Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Dacia Valent - A post that will pass the liberal gatekeeper censors
Introduction by Miguel Martinez
Dacia Valent, of Italian and Somali origin, was a member of the European Parliament for several years, and is now a leading figure of the Islamic Anti-Defamation League or IADL. Recently, the US based Zionist organization, “Anti-Defamation League”, tried to get a court order in Italy forbidding the IADL to use the name: the Italian judges ended up by rejecting the plea and sentencing the US ADL to pay 6.000 Euros in legal expenses to the IADL (the ADL has, of course, defaulted on payment).
Recently, a post she wrote for the progressive metablog Kilombo was censored, so she decided to write the kind of post which would pass the average liberal gatekeeper.
This tongue-in-the-cheek post is such a good spoof on today’s “Left” that it can easily be understood outside its context, and survives translation.
There are a few references which might need explanation: Jovanotti is a mindless progressive pop singer, Inter is a leading Italian soccer team and there has recently been a proposal to send the Carabinieri (a kind of police force) to monitor drug abuse in the schools. Many people in Northern Italy tend to look down on the supposedly “lazy” people in the South of the country: the epitome of this spirit is the Brianza region just north of Milan.
“We don’t wear alarm clocks on our necks” means “we are nobody’s fools”, based on a colonial icon of the “backwardness” of Black Africans.
The rather halting syntax is, of course, part of the fun.
Miguel Martinez
Hi I’m Dacia Valent, and I am on the Kilombo metablog, how’s everything ?
Recently, a post she wrote for the progressive metablog Kilombo was censored, so she decided to write the kind of post which would pass the average liberal gatekeeper.
This tongue-in-the-cheek post is such a good spoof on today’s “Left” that it can easily be understood outside its context, and survives translation.
There are a few references which might need explanation: Jovanotti is a mindless progressive pop singer, Inter is a leading Italian soccer team and there has recently been a proposal to send the Carabinieri (a kind of police force) to monitor drug abuse in the schools. Many people in Northern Italy tend to look down on the supposedly “lazy” people in the South of the country: the epitome of this spirit is the Brianza region just north of Milan.
“We don’t wear alarm clocks on our necks” means “we are nobody’s fools”, based on a colonial icon of the “backwardness” of Black Africans.
The rather halting syntax is, of course, part of the fun.
Miguel Martinez
Hi I’m Dacia Valent, and I am on the Kilombo metablog, how’s everything ?
What I want to say is one’s got to be an optimist and love life. And loving life means loving peace
. Every single one of us can achieve peace, because it’s our right and because it’s a lovely thing. I struggle for peace, beyond every orientation, sexual or political, but also environmental, anti-racist, pro women and pro-men, secular but also Muslim, for peace and multilingualism
. We’ve got to seek love and not hate. Love unites all differences, racial or political or in terms of our favorite football team. Hatred on the other hand drives people to martyrize each other and to hurt each other. And hurting each other isn’t fair
. The way I see it, both Italian politics and abroad, there’s a bunch of politicians, who decide and who we see on TV. A lot of people say that “they’re just in it to make money quick”
, but really they don’t do what they are paid for, but they do the interests of other people, heartless oil tycoons who pollute the sea and businessmen who make children work, maybe making footballs for the world cup, by hand, pricking their fingers with infected needles I mean they don’t even have safety at the workplace, they don’t!!! . The ancient Romans used to say “panem et circenses” but not meaning “bread and circus”, like for us at the soccer stadium on Sunday, but to show lions eating Christians, and bread. Not the lions
, but the public would eat the bread, huh 
? I’m not against this, actually, if the bread is well baked it is the best thing in the world, it’s just the lions. I mean, I wouldn’t have liked to see the lions eating the Christians, just like I don’t like to go to the stadium to see a game without the Inter team 
. All of this is just because I stand for peace and even though I’m a Muslim, I wouldn’t like to see Christians eaten by lions, although I would like to see bread eaten. Well, since we were talking about peace in the world, how can we avoid talking about the endless issue where Israelis and Palestinians continue to face each other
? As you probably have already understood, I struggle against war, especially the one in the Middle East. This is because wars, besides being something very ugly, mean that human beings go around killing each other
. Actually, people kill each other because they are a little sad, but they are wrong to do so!!!
God made us to be happy
and to be optimistic about the future and to bring lots and lots of children into the world 
. This is why, like the great Jovanotti, I want to say here from Kilombo, cool down guys, “think positive”
and this especially where there isn’t real peace, I mean like in the Middle East . As I see it, it’s all a matter of communication among people, if they thought positive things would go the right way
. This post that I’m writing is very brave but also terribly honest: it won’t hide the faults of the Palestinians at all
. I mean, let’s be open about it, we “on the Left”, maybe even if we don’t do it on purpose, tend to consider as if the Palestinians had a lot of excuses for doing what they do, but we never, or almost never, say that the real reason could just be plain envy. I’m saying it now, and this is why you should appreciate my being so straightforward
. On the Left, we gab a lot about resistance, but we should be careful how we use words. Actually, we all know that the Palestinian leaders could buy tanks and remote control aeroplanes too, like the Americans do
, but they don’t do it because they are corrupt and spend all the money with loose girls and belly dancers,
, maybe with that guy in Iran who has the atom bomb to kill all the Christians and Jews
. So it is right for us to say that the Palestinians are not doing “resistance” but just “getting along as best they can”
. I think that we on the Left, as our stand on foreign policy, ought to make sure that the money we send is actually spent to buy weapons
.Then, personally, my political stand is against those Palestinians who go to Tel Aviv full of dynamite and blow themselves up on Saturday evenings in a nice fashionable disco. Sorry, I mean, but those Palestinians ought to build discos for themselves!!!
That way they would be dancing too in Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus . And it’s no excuse to go around saying that they will knock them down if they build them, we on the Left should make sure that the Palestinians comply with town planning regulations, that way they wouldn’t always be seeing the bulldozers coming in, I mean it’s a kind of excuse and people are just making heaps of money on it
. Anyway, these Palestinians, let’s be frank about it, play the victim and we can’t say that they really want to work all that much
. I mean, take those ruins, for example: why do they leave them there? Instead of doing ethnic cleansing, they could do rubbish cleansing, by Allah!
It’s been 60 years that every time you see Palestine, you always see demolished buildings. They should pick up that rubbish! Wait a little until the bulldozers have gone away, and pick the rubbish up
. If we look at it closely, you can see that these Palestinians are a little like our folk down in the South, they’re lazy 
. And yet they’ve had the example of the Israelis who actually made the desert bloom, but why don’t they learn too? You take all that demolition scrap, you can’t imagine how many discos and shopping malls the settlers could have built with them! Think pink, Palestine
! You can’t expect the desert to turn into a garden
, but at least they could bring out a potted cactus, just to show their goodwill!!!!" And then there’s that habbit of launching Qassam rockets
… I mean, why don’t they put flowers in their guns 
? That would be a surprise for the Israelis, a real shock. If they declared their wish for peace, the Israelis could no longer get their tanks and maybe knock down a bakery which is actually hiding a Hamas militant, or the bodyshop which is actually where they enrich uranium. We don’t go around with alarm clocks on our necks, not us . If I want to be really frank (and I sure do)
, I’ve got to say that I too have my doubts about these Palestinian youths that don’t do anything. I mean they never go out and have a pizza with their friends
, never go to the movies, never hold a rave party on the Gaza beach. How can these Palestinians go on playing the victim, and when it’s time to have fun, they can’t think of anything better than to fill themselves up with dynamite and nitroglycerin and blow themselves up in the Jews’ discos? What’s the matter with them? Don’t they like their DJ’s?
I mean, me being Italian, I’ve always admired the initiative of some businessmen of the Brianza who, I guess like their Israeli counterparts, simply rolled up their sleeves, they changed their own fate, it just takes a little at times: a little factory, a swimming resort, a poga-party in the open, because it’s always hot there
not like in Lombardy, where there’s fog. It seems to me that the Palestinians have got a problem with their image, because though they are nice and friendly people, they always appear as scrounging and weeping victims, always asking for the government to do something, and then complaining about the wall, and saying they’re killing us and they’re deporting us and everything else, not to mention that when they went to vote, they voted the wrong people, so they should thank the Israelis who arrested them all, it would be a good idea here too...
And what about all those complaints about prisons, and administrative detention and the Ansar camps?
They complain about their leaders being in jail, and they don’t even realize what a harsh prison sentence, or isolation, can do for people. Do you think Nelson Mandela would have been the man he was, if he hadn’t spent 27 years locked up in a cell? Would they have given him the Nobel Prize? I mean, I don’t know who’s managing their communications, but they ought to change the guy
. Especially, they never see the sunny side of things. A people which is not optimistic is really hard to like, let’s say it . I am sorry
my Leftist and anti-imperialist comrades don’t understand how the word deportation is really not generous towards the state of Israel. Actually, Israeli policies are not based on expulsion, it’s just like mother eagle who pushes her chick out of the nest, to teach it to fly: not everybody is lucky enough to get to know the world, is he? And we should also quit this business of hiding the fact that there is an Arab world which hates the Palestinians much more than it hates the Israelis
(actually the Israelis don’t hate the Palestinians, it’s just that they can’t manage to communicate with them, if the Palestinians studied Hebrew I’m sure half the problem would fade away). It hasn’t happened to us, but I am sure that if 2 million armed Kosovo militants poured into southern Italy, armed and ready to make trouble, we would have welcomed them happy to understand their reasons and to support them in their good struggle for freedom. But we are not backwards like the Arab world, which only has Pagan and Muslim routes whereas we’ve got Judeo-Christian roots and the Enlightenment.
Thank goodness we have humanitarian missions which show the good goodness of these roots to those peoples in need of them.
Think how lucky these Palestinians are
. While the Left here is struggling to get the Carabinieri to monitor the kids at school, they don’t even have to pay tax money, because the Israeli comrades place their sharpshooters, at their own expense, in front of the elementary and middle schools, ready to shoot those little bastard pushers who are hawking hash and cigarettes in front of those buildings which are always chock full of young people who don’t study much . Yes, because there is this too, that the Palestinians don’t study very much, 
they don’t know the sacrifice of sitting there listening to the teacher and spending time on books. This is due to bad upbringing, which makes them little victims. And this too is why, out of a spirit of generosity, our Israeli friends help them by keeping them away from the distractions of a free life,
putting them in comfortable penitentiaries where they can complete their education . they don’t know the sacrifice of sitting there listening to the teacher and spending time on books. This is due to bad upbringing, which makes them little victims. And this too is why, out of a spirit of generosity, our Israeli friends help them by keeping them away from the distractions of a free life,This isn’t nice.
I think that one of the first tasks of the Left should be to help this people, which is kind of left to itself and has got a bit lazy, to walk together with their Israeli friends, so they can educate each other how to listen. This is the only way that there can be the peace we are all struggling for, on the Left, and which will be a step forward for all of us, and certainly for them too . If instead of resisting
, so pigheadedly
, against progress and friendship, they stopped fighting against manifest destiny, the destiny willed by G-d and by everybody, people would appreciate them more. If instead of killing, they just started dying, then they would be much more lovable 
and they would help us to help them.Wowwowchowchow, Dacia Valent
Translated from Italian by Miguel Martinez, (and smiled up by Dacia Valent and Mary Rizzo). Miguel and Mary are members of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This article is on copyleft and may be published elsewhere, as long as the author, source and translators are cited and the content remains unchanged.
Labels: activism, friends, gatekeeping, Israel, Palestine
