Hasta La Gadget!

This year is International Solidarity Year with the Palestinian people. And this week was the 67th Anniversary of the Partition Plan, which proposed a Jewish and an Arab state in western Palestine. While the UN prepares to re-issue its routine condemnations of Israel, Jewish organisations worldwide joined the Israeli government in marking a different commemoration on November 30.

This is the date in 1947 when anti-Jewish riots broke out in Syria, and soon after in Bahrain and Aden. Shops were looted, synagogues and schools were burnt down and scores of Jews died. Violence soon spread across the Arab world. Within a few years, the majority of the Arab world’s million-strong Jewish population had fled.

The violence went hand-in-hand with state sanctioned persecution. In an atmosphere of increasing antisemitism, Jews were fired from their jobs, banned from travelling and entering universities, stripped of their citizenship and dispossessed of their property.

Thus the Arab-Israeli conflict created not one, but two sets of refugees.

The story of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands is little known, but has huge repercussions for today. No understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict is complete without taking into account the fact that half of all Israeli Jews are descended from, or are themselves, Jewish refugees from Arab or Muslim lands.

The Day of Remembrance will restore the narrative of ‘eastern’ Jews to mainstream Jewish history.
But first and foremost, it will be about plugging a gaping hole in the Israeli education system.

The parliamentarian who pushed through the law, Shimon Ohayon, a former schoolmaster, puts it as follows: “Every Israeli child learns about the Kishinev pogrom, but has anyone heard about the Farhud in Iraq? The education system teaches about the first exodus from Europe, while the second exodus — the one from Islamic countries — is missing from textbooks.”

It’s not enough to promote educational and political awareness at home. After years of neglect the Israeli government has woken up to the need to raise the issue in American and international diplomatic fora.

The UN has an especially shameful record of neglect when it comes to Jewish refugees. Not a single resolution concerns Jewish refugees, whereas over 170 resolutions deal with Palestinian refugees.

The Israeli government is taking the fight to the heart of the problem — and a commemorative event was planned for the UN building in New York.

Ohayon frankly admits that Jewish refugees are a weapon in the fight against Israel’s delegitimization. “This is a vital part of our fight against those internally and externally who delegitimize our presence here and claim we are somehow foreign to the region.”

A key strategy of the Palestinian and Arab campaign has been to portray Israel as a colonial interloper in a Muslim-Arab region. But Jews lived continuously in the Islamic world for thousands of years, just as they did in the land that is now Israel.

Although they did not remain refugees for long, the ‘ethnic cleansing’ and mass dispossession of Jewish refugees remain an injustice still to be addressed.

The struggle for recognition and redress will be greatly aided by the 30th November commemoration.

As the Canadian ex-Justice minister and human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler has said: “Without remembrance there will be no justice, without justice no peace, and without peace, no reconciliation.”

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — Ethiopian officials say more than 3,300 people were tested for HIV Sunday in the rural region of Gambella, a massive turnout that exceeded expectations among AIDS campaigners who had hoped to test 2,000 people.

Rahel Gettu, an official with the U.N. Aids agency in Ethiopia, said they believed they broke the world record for the number of HIV tests carried out in one day. She said their claim was yet to be verified and confirmed by Guinness World Records. She said 3,383 people were tested for HIV within eight hours in a single event ahead of World Aids Day. Eighty-two of them received positive results.

About 6.5 percent of Gambella residents have HIV or AIDS, a rate higher than the national average of 1.5 percent. Officials hope that voluntary AIDS testing in this region that borders South Sudan can lead to a reduction in the number of new infections.

If you buy meat, nuts or quinoa — or if you love Mexican food — you’ll definitely want to read this.

By Lynn Andriani

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BEIJING — Recently, two of China’s most infamous digital pirates breathed their last when YYeTs.com and Shooter.cn, websites providing crowdsourced Chinese subtitles for American TV shows, announced their closures.

The winner from such a move appeared clear: Hollywood. The Motion Picture Association of America had long railed against YYeTs as one of the most notorious enablers of digital piracy, undercutting the value of U.S. studios’ licensing deals with Chinese video sites. In an emailed statement, the group said it welcomed the move “to build a level playing field where legitimate business can flourish.”

But there was a second and less celebrated winner in the takedowns: Chinese media censors. That’s because the crackdown on piracy will boost, and several experts say is largely motivated by, efforts to push super popular foreign TV shows into the Chinese pre-approval and censorship regime.

While Chinese regulators are providing Hollywood the revenue it thirsts for by squashing piracy and promoting paid licensing, the same regulators are simultaneously pushing new rules that subject all foreign shows streaming online to pre-approval by Chinese censors looking to erase politically sensitive or simply “unhealthy” content.

“Of course U.S. business wants the Chinese to pay for content rather than pirate it, but at the same time this empowers the government to strengthen content controls,” said Rogier Creemers, a post-doctoral researcher at Oxford University who focuses on Chinese copyright and media issues.

“What is great for U.S. business — having more paid licensing for the largest audio-visual market in the world — may not be what you want from a democratic or human rights point of view.”

Announcements that by April 2015 all foreign shows streamed must receive pre-approval from censors came just three weeks before the closure of YYeTs and Shooter.cn, which allowed viewers to watch the original programs in unadulterated form.

“The MPAA is probably a good covering factor in that [Chinese regulators] can say, ‘It’s piracy, it’s not good and we’re a nation of laws,'” said one Beijing-based media analyst who spoke off the record in order to frankly discuss government policies. “But I think the effect that they’re after is making it that much more difficult to view shows that are both unlicensed and unvetted. Being able to do it in a way that’s makes it about standing up to piracy, it’s a win-win there.”

YYeTs has announced its service in mainland China is permanently closed, but as of Monday the site remained accessible outside the country and by using software that circumvents Chinese Internet controls. Chinese media regulators did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Long accused of being one of the most notorious global violators of American media copyright, YYeTs won’t see many tears shed on its behalf in America. But among China’s rapidly growing community of rabid American TV fans, the website was seen as something else: a grass-roots movement of world-class cultural interpretation, which provided crowd-sourced translations that creatively mixed in current slang while remaining faithful to the original English.

Founded in 2004 by young Chinese students in Canada, YYeTs recruited bilingual and multicultural volunteers who raced against competitors from other sites to crank out the best renditions of dialogue for hugely popular English-language shows. Armed with these high-quality subtitles, Chinese aficionados of American shows could freely download and enjoy pirated versions of “Homeland” and “The Walking Dead.”

America’s golden age of “prestige TV” has coincided with a surge in Chinese access to and interest in foreign shows. Comedies such as “The Big Bang Theory” and dark dramas like “House of Cards” built up huge online fan bases, with China’s top anti-corruption official Wang Qishan reportedly adoring the latter show’s depiction of Washington machinations.

While American shows make up a small portion of broadcast time (where foreign content is highly restricted), professor Stan Rosen of the University of Southern California, an expert on China’s relationship with Hollywood, said the U.S. shows attracted one of the most coveted consumer niches online: educated, internationally oriented and generally wealthy young people.

“This is the future in China, this cosmopolitan group: the people that travel abroad and buy foreign goods. They’re the rising middle class and the rising upper class,” Rosen told The WorldPost. “[They have] an appreciation of Western culture and they want to watch these shows uncut.”

China’s Internet Network Information Center reported that 428 million Chinese people were streaming video online by the end of 2013. That year reportedly saw $683 million in licensing fees paid for domestic and international shows, a 31 percent increase over a year earlier, according to research firm EntGroup.

Feeding into this revenue surge is a steady stream of agreements between Chinese video portals and American studios, such as video portal Sohu’s licensing of Conan O’Brien’s show “Conan” earlier this year and Tencent’s licensing agreement last week with HBO for “Game of Thrones” and other programs.

But public enthusiasm for foreign television shows hasn’t always been matched by government authorities, who in recent years have taken to framing cultural imports as weapons in an ideological invasion of China. In 2012, then-President Hu Jintao wrote that “international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration.” That essay and recent speeches by President Xi Jinping called for strengthening China’s cultural output at home and abroad.

“The Chinese government has never been very happy with easy availability of foreign content, but in recent years that paranoia has been stepped up,” Creemers told The WorldPost.

Streaming online TV shows came squarely under the glare of government regulators this year. In late April, “The Big Bang Theory” and three other shows were abruptly removed from legally licensed websites, with state broadcaster CCTV promising to re-subtitle a “green version” of the popular comedy. In September and November, regulations came out mandating that all foreign shows receive season-by-season approval before being streamed, and limiting foreign content to 30 percent of domestically produced shows from the previous year.

Such rules are routine for television stations in China, but marked a new application to the previously unregulated realm of online content.

The majority of American shows will likely never come in contact with a censor’s scalpel, barring an errant reference to hyper-sensitive topics such as Tibet or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. But dramas that feature China-related storylines may be at risk. The second season of “House of Cards” incorporated a timely Chinese subplot that waded into factional politics and corruption, and censors reportedly nixed two episodes of “The Blacklist” this year that contained Chinese plots.

While regulators can simply excise offending episodes before streaming in China, perhaps the greater threat is self-censorship by Hollywood studios eyeing Chinese viewers’ tastes and censors’ sensitivities. In 2012 the makers of action film “Red Dawn” used CGI technology to retroactively change the identity of foreign forces invading the U.S. from Chinese to North Korean.

Experts say such hedging moves are inevitable as Hollywood looks to the booming Chinese box office to supplement stagnating North America markets. Despite any nipping and tucking by censors, the recent surge in licensing agreements and film co-productions between Hollywood and Chinese studios still means that the average Chinese viewer currently has more legal access to American cultural products than ever before.

But for die-hard fans of unadulterated and impeccably subtitled versions of foreign TV shows, the closures of the freewheeling subtitling sites marked the end of an era and a nudge toward viewing the officially approved translations.

“I never thought it would suddenly be shut down. Going to other sites all I can see are these castrated versions, and after a minute I just lose any desire to watch,” wrote a 30-year-old man posting on the YYeTs message board. “This finally made me realize that the original flavor put out by YYeTs is what I want.”

Earlier this week, our kid said to his father, my husband: “Hi, nice Daddy!”

Thankfully “Daddy” patiently ignored him.

“Hey, nice Daddy!” he said a little too loudly

“I know what you are doing, OK?” I said.

I had just vetoed a kooky idea of his involving ice cream before dinner.

“No one talks to you” he said with a finger wave in front of my face. “No one,” he added with a satisfied smirk.

I don’t like finger waving and smirking is redundant as far as I am concerned. As annoying as it can be, it is typical behavior exhibited by a multitude of children trying to get what they want by marginalizing one of their parents.

Sometimes, though, it isn’t typical. We adopted our son over four years ago, but he moved in as a foster child a year before that. He immediately called my husband Mommy.

I was an articulated: “Ba.” Our mailman was called “Mommy” more than two years before I was.

Of course I asked if he would call me Mommy. As did my husband, for two reasons: to support me and because he wanted to be called “Daddy.” Still no matter how many times we asked he would not call me “Mommy.”

I was gratified by the stories of other mothers who would tell me about how “daddies rule and mommies drool.” I have heard on more than one occasion that no matter how much mothers do, daddies are the real deal. But, I knew this was different for our son. I stopped asking him to because it seemed more important to him not to call me mommy than it was for me to hear it. I wondered if it had something to do with ‘mothers.’ I was his third.

The reality was our son had a harder time bonding with me. This didn’t interfere with how I bonded with him, though. His first morning with us, it hit me. I’m someone’s mother. I have an awesome responsibility. Not awesome like totally cool, but as it was originally intended: reverent, fearful wonder. As the tears flowed, I pictured throwing myself in front of the proverbial bullet, car or bear.

I reminded myself of a story from our adoption classes. One of the trainers shared that every year for 12 years, one of her adopted daughters signed her birthday card to her the same way: Happy Birthday, Mrs. Clifford.

I had a couple people tell me to not let him get away with it. I wondered, what is he getting away with, exactly? Processing a troubled life at 2 years old? A few others said he was doing it to bother me. No sh*t.

Our son has asthma. He used to have frighteningly, terrifyingly horrible asthma. Three years ago he had a massive attack in the middle of the night. He was banging his head and clawing at his throat. My husband went into denial mode, convinced it wasn’t that bad. I took charge. I called an ambulance. My husband and I sat on the front steps, frantic, with our child who was gasping for air.

The next morning, the three of us woke up squished together in a hospital bed. My son turned to me. He put both hands on either side of my face and said: Mommy.

I had finally proved my mettle.

I have had more than one person say to me: I could never adopt. I just know I couldn’t love a child who wasn’t mine.

Sadly, some people put limits on their capacity to love. Thank goodness that isn’t true of our son.