The Mughniya Affair: Who they Didn't Kill

With the perenially elusive Imad Mughniya now killed by a car bomb in Damascus (English news story here, with Arabic story here and here), Israel has one more bee to plant in its intelligence service bonnet; people in the Middle East now have further proof, if proof be needed, that Israel has deeply penetrated the security services of their countries.

What surprises me almost as much as the fact that Israel actually managed to track Mughniya down, is the fact that they decided to go after a character who was relatively old hat, in comparison with, say, Khaled Meshal. This would suggest to me that the Israelis are keeping open the option of dealing with Hamas pragmatists at the moment, including Meshal, who would have been much, much easier to track down in Damascus than Mughniya.

Proof that Democracy is Alive and Well

As if in response to the fiasco with the Kuwaiti weekends, we now have proof from England, the teet from which all parliaments suckled, that people, indeed, are capable of ruling themselves.

Shortly before leaving to make way for his fiscally sound Chancellor, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair outdid himself and set up a website to allow Brits the right to petition their Prime Minister directly in a coordinated way. After the drama surrounding the former British Prime Minister's refusal to listen to protestors opposed to the Iraq war, this was his way to show that he was "listening" to the people in England and, had it succeeded, it would have in fact been the complete opposite to how it was billed--it would have been the end of democracy. When people petition a leader instead of working to effect change themselves over time, what they are doing is recognising the petitioned's power over them, and acquiescing in the system which grants it. The Abbasid Caliphs and their contamperaneous European counterparts received petitioners; a modern Prime Minister should be no different from the citizens... and so, it was with great relish and joy that I discovered the "rejected petitions" lists.

Being inherently sensible, the e-petitioners knew exactly how to catch Central Government out: Demand that the UK invade France; Cancel Tuesdays and replace them with Fridays; lock Jade Goody inside the Big Brother House for good and best of all "make Pete's mom a national resource". There is usually a very pithy explanation for why the said petitiions were rejected, because they were "outside the remit or powers of the Prime Minister and Government", and this is it how it should be. They can impose taxation, fight wars abroad and build roads, but on the really important issues--locking up Jade Goody, changing the order of the days in the week and making friends' mothers available--governments are powerless. It is with the people that power lies. Enjoy reading: Great Ideas from the British Electorate.

Where my Limits Stop

It's good to test one's limits. So after I've been blogging ceaselessly about the shortcomings of my religion of birth and my co-religionists (such as it were), it is quite relieving, in a way, to be offended by some crass type of assault on Islam. It almost makes me realise I still have some religious bones in my body; or perhaps I still have some concept of good taste.

The latest viral video to be doing the rounds in this part of the world, which will completely not help the "dialogue of civilisations", a recording of a young American woman soldier describing how a mosque on her base in the Middle East is regularly used for sexual liasons or, as our friend here from (what I believe is) Camp Doha in Kuwait puts it "a fuck". So when we learn that not only the rank-and-file but that Commissioned Officers are going into a "Hajji Church" to escape the heat of the desert and the monotony of barracks life, I was surprised to find myself in a mad rage. This type of thing should not be treated lightly, which is why I'm hoping this video gets a wide circulation--it is building steadily in Kuwait--and that somebody finds a way of doing something about it.

Now I'm wise enough to know that this sort of thing does and will happen--in an almost reciprocal way, I knew of Arab immigrants abusing the hospitality of churches in Europe (I remember having to explain to some fellows who I was helping with assylum applications that they shouldn't be putting out their cigarettes in a church garden), and amongst Europeans themselves there is the regular use of churchyards by the downtrodden to shoot heroin and sleep rough. The difference is, these people were not the downtrodden of the world; they were armed, trained members of a foreign army for which the host country has been ludicrously welcoming. What's more, and I suspect this will be the biggest factor in the dessemination of this video and its contents, our lovely GI Jane here saw fit to publicise her act through an oh-so-Yankee game of Truth or Dare, as if it were a flippant indiscretion, on the same level as kissing your married boss on the lips after one too many drinks at the Christmas party. Maybe this is how we deserve to be treated: We've gone and allowed this foreign army to come down and take out another Arab leader. This is what you get.

Saudi Surprise

So it seems that a Saudi Prince has been receiving payments from a quasi-public UK arms firm. Of course, we've been reporting on this developing story on Abdulhadi's World for some time now, but the fact that the BBC is reporting on it again just goes to show you how difficult for these real stains to be washed off. In a later development, the Prince's American lawyers have admitted that he used this money to finance the building and refurbishment of his palace.

In the end, life sucks for the honest: A Saudi Prince will almost certainly get off scott-free for his actions; in the meantime, British mandarins, executives and elected officials might be facing the music because of a deal which was going to benefit the export industry of their country. Look, we all know that the Sterling couldn't keep ridiculous exchange rates without Britain importing something. As an Arab, I say to Britain: We understand and forgive you.

Notes on the Syrian Arab Republic: Part I, the Airport

So I arrive in Damascus International Airport where there are queues for "Arabs" and "others" and I think to myself "this is how things should work". Most people I come across are quite cynical about the overt Arabism of Syria, but, when one considers the numbers--for example, the fact that Kuwaiti investments in Syria have doubled since the signing of the Arab free trade agreement--you can see how inter-Arab integration can be not just a slogan, but a tangible reality. Still, the horror stories relayed to me of the Syrian military left a big mark in my mind, and I can feel myself get more anxious as my turn comes to speak to the airport police officer whose job it is to stamp my passport. (The last time I went to Syria, this process was accelerated by the taxi driver who drove me from Amman; he was a cigarette smuggler who just walked into the office where all the big-timer cops were seated and had everything taken care of.)

At the Syrian Consulate in Kuwait, where I had hoped to obtain a letter to help me visit the Cinema Institute in Damascus so I could see their archive of films, things turned sour when the Consul said she could not give me a letter because I might be--wait for it--an Israeli spy. "How can I know?" she stupidly said. "How stupid can you be?" I thought then. This memory did not make it easier to hand my passport over. The Consul was rotund and oval-like, with a blouse buttoned up to the top so hard it must have been suffocating her, and a dress sense picked up in the worst days of the Soviet Empire, probaly studying in Bulgaria or something like that, nothing like the policeman sitting before me. The cop is more friendly than intimidating, and I feel bad for taking on board so much of a Western stereotype: I mean, what the hell were they going to do? Turn away a tourist, an Arab one at that? Torture me at the airport's backroom cells for wanting to see a few Syrian films?

After customs, the state security people might as well walk around with tattoos on their foreheads. It's dry and 22 degrees Celsius outside, but a 2 m-tall man, who looks very much like Husam Zumlot of the Palestinian Embassy in London, is in a trench coat staring at everybody sitting in the cafe. All I can think is "wow, if he had a hat and a clean-shaven face, he'd be just like Inspector Gadget". Sadly, he did not hover off from a propellor attached to his head, but otherwise he was the epitome of a great spy. I sat down and tried to think what to order at the coffee shop.

A long time ago, I might have come to Damascus to enjoy the splendour of the mosques and Sufi corners, so I feel a strange sense of guilt when I ask what the local brew is. Disappointed by the fact that there is none of the Syrian stuff, nor even Lebanese Almaza, I settle for a Carlsberg, from the brewery which sponsored the scientific work of Niels Bohr and brought the orbital model of the atom to the world. There is here some small consolation; not a bad lager, if that's your kind of thing.

In the city of Ibn Taymia, I sip a Danish beer and look around at people toing and froing. The women serving at the cafe in the airport--waitresses are a rather alien concept in the Middle East--could have been models and I feel bad for even noticing. I mean, coming off a plane from Kuwait, ordering a beer and then oggling the ladies at the cafe? Probably the kind of behaviour which would make the Syrians wish they'd never put up the signs for "Arabs" at their airport. Shame, shame.

There's a sort of cosmopolitanism to the place: Damascus is the former Umayyad capital, and you feel that it is some kind of dream destination for people coming from Yemen, the Gulf, Iraq and North Africa. Somehow I feel bad for the Americanised existence of Kuwait, where there was a Godiva before a Ghroui (a Syrian chocolatier dating back to the 1920s); I can see no signs for a McDonald's, KFC, Starbucks, or Caribou. Even the cola drinks are the local variety, Mandarin, which I think is state-owned; the local equivalent of Seven Up is called Cheer Up, which makes more sense as a name anyway. All this brings back memories of Iraq's Kufa Cola, which was so sweet you could use it as an antiseptic, and then I notice how the nicer bits of the airport are like the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. The same influence of Stalin-like architecture planted in the desert is unmistakable; is it a coincidence that the world's first air-conditioned bus was intended for the Baghdad-Damascus route? There are either Iraqi voices somewhere around or I am imagining them, but strongly enough to make me want to cry. Back in the day, the Mongols sacked Baghdad but could not make it past Hatteen to destroy the Arab World's earlier capital in Damascus, but since George Bush is more stupid, zealous and irrefutably more dangerous than the earlier sackers there is no telling where he will stop.

Never mind, I am just a bit jittery from getting an early morning plane and so I order another beer...6,7 or maybe 8 Carlsbergs later and the plane I am waiting for, from London, is just coming in. Not sure whether the people at the cafe are relieved that I could stand, happy to get me out of the place, or if I'm just paranoid, but I go and wait for Kay to show up.

Slightly drunk, and a little tired, I begin to think of how weird it is to look at the people coming off, and waiting for, the planes. The old man, with a ram-rod straight back and nice linen jacket, is waiting for his brother's family from London. Half of a village from the mountainside, wearing sharaweel and moustaches that the Turks left behind, is standing waiting for the plane from Saudi Arabia to land. The Syrians waiting for, and coming off of, the plane from Milan are definitely the most stylish. Then a rather darker Syrian, unshaven--no Arab gets onto a plane unshaven--wearing a brown suit comes off sobbing and is held at both sides and consoled by two men, probably his brother and cousin. A funeral visit. Definitely a trip made in haste for the burial. Great. I came to Syria to watch the jems of Raymond Boutros and instead I get scenes of Egyptian cinema. DJ Firas, the London rapper who does his lyrics in classical Arabic, comes off and I act like I'm a big fan--actually, he's a cool guy, and we had some mutual friends but his music, clever as it was, never really did it for me. Well, at least I know the London plane has landed. The dignified old man finds his brother's family, they kiss hollowly and drive off with arms around each other; sweet, but also the Arab version of a Ralph Lauren commercial. I wonder if the brother from London is thinking about getting out a bigger share of the family's olive groves; perhaps the brother who stayed behind in Syria thinks he could've done better had he been able to leave. Maybe they just really missed each other and wanted to have a good time. Who knows?


Kay finally arrives, and I have my own ambiguous moment. You're an item with someone; you're attached at the hip for 2 years and then you don't see each other for 6 months. What do you do at the airport? Smoke a cigarette outside, negotiate with a cab driver and drive into Damascus, obviously.

Finkelstein

Dear all,

Otto has pointed out that I have yet to post anything on Finkelstein... Since the man is, in my opinion, very much worthy of defense, I will put up links to the websties I know of where people can find ways to show their support:

http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/

Mark Elf, an old friend of mine

www.normanfinkelstein.com

The man himself: If you don't know him, read it, find out.

Finkelstein, the child of bona-fide holocaust survivors--ie, his parents were camp inmates-- is the author of The Holocaust Industry, Israel and Palestine, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, The Rise and Fall of Palestine and other great books. I specifically recommend Image and Reality for anybody who wants a deep, historical understanding of the Palestinian conflict and also The Holocaust Industry if you really want to read how Zionist lunatics have completely distorted public debate in the English-speaking world.

Any suggestions of how we can help take this forward are welcome.

Thanks Otto (jpohl.blogspot.com) for reminding me.

You heard it here FIRST

If you've been following the news, you would've heard the remarkably surprising story that the British government has decided to make contact with the elected Palestinian Cabinet:
The story on BBC News

Of course, if you read my blog regularly, it would have come as no surprise at all, as I had foretold the end of the diplomatic seige would come this way:

My perhaps ill-judged rebuke to Najeeb

Some notes...

It used to be that I dismissed all conspiracy theories as intellectual laziness, but time has taught me to be a little less dismissive. An Israeli newspaper has reported that the French President, Jacques Chirac, encouraged Israel to topple the Syrian regime instead of attacking Lebanon in July of 2006 (read article in Arabic here). This gives us all pause for thought; contemporary wisdom says that Chirac is a "friend" to the Arabs, and he did indeed do the unthinkable by giving Arafat a state funeral; he also seems to find it convenient his De Gaullist roots when trying to find sweet deals for French companies in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Yet this is all preceded by a less than rosy relationship with Syria, one of Frances former mandates. One of the earliest communiques of the Syrian Ba'ath Party (the ruling party now) stated: "Syria should aim to have friendly relations with all countries except Britain, France and Turkey". Back to the future?

I would love to know what you readers can find on this... esp those of you who are French nationals (hint, hint) or even EU Nationals (ehmmm...). It's also time you responded to comments on your comments.

Oil Paintings on Sand, and Other Stories from These Parts

Preamble: Please see the latest comments for my putting both Najeeb and the Ayatollah in their respective places.


The minute I heard about this idea while playing a game of chess with an old friend, I knew it was a bad idea; when my friend, who I haven't seen in years, showed his enthusiasm, I could feel I was going to win the match soon, which I did, in 7 moves (not that this has anything to do with it, of course).

"They're doing a great thing in Abu Dhabi..." (or something to that effect) said Omar. "They're bringing some culture to their country, they're going to build a Louvre in their Emirate." They what? Of course, the BBC story here explains why the French, predictably, are angered. Let me make an effort to explain why Arabs are, or, at least, should be, a little peeved. The short answer: This is an insult to our cultural heritage. If you spend $700 Million to buy a few pretty pictures from Europe, the obvious implication is that your own heritage contains nothing worthy of investing in. This is all the more strange coming from Abu Dhabi, which previously kept a reputation for being an authentic, true-to-itself beacon of Arabness sitting next to the Whore-magnet on the Creek (read: Dubai). The romantic figures cut by the Emirate's former leaders carrying falcons while holding on to the back of a camel's hump are one of the few genuinely positive images of the Arab world which they West received for a long time (see Wilfred Thesiger). Looking to the future, what's to be expected of Abu Dhabi's fledgling art community? Is the Louvre now going to be something for them to live up to? It was never to that Muslims disapproved of "craven images", at least not during more enlightened times, but now I can feel myself actually welcoming a fatwa preventing this from coming about.

On another note, I see that democratic pressure has done the unthinkable and forced the Hamas government to take a more sensible, civilised approach to the protection of Palestinian heritage. Good. I feel quietly vindicated about my strong faith in us, the Palestinians, as a people to, you know, move on with things.

The same could not be said of some cocky shit, dressed in a turban, who thinks he can sit in a cave in Afghanistan (I have nothing against troglodytes--I point out that some Palestinians in the village of Yatta spend part of the year in caves) and tell Hamas what to do. Of course, we never asked this bugger and his crew to go at the USSR like rabid dogs, in fact we actually liked those Commie fellows, and they liked us...but then nobody asked our opinion at the time.

Free Kareem

Sometimes it seems I live in a cave...then again, every time I leave that cave, it seems thing are much, much worse in the outside world:

http://www.freekareem.org

It's hard to imagine Egypt becoming any worse than it is now, but if the situation highlighted above is not rectified, it will be.

Miscellany

Sometimes the background to what shapes my life and thoughts doesn't follow a structured pattern, so here is a completely uncollated assortment of notes about what, I reckon, deserves some attention:

A US officer has commented that "a miscalculation by Iran could lead to war in the Gulf". As my friend Majed put it "a miscalculation by the US could lead to war in the Gulf". Well said Majed, well said.

Al Qabas brings to mind again the fallacy of the obsession over "orientalism". Al Qabas is currently printing a series of fawning book passages about the "great Gertrude Bell" who, we are told "loved the Arabs".

Yet another pundit gets it all wrong about the Middle East. How seriously can people take the claim that rich Arab kids listening to 50 Cent has some kind of political significance to it?

Finally, observe, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Kuwait Oil Company, the State-owned organisation which oversees the production of a commodity for all citizens: see photo here
Meet, as well, Farouk Al Zanki, a member of the Board of the Kuwait Project, which is looking to find the right foreign investors to suck this country dry of its oil: see photo here

See the difference? Coincidence? Conflict of interest? You decide!!

A Baboon, a Caliph and and the War on Iran

OK, so back to the photo-essay format:



You should be able to see here the full, pathetic and rather disturbing spectacle of a baboon, chained, smoking a pipe and being displayed for sale. In fact, the scene pictured above is not too far away from the spot where Adam had his life-changing encounter with the goat, which was mentioned in another blog post. Animal welfare is not a subject I pretend to either know much about, or care too much for, but this kind of treatment of a high-order primate is in another league; to better deal with the rage in my mind, I allowed myself to think to another, more leisurely baboon who lived in my region of the world.

The story is told, my good friends, that Yezid ben Muawiya, the King of Syria and Caliph to all Muslims, a man of opulence remembered for his drinking binges more than anything else, kept a baboon with him at all times while receiving visitors at his Diwan. Ambassadors from the Byzantine Empire, local notables of the tribesmen of the Syrian desert and cityfolk of the Levantine Mediterranean coast, Quraishites from the Arabian peninsula and Shi'ite petitioners would seek the Caliph out for his wisdom only to be met by a baboon wearing layers of silk robes and throwing about pieces of monkey feaces at the astonished guests of the Successor to the Prophet of God, the Prince of the Faithful.

Yezid, who was Muslim in name only, would protest that the ape was, in fact, a Prince of the tribe of Israel, but that God had turned him into a baboon as a punishment for the sins of his people, as had been put down in the now-famous passages of the Koran. The hapless ape, mindless to the storms about to engulf his Umayyad sponsors and caretakers, became a hate figure of the oppressed, conquered non-Arab peoples in the newly Muslim realm, particularly the Persians. In short, we can call him, for the purposes of this post, "the Sunni Arab Baboon". My thesis is that the Sunni Arab Baboon is alive and well today, and is in fact exerting an influence on international affairs.

Now, let's suppose the Sunni Arab Baboon lives on one side of a pond. On the other side of the pond, divided by natural geography but united by a common ancestry and sharing a future, is a rather more inventive chimpanzee. The baboon and the chimpanzee have had a bad time sharing the area; the chimp was enslaved by the baboon, so then it tried to cunningly get all the baboon's tribe to be more chimp than the chimps themselves. All of this confusion led to trouble to no end in the division of shiny rocks between the chimps and baboons, which they use mostly to throw at each other but also to sell to tourists who take the shape of Neandertaals, a much larger, smellier and more brutish class of ape.

Let's suppose that the chimps decide that they're better off selling all their shiny igenous stones and using a new kind of fire-power they get from other materials for all the things they used to use the rocks for at home (firing the stoves, make cosmetics, etc). The Neandertaals know this, and they themselves have found the fire-power very useful in myriad ways, for example the way studying the fire-power improves their educational systems, makes them more productive, frees them up for other things, etc. They just don't want the chimps to get it, because they fear it will allow them to move up in the world and begin to challenge all the other apes, even the baboons, whom the Neandertaals never liked but--since the baboons are good for the neandertaals' business--need to keep happy.

Deep down inside, the baboons know that the chimps having fire-power is no skin off their noses, but then the chimps always looked down their noses at the baboons. Just find a chimp and tell him he looks like a baboon, and you'll see what I mean. The baboons, far more clever than outside appearances or even past behaviour suggest, know, in fact that the chimps might one day be persuaded to share the fire-power's gains, helping them, too, evolve and grow. The baboons are narrow-minded and short-sighted however, especially the big Chief Baboons, and so they will side with the neandertaals attacking the chimps on the other side of the pond, and possibly do some of the attacking themselves, given half the chance.

The moral of the story: We might not like Iran too much, but we'll be bloody baboons if we're not on their side.

It's official: I am NOT a terrorist

OK, I am at least not on the "terrorist black list". Let me revise that one more time: As far as I am aware, the nice lady who works at the Mishref branch of the National Bank of Kuwait did not bother to see if I was a terrorist because, as far as I understand, I did not ask for a cheque book.
She did, however, oblige to let me use the stamp on her desk on my own paperwork:



I am now fantasizing about all the additional security clearance I will get through this. Perhaps the ability to go and visit relatives on the West Bank; maybe I could be let in to meetings of Congress. Who knows?, maybe some day I will use my little stamp-on-chit to get me into some concerts for free.

Please do answer the following questions if you do indeed know the answer:

--If a terrorist were to walk into a bank branch, declare himself to be a terrorist, but was not subsequently found on the black list seen by the teller staff, would you take his word for it?

--If someone were to come in asking for a chequeing account, but was found to be a terrorist "on the black list", is it expected of the branch's security guards to wrestle said terrorist to the ground, even if the suspect is believed to be armed and dangerous?

--Would a bank allow a terrorist to walk out with a cheque book, but perhaps with a precautionary stamp on the cheques, notifying any businesses who might receive said cheques, that a terrorist is giving them custom? This way, we could ensure that terrorists are able to live/eat/clothe themselves, but denied the ability to buy goods which they could use to harm others.

Does your local bank have one of these?

I have to agree

I have to agree with ayatollah's (when can I use your real name, big guy?) comment on my last post. Until I feel ready to post something meaty--inshallah tomorrow--I will post the URL he suggested, because it is absolutely brilliant:

Rob Newman's History of Oil

You really must watch this video.....If I were a teacher, and this blog my class room, the video at the above link would be homework. Please note that I retain the right to use this video as a reference for any future posts, and that it is very funny. See you guys soon.

Welcome to the New Egypt....A lot like the Old Egypt!

OK, so last night I came home after a frustrating day at work and plonked down opposite the television to watch a few rowdy music videos--there are something like 12 TV stations broadcast by satellite which carry nothing but music videos, about the only thing I have energy enough to do these days. The obscenity Arab music video-makers can get away with is a matter for another post, but I would doff my cap at the ingenuity and story lines they weave into them. What jumped out at me from the screen was Huda Haddad's El Wad Hassanein Ibn il Umda, loosely translated as "Hassanein, the village chieftan's son".

In Huda's music video, a village peasant girl--who looks remarkably well-fed, buxom, agile and has skin rarely seen on Arab agricultural workers--prances around and appreciates the attention she gets from Hassanein, the son of the village strong man/petit aristocrat. At the end of the acted-out music video, Huda's character lures Hassanein into an impromptu marriage, and the happy love story is completed. The agreeable resolution of this story jars with a previous Egyptian cinematic classic, Shafika wa Metwali, which tells a far more believable--and documented-- story of the Turco-Albanian gentry taking advantage of the Egyptian people in every way. Huda Haddad's efforts are not an individual anomaly...

"Melody Arabia Hits", the ludicrously named TV station which I was watching at the time (nothing Arab-melodic about their music) then anounced that Miss Deutchland 2007 was to be held in Egypt, "for the first time since 1909". The implication was clear: Nationalisation, socialist dreams of social justic and Arabness were a nightmare for Egypt, and people are jumping back on board to the Egypt they want to recreate from scratchy memories: Gin and Tonics with foreign visitors at plush hotels, Nile cruises with Francophone archaeologists, visits to the Cairo Opera House... but wait a minute, who mixed that gin & tonic? Oh yes, the former Egyptian agricultural worker. The absurd self-delusion some Egyptians I know engage in ("before Nasser, my family used to own half of the Delta!!") goes some way to explaining why Egyptians have now embraced not Sadat's liberalization programme--which in theory had some things to recommend it--but a crazy form political nostalgia.

Sadly enough, "high culture", at least that bit of it which reaches the publishing world, reflects this trend as much as music videos do. Alaa Aswani's "Yacoubian Building" has echoes of Mahfouz's Children of Gabalawy in it, save that it glorifies Egypt's dynastic age without ever alluding to the fact that most Egyptians were victimised, impoverished and miserable during those years. I wonder if we'll all be seeing another coup some time....


In closing, I would like to thank Najeeb for prodding me into publishing a political post, although it might well have remained a half-baked potato in my brain.

A week away....

So it's been a week since I've posted... my how time flies. Just to disappoint you some more, this first post is going to be a rather minimalist post to direct you to a site that has really captured my heard of late:

http://www.techonthenet.com

Do enjoy it... more to come soon, I hope

So what have I been doing?

Last weekend Adam stopped by in Kuwait for an unexpected 3 days (try explaining to airport functionaries why an tall, lanky English guy is carrying carpentry tools in his carry on luggage) on his way to India, making him the first contributor to the blog to actually come out and see me in corporeal form (OK, it helps that I've known the guy for some years now, but....). Adam was also kind enough to bring me a copy of Arthur Lesk's Introduction to Bioinformatics (I wonder why there is NOT A SINGLE BOOK ON BIOINFORMATICS IN KUWAIT, when you can get perhaps 30 different books on astrology, ESP, etc.). This means I can read/try to learn/be stumped by the creation of Perl programmes for bioinformatics when I want to avoid conflicts with my bone-headed colleagues....and I leave you now with a photo of Adam with a goat he wanted to take with him to India.




I've been quite pleased recently that we Palestinians have learned a thing or two, as evidenced by Abu Mazen knowing when to play hard to get by turning down Condoleeza Rice, and some protesters in RamAllah (where else, really?) dressing up as Native Americans (disastrously rendered "Red Indians" in some Arabic newspapers) with placards reading "we are still here... this will not happen to us" (see admittedly low-quality image above; this image was taken from Al Qabas, and edited using the Windows' distribution of The Gimp).

Hats off to Abu Mazen, I knew he would pull through in the end....






In other news, I have been discovering the wonderful world of Web 2.0 and all it has to offer in the shape of tiddly wiki.

The site is described as "a reusable non-linear personal web notebook", which is a way, I suppose, of saying you can use it to jot down notes, create files and so on and then share them with people. Except there's more to it than that... you really must visit the site.

Mauritania joins the club....and other notes on Africa

Things in Africa are picking up. Mauritania is now finally in the same shitty situation Levantine Arab countries were in in the 1950s: with politicans seeking to interact with the military. Al Jazeera reports that one of the front-running presidential candidates in the upcoming elections, Mohammed Walad-Mawlood (taken together, this means "Mohammed Son of the Born"; wth?) is demanding a "discussion" between "opposition political parties" and the ruling junta. I had my doubts about Mauritania's status as a member of the Arab League, but with this completely nonchalant suggestion that politicians deal with military officers to forge a new future, Mauritania has shown that they are well and truly Arab. Welcome to the club Mauritania, you're in good company.

On the other side of the African continent, Ethiopia has proven to the world that the US can indeed adjust to a post-Cold War situation. Observe, the wars of the future-past: US naval ships will observe from a distance as an insignificant proxy deals with "terrorists" in the shape of the United Islamic Courts. People are ridiculously claiming that the UIC were East Africa's equivalent of the Taleban, when the fellows readily produced television images (which were forbidden by the Taleban) of chanting female supporters (whoa!). Nobody took the time to ask the Somalis running the telephone shops in East London--or even the Somalis of Somalia, for that matter--how they felt about their streets finally being safe. Instead, the US has effortlessly, without the loss of US lives this time, done under Bush Jnr what it could never have done under Clinton: Install a new government in Somalia and secure the Horn. The last time the US got involved in securing a shipping lane with similar vitality, it cost the host region around 1 million lives (the Iran-Iraq war), so this is a comparative victory. How the hell Ethiopia, with one of the world's lowest GDPs per capita, can see fit to fight a war on a neighbour's turf is beyond me.

Ethiopia, like Iran, also has its own imperial past to look back on in the region. Halie Selasie, Emperor/Slave-driver of renown, made no secret of his dreams to subdue Muslim communities in East Africa, so the battle lines of the past apply here, too. I might be overturning a nearly decade-old personal boycott of Starbucks--because of the pro-Israel stance of its board, its shitty treatment of workers and coffee growers and even shittier coffee--as Starbucks is now battling Ethiopia for the rights to trademark Ethiopian coffee, which could've produced a pacific way for that country to lift itself out of poverty. Now it seems Ethiopia's government is the enemy. It remains to be seen whether the Bush administration will be supporting one of their country's greatest/worst exporters and (worst) employers, or their new allies in that ubiquitous war on terror....

Turkey and the EU....and Kuwait

It's not good when some company you don't remember applying to wakes you up at 10:30 with a phone call to book an interview. It's even worse if you haven't got the foggiest idea about what they do, and can't seem to find anything on the internet. To make matters worse, if you want to go meet somebody in Tunisia and that person doesn't respond to her text messages, you're screwed.

Anyways, when that kind of weird stuff gets combined and begins to wind me up, I think of completely pointless political things. How about: Turkish membership of the EU? I have mixed feelings about this issue... I'm sure it would probably help to keep Turkey and the EU more secular, but then it would also give the US/NATO a stronger voice in Europe. Besides, I'm an Arab, and everybody knows that Arabs are bitter towards Turkey, until they started opposing the formation of a Kurdish state in Iraq......OK, none of this mattered to the barber shop in Salmiya, Kuwait.

At last....

Finally, the Arabs have learned to export something to the West. Not too long ago, the uppity elected officials of Britain thought they could investigate the financial goings about of princes of the Al Saud family. Whoa boy, were they wrong. Britain has now succumbed to pressure and is stopping the investigation into how BAE systems bribed Saudi officials in order to win procurement contracts for fighter planes.

Now, you in the West will learn what it means to live with corruption in the most luxurious Arab style. Welcome to the club. After all, what the hell were the Brits doing getting their panties in a knot, anyway? It's not like their officials were being bribed...when the army of 20,000 diabetic, delusional Kuwaitis runs across the border to conquer the date plantations of the Hejaz, it's the Saudi citizens who will be let down by any faults in the hardware.