What Occupy Wall Street Can Learn From The Arab Spring And Los Indignados

From the far right to the far left, anti-Wall Street activists across the nation have been fodder for equal amounts of primetime praise and condemnation. Many attribute the movement’s accelerated popularity to shared economic suffering and frustrations coupled with the web and mobile-centric social mobilization movement that swept through Egypt in the height of the Arab Spring and drifted north onto Spanish soil the following summer.

Unsurprisingly, as both the media and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) try to derive distinct meaning from the multifarious movement, some misleading comparisons are being made between the 21st century American attempt at national protest and the spring and summertime predecessors in Spain and the Middle East. However, these movements have operated within their own spheres stemming from specific national economic and political contexts. If they continue to falsely analogize many aspects of the Spanish acampadas and the Egyptian protests to what is currently happening in Wall Street without fully understanding and learning from their unique circumstances, the Occupy Wall Street Movement will fail before it can even come to fruition.

While the claim can be made that Egyptians and Americans are both fighting against government corruption, some of the more salient facts pertaining to Egypt suggest more contrasts than comparisons. For example, thirty years of continuous emergency law that allowed for the suspension of constitutional rights, legalized censorship, increased police powers, and sentencing to indefinite imprisonment without reason left many Egyptians suffocating at the hands of the unscrupulous Mubarak regime.

As Mubarak and his National Democratic Party cronies enjoyed Egypt’s wealth (Mubarak and his family’s net worth ranges from $40-$70 billion), approximately 40% of the population lived on around two dollars a day. Furthermore, with the number of new people entering the job force annually at about 4%, a college graduate was ten times likelier to be unemployed than someone who only completed elementary school. Coupled with an absurdly high inflation rate of 12.8%, the outlook was not only grim, it was fatal.

As a result, most Egyptians rightfully distrusted the Mubarak government. In 2010, Transparency International rated Egypt’s Corruption Perceptions Index as 3.1, with a score of “0” being completely corrupt and “10” being very clean (for comparison’s sake, the United States is nestled safely between Belgium and Uruguay with a 2010 score of 7.1). The Egyptian people had enough.

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The Story Of Hamzah Al-Daeni & Righting Wrongs In The War On Terror

Hamzah Al-Daeni was only moments away from celebrating his fifth birthday when he was struck by a U.S. missile in front of his Baghdad home on May 1, 2008. The powerful force that spread from the missile launched Hamzah across the street and into a neighbor’s yard, where he was immediately knocked unconscious. Amidst the frenzied panic unleashed by an American warplane, Hamzah was carried home to his father, Imaad, by a neighbor whose young son Malik died upon impact. Imaad recalled in a solemn voice the terrifying sight of his blood-drenched and dirt-covered five-year-old son, whose exposed intestines dangled aimlessly from his severed abdomen.

Hamzah sustained several injuries throughout his brown-skinned five-year-old body. He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors informed Imaad that in order to save his son they needed permission to amputate the unsalvageable appendages that hung like broken branches from Hamzah. Imaad consented on behalf of his son, but the doctors were initially unable to perform the life-saving operation.

Profuse amounts of shrapnel from the blast had severed nearly all of Hamzah’s veins that could have been tapped for an intravenous drip. Imaad and his family felt the hopeless weight of their son’s impending death as the gangrene rapidly crept through Hamzah’s right leg and into his pelvis. But in what could have been his passing moment, Iraqi physicians found a viable vein and were able to perform a massive amputation of Hamzah’s right leg, right testicle, right buttock, two meters of his small intestine, and a portion of his stomach.

I met Hamzah and his father three years later in 2011 at a dinner party hosted by a Palestinian Muslim family in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In the wake of September 11th and the War on Terror, all of our ummah’s gatherings and celebrations had been politically charged. This gathering – where the personal so viciously collided with the political – was no different. The father and son had been brought to the United States by Healing Children of Conflict, a regionally-based NGO that fits third-world amputees with first-world prosthetics. Hamzah and Imaad sat poolside in the Kanaan’s meticulously landscaped backyard, drenched in the humid heat of the early-summer Michigan sun, as local Muslim families and elderly white anti-war activists convened to both celebrate the strength and mourn the pain in Hamzah’s survival.

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Six Ways to Tell If the Online College Course You’re Taking is Legit

Thanks to the anonymity of the Internet, the tenacity of the wicked and the desperation of our times, fake online college course, aka “diploma mills”, are popping up on every corner of the web. They offer low rates for accredited degrees that can be completed in half the time to qualify students for great, high paying jobs in exciting new careers. And not only do they not deliver on the promise or even their degree, but most of the time, they just take your money or worse, your credit card and your bank account information. This didn’t start with the Internet. The scam has been around since the 1880s when fraudulent doctors would draw up fake medical diplomas and sell them to students. However, there are ways to tell if the online college course you are taking will get you an accredited diploma instead than a lower credit score.

1. Stick with accredited universities

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How The British Recaptured America

The Queen of England gave the President of the United States the evil eye.

President Obama deserved it. He raised his glass over the band’s rendition of “God Save the Queen”. Her Majesty glared. The Commander In Chief bit down on his lower lip. The band played on. And just like that, the most powerful man on Earth was chastened—the one-time clarion call for Change hushed—by a starchy, octogenarian grandmother.

Alas, the Queen’s wordless reproach of President Obama was only the latest and all-too-public of reminders: Mother England has grounded the rebellious son.

America has suffered her indignities at the hands of England before. Beatlemania. The unfortunate Spice Girls-Weakest Link-Teletubby triumvirate of the late 1990s. But from Piers Morgan to the Royal Wedding to the premiere of X-Factor, the British at last conquered American culture in Fall 2011.

In the pantheon of Empires, the Romans turned the Mediterranean into their own lake. The sun never set on the British Empire. And America made the world its TV room. Until the British Empire struck back.

Perhaps American is chastened. Humbled after a rough-and-tumble decade of wars and truculent unemployment. Or maybe we need Mel Gibson back. Because ever since the Aussie actor stopped lobbing spears and musket-balls at the British (1990s) and started spewing diatribes at minorities (2006-Present), the British recaptured America one TV room at a time. They invaded not by sea but reality TV shows.

The British already came to a theater near you. Colin Firth and the “King’s Speech” plundered the Oscars. English shape-shifter Christian Bale scored Best Supporting Actor as the drug-addled n’er-do-well brother in “Fighter”. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 hexed box offices all summer, grossing $1.3 billion and soaring.

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Reflections On 9/11 As A Muslim In America

This past weekend, many Americans commemorated the tenth anniversary of September 11th. Some retold the stories of losing loved ones amidst the constant buzz of news stations replaying the images and sounds of planes hitting buildings. Others celebrated the vicious assassination of Osama bin Laden and death of Saddam Hussein as proof that we are, in the inspirational words of George W., “kicking ass” in the War on Terror. Underlying all this pageantry was an almost cultish romanticization of American democracy and freedom. But these commemorative moments of neologistic patriotism were not felt equally by all: for me and other brown-skinned Muslims, Arabs, and look-alikes in this country, our memories of 9/11 have been clouded by what has happened since that fateful day.

The day after airplanes full of civilians from my homeland were hijacked and crashed by terrorists from my motherland, I arrived at Portage West Middle School to find that my locker had been broken into and most of my belongings stolen. Later on in the day, I was asked to report to the Vice Principal’s office, where most of my belongings were strewn across the floor. Whatever remained of my overpriced but underused graphing calculator, extensive collection of rainbow gel pens, and outdated textbooks was beyond repair. In what was most likely a pre-pubescent frenzied mess of patriotic post-9/11 R.A.T.M. (Rage Against The Muslim), my things were smothered in and dragged through the mud in the woods behind my school, where a jogger eventually found them. Absent any evidence at all, the school administrator proceeded to accuse me of staging the hate crime as an attention-seeking ploy, implying that I was a twelve-year old sociopath.

I was nothing of the sort – at least not then. If I did suffer from anything remotely pathological, it was shame for my name. Born on the eve of the Gulf War, my parents named me Hussain, and so my first grade peers nicknamed me Saddam. I was even asked by my fourth grade teacher to explain to our social studies class the Arabic translation of “Saddam” – because I was named Hussain, like Saddam Hussein, the late Iraqi dictator who was both partner to and victim of U.S. American political powerbrokering.

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