Imet Wissam, author of Ethiopian Suicides at the Arab Bloggers Summit in Beirut recently, where I learned about his blog. (Here’s a video interview of him).

Wissam’s blog was featured in CNN, CNN Arabic, the L.A. Times, the Guardian, El Mundo (Spanish), Angry Arab News Service, The Daily Star (Lebanon) and Now Lebanon. It’s a great example of how citizen journalism can she light on important issues that hardly receive attention from the mainstream media.

Here’s what Wissam wrote on 24th December:

Ethiopian maid commits suicide in Ashrafieh. Merry Christmas everyone!

I just got a phone call from Nadim (HRW).
A few hours ago, an Ethiopian maid committed suicide in Ashrafieh. Her body is still laying on the road.
Ethiopian Suicides blog wishes you a Merry Christmas!

Here’s what he wrote a day later:

The Ethiopian maid “fell” from the balcony yesterday

The investigation into the death of migrant workers is taking a more “professional” approach. The death yesterday of Melomasen A., Ethiopian domestic worker, in Ashrafieh, was not declared a suicide. Investigations into the circumstances of the death are ongoing. She “fell” from the balcony of her employers and died immediately.

Al-Akhbar newspaper reported today on the incident. It mentioned that the security forces waited for the forensic team to come and remove the evidences, in case it was more than a case of suicide. This is considered a progress.

Wonderful. “Merry” Christmas indeed.

Merry Christmas boys and girls. 2009 is bye bye, and 2010 is about to dawn upon us. So here’s a question for you: what are you going to do to make 2010 better than 2009? Note down the answer, execute it, and have fun doing it.

Yippie yay.

Happy holidays and have a fabulous 2010.

Back to being drowned in the sounds of Nina Simone.

NOTE: Super long post ahead. Possible blindness might immediately ensue if you read it all. Continue at your own risk. You’ve been warned.

Phew. It’s been many years since I left the back-then very conservative Arab nation of Qatar, and my family started a new life in Southeast Asia. A lot has changed over the decade - world politics, media and myself.

And with that kind of transformation comes the desire to grasp on a deep level what really happened, what really changed, and if there was anything you lost along the way.

Or maybe whether what you “lost” has always been there within you but you’ve been too distracted to notice it, leading you to assume it’s become nothing more but a mere relic of your past.

Such an introspective exercise inevitably forces you to look within yourself and at times also induces intoxicating nostalgia.

In the case of Beirut, the experience reminded me of what it means to be an optimistic Arab, amongst warm hospitable Arabs, in an Arab city drowned in the sounds of Arabic music.

[click to continue...]

Iarrived in Beirut yesterday with a crapload of misconceptions about Lebanon and its people, but I’m glad to say that I’ve been largely very, very wrong.

It’s been a lot of fun so far.

There seems to be a certain quality about this city that I haven’t witnessed anywhere else. It’s chaotic yet elegant. Anxious with a dash of fierce frustration, yet deeply soulful. Full of cracks, yet somehow still glued together.

And in the midst of it all, the magical element, that certain quality that keeps this living and breathing oxymoron ticking - resilience.

That’s what I’ve learned so far.

The Lebanese, if anything, are a very resilient people, and it’s an awesome admirable quality I’m starting to like about them, besides their warm hospitality of course.

More to come soon, about Beirut, and the 2nd Arab Bloggers Summit.

Drima enjoys being stimulated, and he’s certainly grateful for the occasion.

So yay to stimulation - bitches.

This is what happens when an Afro-Arab Sudanese, aka yours truly, and a white English chick, aka my friend Claire, get together to talk about the recent BBC show that invited our lovely friend, Nick Griffin of the BNP, for a fun entertaining episode.

Yours truly pretty much bugged the shit out of busy Claire to write a quick guest post sharing her honest opinion on the matter after we discussed it.

Brits in the house (you know who you are), please drop your thoughts below after reading. Here it is. The blog post’s title is mine. The rest is hers.

Enjoy.

So Drima and I got talking one day about “the rise of radical Islam” in my country, the UK. Prompted by Nick Griffin’s appearance on prime time television, this huge issue has been publicly ripped opened - at last. So now the conversation can really begin…

But you know what? It’s such a huge and complex conversation, I can’t even begin to do it justice.

The one thing I will say is one of the more significant points in our conversation.

Drima was railing about how British political correctness had gone crazy and why we let that happen.

We allow the East London Mosque and its bookshop to run freely despite knowing what it sells, whilst we send innocent people to court for wearing a Cross necklace at work?!

“Simple” I said. And I know the answer because I am white, British and middle class.

We let the PC go crazy because our ex-colonial past is not in the past.

We used to take over and destroy cultures, replacing them with our own. We now acknowledge that this is wrong. Very wrong. So today, if we tell someone of an ethnic minority, “you can’t do that”, for any reason, justified or not, the auto-response is “racist! You don’t understand or respect culture. White colonialist! Shame!”

And we do feel shame. And the next time we keep quiet.

What makes this more difficult? More often that not, this shouted response is not from the minority.

It is from our embarrassed white brother.

In recent years this attitude reached special highs and the average person got sick of it - which is probably why the BNP started doing so well.

Of course they went too far, but apparently, at least they were willing to “stand up and say no, enough is enough. This is our country too and we want Christmas! Change is coming.”

The BNP is an overreaction (thank you, BBC, for allowing Nick Griffin a public platform to hang himself and his “political party”) but now the shout of “too much PC” has at least been heard.

And perhaps more importantly there is the growing voice of the home-grown Islamist recanters, speaking out against violence and promoting “secular Islam.”

Could this be the shift we’ve been waiting for?

These two voices need to be heard and they need to work together to create an environment we all can live in together.

I’m hopeful. Because there is a middle ground filled with people just like me, who are neither fascists nor jihadists. Dare I say it, we’re the quiet majority?

We must be louder.

Islam will not leave our country but neither will it become an Islamic Republic - and the scared white folk and radical Islamists both need a re-education to understand that that is OK.

Welcome to 2010.

Special thanks to Drima for sending me this article, it reveals a lot of what needs revealing in a way I could never express.

O

ur quote of the day comes from Michael Knight, author of the infamous book, The Taqwacores.

When he was 17, Michael Knight left his mother’s home in Rochester to study Islam at a Pakistani madrassa. It was his first act of rebellion – against his abusive, schizophrenic, white-supremacist father. Years later, burned out on the demands of religious dogma, Mike rebelled once more – by penning a Muslim Punk manifesto called The Taqwacores. His work of fiction struck a chord with young Muslims around the world and before long, real-life Taqwacore bands were creating a scene. This film follows Michael and his band of Muslim punks as they journey across the U.S. and Pakistan, transforming their worlds, their religion and themselves through the spirit of Taqwacore.

The quote? Well, it comes from this awesome interview he gave about his new film.

“I realized that I’d rather be inside the mosque urinating out than to be outside the mosque urinating in.” - Mike Knight

LOL, hilarious!

Watch the whole interview here:

And here’s the film’s trailer:

N

o, this isn’t some New Age pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo. No I haven’t been converted into a believer in The Law of Attraction after watching that hit film, The Secret. And no, I don’t buy into everything New Age guru, Deepak Chopra says, although he does have many cool and pretty valid ideas.

I’m talking about something very different here - how science and religion connect together at their deepest level.

Neil Tyson says it better in this video.

What Happened Before the Beginning?

Here’s something that pretty much sums up what was said in the video.

Read it all, every word of it.

“What happened before the beginning?”

Astrophysicists have no idea. Or, rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. Yet certain type of religious person tends to assert, with a tinge of smugness, that something must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues. A prime-mover. In the mind of such a person, that something is, of course, God.

But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify–a multiverse, for instance? Or what if the universe, like its particles, just popped into existence from nothing?

Such replies usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist on the ever-shifting frontier. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. And therein lies a fascinating dichotomy. “The universe always was” goes unrecognized as a legitimate answer to “What was around before the beginning?” But for many religious people, the answer “God always was” is the obvious and pleasing answer to “What was around before God?”

No matter who you are, engaging in the quest to discover where and how things began tends to induce emotional fervor–as if knowing the beginning bestows upon you some form of fellowship with, or perhaps governance over, all that comes later. So what is true for life itself is no less true for the universe: knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going. ~ Neil Tyson

Right on Neil.

And that ladies and gentlemen, is where science and religion connect - at their deepest questions.

So, whether you’re an atheist, pantheist, theist, mystic or just plain agnostic, next time somebody starts going on a rant about how it all began, keep in mind that to a certain extent, the two of you are merely engaging in a game of semantics.

At the deepest level, “The universe always was” Vs “God always was” aren’t such different answers after all.

Unless of course, you take the discussion to a higher level and begin discussing the qualities and properties of those two entities.

Either way, it’s something I personally find pretty damn fascinating and I love Neil’s approach to the issue.

The last few days have been awesomely interesting to watch, and so far, I’m loving what I see.

I call it double J heresy: J-Street and Jon Stewart.

Some AIPAC dudes are probably thinking to themselves “gosh, such evil self-hating Jews, Jon Stewart and these J-Street people are. How dare they challenge our agenda!”

Watch Jon Stewart commit some needed heresy.

Definitely a welcome sign. And it looks like I’m joined by these happy Jews who agree too.

• Antony Loewenstein: Jon Stewart tackles Palestine in prime time
• M.J. Rosenberg: Jon Stewart Creates Sea Change on Middle East Coverage
• Adam Horowitz: Palestinian equal rights joins the progressive agenda on ‘The Daily Show’

Fun times.

And damn is Anna Baltzer HOT. Oh yeah baby.

How nice. Apparently, army ceremonies in Israel “have become Jewish mirror vision of Hezbollah events.”

Thank you, Dror Ze’evi, for writing this piece.

… what bothered me the most was the blatant religious content. During the brief ceremony, no fewer than three religious figures took the stages, all of them IDF rabbis if I’m not mistaken. They read prayers and biblical verses and spoke about the land being promised to Jewish people.

… The message conveyed in the ceremony, both openly and between the lines, is that the military is an arm of the settlement enterprise. The rabbis, the prayers, the songs, and the texts were almost entirely religious, and we can assume that the ceremony served as a brief reflection of the atmosphere that prevails later on during the service; an atmosphere that the parents don’t see.

… The defense minister and top defense officials must embark on an in-depth examination of the slow process whereby the army’s character is changing. They need to reexamine the way religious figures are integrated in the establishment in general, and in swear-in ceremonies in particular. They should also create a binding text for pledge-of-allegiance ceremonies that would allow for, if we insist, a mention of God, yet avoid altogether blatant religious content.

What really stood for me in the article are these two parts: “the military is an arm of the settlement enterprise” and “spoke about the land being promised to Jewish people.“

Pretty disturbing I must say.

Here’s some late, but rather unexpected significant news that’s gone quite unnoticed.

October 13, 2009 (KHARTOUM) — The Sudanese government downplayed the significance of changes made to the new generation of Sudanese passports that practically allows its bearer to use it to travel to Israel.

… The old Sudanese passport had a stamp on it reading that it is valid for “All Countries Except Israel”. South Africa is the only other country to be covered by this ban in the history of Sudanese passports during the apartheid era.

Major General Adam Daleel assistant police chief for passports and civil registry told the pro-government Al-Rayaam newspaper in an interview that said that removing the ban was a procedural decision relating to the size of the stamp on the passport.

Daleel stressed that people should not read too much into this step stressing that Sudan is committed to Arab embargo on Israel that commenced in 1958.

The Sudanese official said that removing the stamp should not be understood as endorsing trips by its citizens to the Jewish state.

He noted that the Sudanese national assembly at some point objected to the stamp saying it is a recognition of Israel.

Daleel acknowledged that Sudanese citizens can use the passport to travel to Israel if they reside outside the country but that the authorities will not grant an exit visa to anyone intending to head towards the Jewish state.

The fact that this happened around the same time US announced its new Sudan policy is not a coincidence. Long story short, it’s a strong indication that the Southern government is getting more say in matters that affect all Sudanese including Southerners.

Matters that include Southerners being stuck with a passport that forbids them from traveling to a country they’re supportive of, and that has militarily supported them in the past.

Officials at Khartoum can downplay this as much as they want, but there’s no question that it indicates a small - even if only symbolic - concession towards the Southerners and their demands within the context of the CPA.

Cool video from a person who’s ideas have had a massive impact on my journey and intellectual development.

This email from a new accidental reader made my day!

Subject: Thanks for giving me hope

Hi There,

I somehow stumbled onto your blog tonight.

As an ignorant American who travels a lot on business, I started researching Islam during the “cartoon riots” several years ago, and was really shocked at what I found. Reading “The Islamist” by Ed Husain helped make sense of some of it, but the rest - women arrested over naming a teddy bear, the wars over who is practicing the “right” or “most holy” form of Islam, silencing of 800-yr old church bells in Sweden - Well, I began siding with the Geert Wilders of the world - Maybe Islam really can’t exist within the confines of a diplomatic society.

Your blog gives me hope that reason can win out, and that there’s a lot more to Islam that what we read in the papers. Thanks.
Peace,

KLS.

Yay, this is cool, and really encourages me to keep moving forward.

I know blog updates have significantly lessened in recent months and this will probably continue for a few more.

But sometimes, (as much as it sucks), you just need to slow down so you can speed up again, and right now a lot is happening behind the scenes that will bear fruit soon.

Meanwhile, it would be really nice to know what kind of positive impact this blog has had on you, if any. Please share your thoughts below.

Finally, looks like the annoying divisions within the US State Deparment on what to do about Sudan are bye bye. There will be more internal arguing to come for sure but this is a pretty good step.

Here’s the new policy outlined here.

Call me a genius, but long time readers will know that I’ve been calling out for a more balanced approach for a long time, very similar to the one being espoused by the new policy.

Maybe Obama’s people have been secretly reading this blog.

The Save Darfur Coalition’s idiotic promotion of military intervention has been dumb from the start. Same goes for the more recent proposed La La Land appeasement approach of new key Obama people.

However, both combined have produced something in the middle that I believe is much better than anything we’ve ever had before. Tough action and credible real threats are needed, but so are some carrots.

Because, as we can see with terrorism-related stuff, the NCP has been very cooperative in recent years, but that still didn’t get Sudan removed from the US State Department’s list of terrorism-sponsoring countries, which up until now made a lot of people within the NCP reluctant in pursuing further cooperation to resolve things in Darfur.

Anyways, for now, this is all lovely and wonderful, but it’s still ink on paper.

Following up on this is what’s needed, while making sure the whole execrise doesn’t deginrate into mere lame naive appeasement. Don’t think the latter will happen though, with people like John Prendergast keeping a watchful idea.

Here’s to a fruitful new American Sudan policy.

This  is too damn funny! If you understand Arabic, you’re gonna laugh your ass. If you don’t, read the translations, and you’re still going to laugh your ass off.

Don’t you just love these clowns?

That Al-Azhar scholar (the same Al-Azhar Obama spoke at and praised) belongs in an episode of… taraaa… The Holy Room!

Seriously though, the paranoia on this one is staggering. Although, I’m glad this debate is gaining more and more momentum so that the Arab public can get more informed, and hopefully reform the current education system in regards to that important issue.

But beware, most of za bearded ones will fight! Especially in za wahhabi kingdom.

If we have za sexi education, za arab worrrlid iz eegoing to be bigger immorality, and zat is a big broblim.

BROBLIM I TELL YOU!

Za youngi boyz and girrrlz will be, erm, you know, sorry, zat iz dirty word, but you know what zey weel do?

HARAM!

No, no, we musti fight za zionist sexi shops.

LOL.

Yay to baby-making factories!

Let’s have more. LOL.