Against Sectarianism in Lebanon!!

Before I write about Lebanese politics, check out this campaign (as seen on the Perpetual Refugee blog). Great campaign photos, this is something worth supporting. Check out Project 05amam.org for more info.

(that reads: Parking, for Maronites Only)

Scary how far we are willing to go when it comes to identifying an 'other'. Sometimes, we strive to find this bloody difference because it happens to serve some interest. I was speaking with some friends yesterday, and one said he believes the new generation of Lebanese is growing up knowing that they are Lebanese first, and whatever else second.
Ricard, I hope you're right!

I remembered this caricature by Naji Al-Ali, the Palestinian cartoonist assassinated by the Israelis in London in 1987. If you don't know Naji Al-Ali, RUN to this website in arabic or that one in english.

Naji Al-Ali is the only cartoonist that has ever made me cry, and i'm eternally grateful to him for that.

Anyways, enough talking, here is one of my favourite cartoons of his on Lebanon:

Everything You Don't Want to Know About Your Kid’s Sex Life

The New York Magazine ran survey where the asked 100 teenagers a 100 parents about the teens sexual life - asking the kids to answer and the parents to guess what their children's answers would be. The discrepencies are quite significant, and hilarious at times!!
Check out the full survey.

And until you do, here are some of the good ones:

Have you ever french-kissed? Teens saying yes: 84%; Parents: 43%. (Duh!)

Have you ever received oral sex: Teens: 61%; Parents: 10% (Oops...)

Have you ever had sex on your parents' bed? Teens: 16%; Parents: 1% (you may want to change those sheets).

Have you ever had sex in a public place? Teens: 15%; Parents: 1%. (Parents should stop believing the 'Mom, i'm going to walk the dog in the park behind our house, he needs to go again' line..)

BBC News Humour and Bloopers

Hilarious. Will get your mind away from the shit in the ME.

I love how they have humour... not only do they actually make the jokes, but when it's merely a blooper, they can laugh about it :)




Thanks to Nadina :-*

US veto on Beit Hanoun condemnation freezes the UN

From www.Aljazeera.net.

And it was just a fucking condemnation under fucking chapter six... What if it was a resolution deciding of sanctions against the state of Israel? Would Bolton have burned down the UN building or something? Stupid asshole...

Seriously, we should have a world petition removing the veto power from the United States in the UNSC....

Suffocating

"At five or six this morning, shells hit our neighbours while we were all asleep. They are just 300m away from us. Eighteen people killed from two families. And many, many people now injured. "

Harder to breathe.

As I grasp the enormity of the Beit Hanoun atrocities. As I realised what happened as we were watching.

Again.
And again.
And again.

Names started to jump in head. Qana. Jenin.

Flashes of light and darkness, snaps of sound..

Images of dead bodies, pictures of destroyed houses, the sound of crying children, the heavy breath of those trying to carry their wounded and dead loved ones to the nearest hospital, already overcrowded.

The drops of blood on the white paving making a trail to the emergency room. Or to the morgue.

The sound of rolling tanks outside. The tip of the helmet of an Israeli soldier, peeking out of his tank to take a look and have a breath of fresh air.

The air smells like sulfur from the shelling, and of dust from the walls that fell into pieces, often on the head of their inhabitants, always on their lives.

Nausea.


Counting our dead.

18? 20? 40? 70?

75 people this week. This is like all the MPAID 2 class.

I want to vomit.

Vertigo.

I need a sip of water.

I punched the wall. My hand hurts.

-------------------------

I was just on www.aljazeera.net. There was a poll: Do you think that peace between the arabs and israel is still possible?

I hesitated. Half a minute. I could feel my heartbeat in the tip of my finger as i was going to click, as if my choice would determine my future opinion.

I somehow managed to click 'yes'.

the results of the poll were a 9% for yes, 91% for no.

Bravo, Israel. I mean, after welcoming a racist and violent party to your government's upper circles, a massacre was just what was needed to pave the road to peace.

Does the word even exist anymore in your language? I doubt it. Bravo.

"Yesterday they killed my aunt. She lives in eastern Jabaliya camp [near Beit Hanoun]. She was cleaning inside her home when a shell hit the room she was in. She died instantly."

"My son is two years old. He was so scared.."

(Quotes in bold from the BBC's 'Eyewitness: Gaza Bloodshed')

Institutional Evil - Or why WE don't have a partner for peace in Israel

I’ve wanted to post/shout/cry about that for a while now.

THIS PIG has been appointed vice prime minister of the state of Israel.

Okay, deep breath.

The gentleman here depicted is Avigdor Lieberman, head of the Israel Our Home (Yisrael Beitenu) party. The party’s base is the Soviet Jews who went to Israel after 1991. Himself was born in Moldova.
This pig - sorry, person - has joined the Kadima-Labour-Shas-Gil coalition and hence reinforces the coalition’s presence in the Knesset to 78 seats (out of 120).

But hey, it’s all cool. I mean, the guy only calls for bombing Iran and Egypt (!!!!!!), expelling Arabs from Israel proper - and Israel improper as well, as he aims to annex as much as he can from the Autonomous territories. He is a notorious racist, an arrivist, and basically everything that is supposed to separate humans from rats, well, he displays the rat characteristic.

The interesting thing is that this governing coalition which welcomed our good friend Lieberman (‘Lovable man’, as he was ironically dubbed by Uri Avnery) on board was brought to power on grounds of finding some kind of... hehehehehe... peace.

Remember Ariel Sharon, the war criminal who killed the Egyptian prisoners in 1973? The man who orchestrated the Sabra and Chatila massacres in 1982 in Lebanon? The man who ignited the Second Intifada, who was Prime Minister from 03/2001 to 04/2006? Yep, that one. Well, his Kadima party was brought to power, and this worm Ehud Olmert became prime minister, on a ‘peace’ agenda. Well, end-of-the-conflict-disengagement type of thing.

I can't stop laughing.

We thought that could never happen . We thought that extremist parties no longer had their place in the civilised world. No Jörg Haider in Austria, no Jean-Marie le Pen in France.
Well, I was clearly wrong on my definition of the civilised world.

And for that matter, it is also funny to know that the Labour party, led by current defense minister Amir Peretz, has grinned a little bit but decided to bend over. After all, Peretz, who had promised before the elections to never join a coalition with Lieberman, knew that someone with his limited intellect and education - barely made it through high school - would never get such a sweet chance.
Ha’aretz, for that matter, said that "Amir Peretz has let his voters down in every possible way".

Why don't we take a quick look at the other members of the governing coalition, while we’re at it?

Another coalition member, Shas, is an extremist religious party, led by rabbi Ovedia Yosef - a lovely lovely old man who has said that “In the old city of Jerusalem they [Arabs] are swarming like ants. They should go to hell - and the Messiah will speed them on their way”. (Source: Newsmax); ; and on many other occasions, he also said about Arabs that "It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable", and "The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world."(BBC NEWS: “Rabbi calls for the Annihilation of Arabs).
Charming, isn't he?

Gil is the pensioners’ party. La lohom wala 3aleihom, as we say. They made it into the Knesset by encouraging people to vote for them rather than put a white ballot. Cute, no? The average age of their electorate should be something like 85 years old.

So basically, whatever hope we thought we had is totally gone. Not that there was much left after this summer’s Lebanon massacre anyway.

Oh, and the cool thing: Lieberman, the man who advocates the expulsion of the country's original citizens, the new vice-PM, was given a ministerial portfolio responsible for strategic threats against Israel, notably the crisis over Iran's nuclear programme.

Hehehehehe.

Israelis may be bloodthirsty, hateful, lawless, trigger-happy and irrational (no, not all of them. Just some. Stop whining.), they do have a sense of humour.

9 bonnes raisons d'etre rebeu en France

Neuf bonnes raisons d'être rebeu en France
Thierry Ardisson, "Salut les terriens !", Canal+, Samedi 4 Novembre 2006.

9 - T'es ami avec tous les flics de France. La preuve, ils te tutoient tous

8 - Tu peux facilement trouver une place sur un bateau pour l'Algérie

7 - Vu que tu habites au 26eme étage d'une tour, t'es à l'abri en cas d'inondation

6 - Tu cherches pas ton temps a chercher pour louer un appartement, t'en a pas

5 - Ca pourrait être pire : tu pourrais être noir

4 - T'es le premier mis au courant par la police quand un vol a été commis

3 - Tu fais chier Nicolas Sarkozy.

2 - Tout le monde t'adore, a condition d'avoir marqué 2 buts en finale de coupe du Monde

1 - Tu es né ici !!

A Love Story in Four Pictures

Thanks to Nadina :-*

Bye bye Saddam!

As I type I am watching the judgment issued against Saddam Hussein - for those who were asleep, he has been sentenced to death.

Won't share my opinion on the court, the judgment, blablabla.

What was weird though was to watch the face of a man as he is being sentenced to death. When someone is being told that his life will be ended within the next 30 days...

It took him a second to react. Remarkable emotional stability, if you want my opinion... he started shouting "Long live Iraq! Long live the Iraqi people! Down with the traitors!". The judge kept on going with reading his judgment and its sub-paragraphs and all... then he stopped.

The look on Saddam's face was quite incredible.
It was... or at least, I could read his eyes saying... "Game over? Really? So that’s it?"

Weird, weird.

Apart from the jubilatory reactions of the Americans (48 hours before the mid-term elections...) and a few outbursts of happiness here and there - Iran was just as glad as the US, by the way - there seems to be a general acceptance of the fact that he was sentenced to death. Only JL Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain's prime minister, added a little parenthesis that the EU is against the death penalty.

And it's going to be even crazier in the Iraqi street after a little while.
Damn. We've already got half a million people dead since the invasion. I cannot imagine what it'll be like in 6 more months... I tell myself that there'll be an appeal and all, and hopefully the judge will be less vindicative than today's and the dog will get a life sentence, and we'll basically forget about him in 2 years.

Otherwise....

I'll try to embed the video of the judgment in this post, but until then, you can find it here.

Didn't take them that long to crush that little bit of hope in me.. Yawlad el....

It is 6:30 am. I’ve been in the library for the night, because my hard drive crashed on Wednesday, working on the Rodrik papers that were due on Wednesday :) And trying to focus on the boring topics we've been offered... no distractions, no blogging!!

But there is so much a soul can take.

And THAT was it. I am more frustrated and angry than I've been for a long time, towards to Israel-Palestine thing.

Maybe because I am evolving in an environment of reasonable people? Getting to learn about the humans, not the Army? Maybe because even in the nastiest conversations we still agree that the end target is peace, dammit.

But this really pinched my heart to the tears.

Israel decided an incursion in Beit Hanoun (nothing new.) and decided to assassinate some people (nothing new here either. The soldiers need their training, right? We're an easy target).

So anyway, 20 Palestinians dead later, including victims as old as 4 years old (they had trouble labeling this one as a Hamas militant!!:) and 1 Israeli soldier dead, they decided they wanted some more, so they went on another deer hunt and ended up cornering more than 70 people who went to hide inside the mosque (the Israeli claim is that among them were a dozen armed people - which I can surely believe and is quite irrelevant, for that matter).

So the Army wanted to smoke them out - well, crush them out: they had already demolished a wall, when...........

TATARARA RARAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! (Cavalry horns :).

About 100 women came to the mosque, on a radio call from the Palestinian Government! Building a human barrage, the allowed the poor ppl stranded in the mosque to go out.

Now that's more guts than i'll probably ever have.

So the Army opened fire at the women. Killed two.

Tssk, tssssk. Shooting in anger at unarmed mammas? I don't know what they told you in military school, kids. But that's not classy.

See, what pisses me off the most with the Israeli Occupation Army is that whenever I start seeing a bit of light, whenever I manage to convince myself that most of the people in Israel actually want peace, they burn down half a village, kill 25 people and then call it self-defence or whatever lousy excuse they can fight.

Alright then, so you're trying to tell me that Israelis are looking for a fight... thank you, message received.

Don't come weeping when the war comes a tat closer your way. Blame it on your own incompetent political leadership and your bloodthirsty trigger-happy teenagers gang you call an army.


Oh wait, wait!!

Here's a real conversation from the first Intifada days (1987-1991):

Whenever the Israeli Occupation Army would grab a kid in the street, you'd have all the women around try to grab him back from the hands of the soldier (Gosh they have guts...) and all of them saying "Ebni, ebni!!!" (my son, my son!!). An exasperated soldier once yelled back at them "How come your son? Are all the children your children??" at which point a woman replied "Yes. Our children have a 1000 mothers. Unlike yours - with a 1000 fathers".


Touché :)
(for the French: Putain si ça c'est pas de la CASSE, quand même.. :)))))

And on that, back to my paper on the Medical reform in Cambodia. Let me know if you know anything that would help!!!!

Frustrated and burnt out yours,

Mohamed.

PS: the story above is related in Morid El Barghouti's fabulous book 'I've seen Ramallah', with the name of the lady and the location and all!! :)

UPDATE. 50 dead people since wednesday in Gaza. That makes 10 murdered people a day.

I am ashamed of being in a world that allows that to happen.

Launching the STARVE A PRESIDENT Campaign :)

Oxfam is launching a 'Skip a meal campaign', for Thanksgiving. Noble thought. And they're asking people to email GWB to skip a meal as well:



Okay, I think it's cute. But i'm thinking of a way to make a far, far better impact in the world.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Launching the STARVE A PRESIDENT Campaign!!

what better way to make the world a better place? :)

Please send your emails to [email protected] with the subject "Please starve for a better world".
Make sure you tell him there will be photographers, he'll walk right in. :o)

OR if you just want to participate in the Oxfam campaign, which is fine too, please click here.