up a few feet, to reveal a dozen photographers latching onto every tear. The child`s grief is only too real, but the meaning we take from it is largely a construction of journalists who want us to be wowed, moved, or outraged. In many ways, dishonesty is the engine which allows all of this hellish violence to continue. Behind all the pictures there are real people living daily lives under a military occupation whose real nature cannot easily be captured by a camera.

When I post pictures about Palestine, I am also trying to decieve: I want to give you the "wow", the outrage, the compassion which might move you to find out more. And in so doing I am concealing the reality of the Occupation, which is not about all this melodrama and funereal pomp so much as the slow daily grind of decades of systematic racial subjugation & humiliation, and the deliberate cultural, material and economic impoverishment of an entire people: things you can`t take a picture of. But my goal is to encourage you to realize that you need to discover the truth for yourself, and so this is one "Use of Fiction."

I hope to help correct some popular untruths which have arisen in part through the systematic portrayal of only one side of this conflict. In fact it is not even "one side" which is being presented in the media - not the Israeli side, but a hideously parodic and narrow sliver of Israeli opinion: one small part of one-side. There ARE decent Israelis who are struggling for justice. Not many, unfortunately. But I know many of them and I am honored to work alongside them.

So consider occasional images of Palestine here as my gift to my Israeli friends, and a supplement and antidote to the one-sided and largely fictional presentations of this conflict which are provided by the American media, in which all Mideast violence consists of Islamic fundamentalists blowing up Jewish babies.

The humanity of Others is something that is largely created - or obscured - for us by the media. By now you have all seen countless images of Jewish and Israeli suffering and I trust and hope that you all empathize with their situation. When I post pictures of Palestine and Palestinians, I do it not to hide or deny Israeli suffering, but to help people learn to see Palestinians not as mindless homicidal maniacs but as real human beings who are also suffering, so that they can be as real and human for you as Israelis are, and equally deserving of your compassion and intervention.

There are many peaceful resolutions to this conflict possible. If Israel were simply to abide by international law, 99% of this conflict would end overnight. For now, inthe current climate of Israeli lawlessness, the ongoing, excrutiating encounter between Israel and the Palestinians can only end in mutual disaster unless these most basic truths of the Palestinian experience of Zionism are allowed to be told.

Just as we have an obligation to protect our own friends and neighbors from violence and harm, as a Buddhist and as a decent human being I feel I have a personal ethical obligation to help people learn enough about the US-maintained Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be able to skillfully intervene as best they can, with compassion for everyone involved, to end this misery once and for all.


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"Appearances often are decieving."
--Aesop, "The Wolf in Sheep`s Clothing"

"Nemo aliquid recognoscat, nos mentimur omnia." (Let not any one take these thing to himself, they are all but fictions)
--from "Democritus to the Reader", introduction to "The Anatomy of Melancholy" by Robert Burton.
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NYC, New York, United States

My Fotolog page

November 24, 2003
  • Canon SD100 (Digital)
  • Canon SD550 (Digital)

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