Adrien K. Wing on Egypt

Our colleague Adrien K. Wing, who's been traveling to Egypt for more than a quarter-century, has just published an op-ed inspired by recent political events on which we've posted.
Appearing in the Des Moines Register, the essay's entitled "Before now, Egyptians never dreamed of anything like Iowa's caucuses." In it, Adrien (right) recalls that many of her Egyptian hosts had been fascinated with the U.S. Presidential race. That race begins every 4 years in Iowa, the state where Adrien is Bessie Dutton Murray Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law.

Adrien's essay recounts discussions she had following Barack Obama's 2008 victory:

After the election of an African-American president, something that many Americans thought would never happen, I asked my Egyptian friends how they felt while watching our process. Could they imagine an Egyptian election in which Hosni Mubarak might not win? Needless to say, for them, it was beyond imagining.

Adrien continues with thoughts on the unveiling imagination of just that.

On July 1

On this day in ...
... 1934 (75 years ago today), the United States' Roman Catholic bishops formed the Legion of Decency a lobbying group that issued ratings on movies. Films were categorized as "Class A: unobjectionable," "Class B: objectionable," or "Class C: condemned." An "objectionable" label would result if the film entailed suggestive dialogue, lack of moral compensation, lustful kissing, or acceptance of divorce. The lobby proved powerful, as film studios either pulled or altered projects in order to win the Legion's approval. For example, the plot of Belle of the Nineties (1934) was changed so that the lead actor, Mae West, was married by the end of the film. (image credit) Hollywood soon adjusted, adopting a more subtle but equally suggestive approach to “indecency.”
... 1994 (15 years ago today), Yasser Arafat (below left), Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman, returned to the Gaza Strip after 27 years in exile. Before boarding a helicopter from Cairo with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Arafat said: "Now I am returning to the first free Palestinian lands. You have to imagine how it is moving my heart, my feelings." His return followed the 1994 Israel-PLO pact known as the Cairo Agreement, which created self-rule for Palestinians in Gaza and Jericho in the West Bank. Arafat went on to become the elected president of the Palestinian National Authority in 1996. He would remain a symbolic figurehead for many years even after he lost prominence, and huge crowds would turn out for his funeral in November 2004.

(Prior July 1 posts are here and here. And a hat tip today to Rachel Prandini, 3L at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, for drafting these items!)

Hunger “strikes”

And when it does, the hungry strike back. In Egypt in late March, at least 7 people died during an acute shortage of subsidized bread: long lines in the spring heat contributed to violence responsible for 2 deaths, while exhaustion and complications of other ailments killed 5 others. To avoid rioting, President Hosni Mubarak called out the army—not to quell violence, but to bake and distribute bread. In Haiti, where the price of rice doubled in a single week, demonstrations began on April 3, developing over the course of a week into violence, pillaging and the arrest of over 300. To calm things down, President René Préval announced he would lower the price by $8. Considering the extent of the problem, the solution is not at all adequate: 80% of Haiti’s population lives on less than $2/day, while the price of rice rose from $35 to $70 for 110-pound bag. Dropping it to $62 is not likely to appease anger or hunger for long. Especially since such hikes in prices are not solely due to the shortages of rice or wheat that we’ve all been hearing about. According to Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur for the right to food, the problem is structural: drought in Australia and increased consumption in China and India cannot be blamed entirely for the 52% increase in the price of rice over the last 2 months, nor the 84% hike in other cereal prices in 4 months. Obviously, the price of oil, and thus transportation, has to be figured in. And as the French weekly, the Canard Enchaîné pointed out, (sorry, no web link) trading commodities such as rice on the world market also shares responsibility for such precipitous rises in prices. Ziegler claims that the food riots we’re seeing are merely the tip of the iceberg of a coming catastrophe: before prices rose, children under age 10 died of hunger at the rate of 1 every 5 seconds and 854 million people were seriously under nourished. And with the United States now putting big bucks ($6 billion) into biofuels, 138 million tons of corn will be used to propel people rather than feed them. Serendipitously, as I was preparing this post yesterday, I received notice of a way we all can help: go to http://www.freerice.com/. I was told the site was created by a computer programmer who wanted to devise a way to help his son study for his SAT's (vocabulary portion) and do something to help end world hunger at the same time. It consists of a vocabulary test, on which you can preset the level or have it adjust automatically to suit all ages and levels. For every correct answer, the site’s sponsors donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food program (a quick check of the UN site shows that rice from Free Rice has been donated to at least Bangladesh & Myanmar so far). In just a few minutes, you can donate thousands of grains of rice (and improve your vocabulary to boot)!