Why do I love my country? – The question keeps torturing me.

Most pressing of all, apart from what they taught us in first grade and what certain billboards tried to achieve in recent years, do we really have to nurture such an emotion at all? While to some people the uncertainty itself is blasphemous, I am not ashamed to say that my thirst for a rational answer keeps intensifying with time. I just cannot suppress the itching curiosity to understand the roots of this non-severable connection that I’ve developed with earth, concrete, very little water, and a whole load of hairy, grumpy strangers.

I am not interested here in the theories of a social contract, taxation, or the tribal or political attachments to a certain community or nation state. I am intrigued by a totally different aspect of this relationship, the one, for example, that triggered a profound sadness in me as I read that the toll of the recent fire in the Dibbeen forest was a staggering 5,670 trees lost forever, taking the news as if a piece of my own flesh had been charred by the same fire. Why did I feel like that?

Ever since I came back from Switzerland to settle in Jordan last year, not a day has passed by without asking myself why I even bother in the first place with this mistress named Jordan. Although I understand that love is an irrational business, I still want to discover why I would develop an affection towards the only thing that consistently keeps breaking my heart every single day.

From ill-mannered drivers, to unprincipled politicians, to unethical businessmen, to mosque goers who close down entire streets on Fridays by parking their cars in the middle of the road to answer the call of the Almighty, to pitiful scenes of abject poverty, to uncooperative government bureaucrats, to so many other things, we all know how pleasant a single day in Jordan can be. Yet, I persevere in my masochistic love affair. Call me a romantic fool, but I find nothing more meditative than taking advantage of the empty streets of Jordan on early Friday mornings to try to get lost in the familiar terrains of this mountainous country, basking under its magnificent blue skies.

The elusive whiffs of pine fragrance on my solo morning rides through Wadi-Seer cliffs, Mahes hills or Jerash forests remind me of a carefree existence during bygone family picnics when Amman was a very small town, nostalgic moments that are only surpassed by the seductive odors that seep into my nostrils when I pass through the perfumed alleyways of some rare quarters of old Amman on cool summer nights, jolting me back thirty years in a couple of jasmine-scented seconds. These aromatic experiences no doubt mirror very subjective feelings and private memories, but so is patriotism and love of country, which are equally personal emotions as well.

So, to deal with my nagging question, I will use an unlikely analogy:

Connoisseurs of whiskey cannot deny that in the absence of the intoxicating feeling of pleasure associated with the drinking process, the beverage itself, at its best, tastes only slightly better than pungent urine with a twist of onion. Yet, the scotch aficionados wax poetic about its effect on the palate solely because, in their experience, whiskey has always carried the quality of making them feel good, and with time, its unpleasant bitter taste becomes not only acceptable, but even delicious, as its consumers associate this taste with moments of satisfaction and delight.

In this sense, and by the same token, any intolerable shortcomings of my country become secondary and bearable, because the bond of my own personal history and the memories evoked by the geography of the place would eventually eclipse and dwarf its other sad realities.

This all might sound like passionate babble to many, and I can understand why. Alas, a love of earth and wind is a very difficult thing to describe no matter how many whiskey metaphors I conjure up (or gulp). This is especially disheartening when half of your fellow countrymen cannot elevate their petty differences with the other half beyond the boundaries of how certain vowels and consonants are pronounced.

Oh yes, I’ve been aching to get this off my chest for more than two decades now, this whole east and west bank thing that infests our society and refuses to go away. Although a taboo most of the time, it keeps rearing its ugly head at every corner of our lives, because it has never been openly and frankly addressed. To be absolutely fair, both sides of this poisonous discourse are equally guilty of ignorance, pettiness, and worst of all, a refusal to grasp and appreciate the true meaning of a homeland.

I have witnessed the travesty with my own eyes, and it is sickening. On one side of the divide, a sizeable number of people living in this country, many of whom were born here, are still paranoid that they are discriminated against because of their origins. Somehow though, this supposed discrimination never prevented them from making very successful livelihoods for themselves and their families, and never stopped them taking advantage of every opportunity this country has offered them.

But when you talk with them privately, they express a kind of venomous contempt for the land in which they chose to build their homes that leaves you wondering why they wish to be treated as equals in the first place, if it is such an insult for them to belong to such a land. Recently I had a nasty personal episode dealing with a major bank in Amman, which I will not name here for legal reasons, save to say that it is an Arab one. While waiting for the outcome of my personal affair, I took a walk in its alleyways, reading name tags of employees at random to pass the time while they kept me waiting.

To my absolute shock and dismay, I discovered that the rumor that this bank only employs people of west bank origins is not only absolutely true, but is also disgustingly executed to perfection, without exceptions. Apart from the treacherous and obscene treatment that this bank meted out to someone with a family name like mine (so much for their hypocritical solidarity), I just could not believe that a major institution such as this one can still get away with such overt and unashamed ethnic discrimination in its employment policies.

On the opposite side of the divide, you still have the usual xenophobic morons who expect an oath of allegiance to their own brand of Jordanianism with every sunrise, and have the temerity to keep referring to their fellow citizens as guests in ‘their’ country, questioning their allegiance in so many subtle and explicit ways. These agitators can get away with their ranting because the easiest task for a charlatan is to proclaim loyalty in peacetime. Brown-nosers become abundant when there are no testing crises to tell the men from the boys, and at the cost of having to put up with such imposters, I do hope we never have another civil upheaval in our country to put them to the test. I’m prepared to live with that.

But lament no more, for I’ve found a therapeutic remedy, a special treatment to deal with both these retarded specimens. Whenever anyone questions my attachment to the land where my father was born and where my grandfathers are buried, I rub it in his face by proclaiming I’m a Palestinian to the bone.

And whenever the other side reveal their repulsion by the idea that they could love or belong to the land where they were born and lived all their lives, I become a fanatical Jordanian, as hard as they come. I advise all of you to do the same. It can be fun sometimes, and there is no other way to overcome the madness, trust me.

Of course, speaking of the memories evoked by the Jordanian landscape, a few Fridays ago I found myself revisiting the town of Na’our, to remind myself that I’m also a half Circassian citizen who spent some of the most beautiful nights of his childhood attending outdoor traditional weddings (Fantaziyyeh) in Na’our, marveling at the energetic dancing of this hot-blooded and fascinating people – and collecting empty rounds of 9mm shells whose loud bangs used to accentuate the euphoric foot thumping involved in the mixed gender dancing (thankfully, the Circassians, although devout Muslims, are still only mildly contaminated by Wahabist and other doctrines of segregation).

I’m not trying to run for elections here, but it crossed my mind as I passed through the old streets of this quiet village that I’ve got a very politically correct mix of national unity running in my veins after all. Hell, I am actually like Barack Obama (except that I don’t pal around with sons of Irgun terrorists who believe Arabs are destined to a floor-mopping destiny). Never mind Obama’s Zionist staff right now, as I must share the fascinating fact that Na’our is a town that has hardly changed a bit in the last thirty years.

While all surrounding areas have expanded by more than forty fold in population and buildings, Na’our truly remains one of the last sleepy vestiges of the old rural Jordan, and I wish it stays like that, if only so that I could have this convenient snapshot reminder of the beautiful culture of my maternal uncles and their unforgettable parties.

Where am I going with this, and what’s the answer to the question in the very first sentence above? Well, I guess every one of us is a product of the childhood air and dust we grew up inhaling, and you would love your country in as much as you hold that childhood dear to you. Personally, I can tell you that the addiction that compels me to keep roaming the streets of this country is stronger than any other ancestral linkage to a family name connecting me to a city in which I have never dwelled.

One can only understand the connection with the soil if one is haunted by a moving reel of his early life hugging every particle of sand in his backstreets, or climbing the ancient almond tree in his grandmother’s garden. This is what really connects me to a place I can call home, despite all the unfairness that may exist in this place and all the rotten things that take place inside it. That is also why you can only bow in reverence before those who choose to give their lives and sacrifice everything to defend their homes from foreign invaders, wherever they may be.

I am writing this on my way to Jordan, forty thousand feet across the Atlantic, and in addition to the burning longing one naturally has for his family, there is definitely something else to the inexplicable urge to be back home after a few weeks abroad, something deeper than just an urge to switch on that motorcycle once again. To all those who do not share my perception of this homeland, I say to them that whatever our backgrounds or origins are, we are all on board this ship together; we sail if it floats, and we drown with it, God forbid, if it sinks.

I will continue to visit my favorite view point in Abu El-Soos to watch the shimmering lights of Palestine with pride and remembrance of a tragic loss. And I will continue to love, with equal pride, the country where I was born and where I chose to raise my children. These two emotions should never clash in our country, and in my mind they never will. I shall continue to feel this way regardless of how inexplicable or irrational this love maybe. I have no choice over how I feel, because this homeland is the only one I’ve got.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

The other story in the news on the very same day was the gun attack at the Roman Amphitheatre in Amman, where a deranged Islamist opened fire at the audience of a musical concert. How the two stories are closely connected, I shall reveal after I share with you the totally new kind of emotion that enveloped me as I followed the parade of the liberated men on TV (alongside the coffins of the fallen fighters, inside one of which lay Dalal Mughrabi, whose corpse Ehud Barak personally mutilated in 1978 and invited the cameras to record his primeval act).

As I watched this historic event, I didn’t know how to define the overwhelming jolt of elation that swept my own sun-mutilated corpse. Why did it seem so unusual to belong to a nation that gave birth to a dedicated group of fighters who refused to abandon their captured comrades, I asked myself? Why was I so surprised to feel that way? Indeed, the extraordinary nobility of those who persevered and offered their lives to twist the arms of the captors of their brothers-in-arms was a manifestation of military valor and gallantry in combat that I have not witnessed in recent memory from my own nation folk. Then I realized what this sensation was like

The only people in this region who have always lit a candle of solidarity for their missing sons and daughters were not the Arab countries. Finally, I could feel as privileged as Jews do. For the first time in my life, and although I never wished for it, I felt like an Israeli. Indeed, one of the reasons the Israelis have always conquered their Arab adversaries was because their soldiers go into battle knowing that their leaders and their people shall never rest until they return them to their families, whether living or dead.

And now, this most honorable trait with its noblest values of gratitude to your fighting brethren combined with the solemn vow to leave no man or woman behind, is no longer monopolized by our enemies. The sweltering Aqaba sun became cooler all of a sudden as the refreshing breeze of redeemed dignity penetrated my soul.

But some people want to snatch that pride away from us, using the most ridiculous and shameful of arguments to tarnish the only bright spot of hope across a demoralized and defeated nation. They keep shedding their crocodile tears over the wanton destruction that Israel inflicted upon Lebanon in its aggression two summers ago, and never cease to blame Hizbullah for inviting such a war on that beautiful Mediterranean nation. But how can Hizbullah be responsible if an irrational beast chose to punish all of Lebanon for no justifiable reason? What would the Cypriots have said if Israel decided to bomb Cyprus in July 2006 because there is a substantial Lebanese community living there? Would you imagine having one single Cypriot clown coming out and blaming Hizbullah for such unprovoked attacks by Israel?

Did Britain blast Ireland to smithereens to fight the IRA? Did Spain flatten the Basque country to avenge the actions of ETA? Nevertheless, you have rabid local columnists – the ones who still insist that Israel did not lose the last war despite Israel’s own admission of defeat – who took it upon themselves to advocate the US stance in demonizing anyone connected to the new public enemy no. 1, the evil Persians.

To perform their new dirty role, these agitators must, against all evidence and reason, keep undermining the role of Hizbullah in Lebanon, despite the fact that this Shiite group is allied in an unprecedented manifestation of national unity with the majority of Lebanon’s Christians against a gang of war criminals and warlords who still have not been held to account for their cruel devastation of their entire nation during 15 years of civil war. Hizbullah is implementing a Shiite Iranian agenda in Lebanon, these quasi-journalists would tell you, and not a whimper you would hear from them about the sponsors of the Fateh Al Islam Sunni group that burnt down Nahr Al Bared refugee camp last year (for a full exposé of the parties behind the funding and arming of Shaker Al Ibsi and his followers, read Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s article in the New Yorker magazine, March issue, 2007).

It is no longer acceptable not to speak out with outrage against this nauseating vilification of Iran’s role in our region, for the Wahabist alternative we are asked to swallow is downright horrendous and, frankly speaking, absolutely indigestible. And let me begin here by reminding everyone that I am not a fan of any group that proclaims religious values in its earthly endeavors, whether it be Sunni or Shiite, Judaic or Christian. I have in fact risked myself several times in the past by taking a public stand against the excesses of religious zealotry, and have endured my fair share of defamation in the process.

But in this case, I sense there is something profoundly perverse in the current campaign to denigrate all Shiites as subversive agents of an expansionist Persian empire, as it serves only one divisive purpose obvious for all. The latest blatant exaggerations of this off-beat circus band betrayed its members when one usual suspect wrote recently that moving the exhumed bodies out of Israel in the latest prisoners swap was deplorable in his opinion. This columnist, who shifted in his late life to the extreme right wing ranks, and in order to score a cheap point against Hizbullah, suddenly proclaimed that those buried in Israel, meaning the land occupied in 1948, were in fact laid to rest in “Palestine”, because “Israel never demarcated its borders”, and therefore the dead should have stayed there (although this shifter would never even be heard referring to land occupied in 1967 as Palestine, let alone to now deny Israel’s existence in order to make his sanctimonious argument).

For the shifter who made a career for himself out of his daily Iran-bashing rants to claim that Dalal Mughrabi was dignified in her unmarked Israeli grave is quite astonishing, since he knows too well that Dalal was displayed by the mutilators of dead corpses in a glass coffin at the Judicial Institute of Autopsy for Zionist students to peek at her before she was dumped without ceremony in an anonymous graveyard in what Israel termed the “Enemy Combatant Cemetery”. To pretend now that the fact that her family can finally afford her a proper burial is somehow lamentable, defies all human norms of decency and simply beggars belief.

But let me get back to the imaginary Iranian threat being propagated by the scaremongers in our midst. As I said, I have absolutely no interest or desire to defend the Iranians or what their revolution stands for, but we owe it to ourselves to examine in depth what the ideological counterpart that is being offered on the menu for our children’s future is all about.

If it’s going to be the reinforcement of the Wahabist stranglehold of the Sunni sect of madness that produced the likes of Bin Laden and Zarqawi; if it’s going to be the stream of insanity that wants to ban all aspects of beauty, art and splendor in Islam; if it’s going to be the deformed version of our great religion that prevents women from driving cars and has a grudge against all elements of refined civilization; if it’s going to be the cult of hate and death that declares all Shiites, Christians and Jews as apostates who must be killed; if it’s going to be the same ignorant hordes who have bulldozed and erased every single physical remnant of Islam’s history in Mecca and Medina; and, finally, if it’s going to be the uglification brand of Islam that brainwashes our youth to become cold-blooded murderers by opening fire at a musical concert in downtown Amman on a peaceful summer night, then without a doubt, I salute the glorious brigades of Hizbullah in this battle of ideologies.

To be totally honest, I am not too concerned to take sides in an historic squabble that took place more than fourteen centuries ago, and don’t particularly enjoy the sight of bloody chest-beatings today by those who still can’t get over the outcome of that dispute. But if I am seriously asked today whether I would stand with Mu’awiya or his enemy in that ancient battle, then by all means I solidly stand with the Hashemite household of the Prophet Muhammad, the Shiites of Ali and his sons, as any human being with any sense of justice would.

And today, despite all its shortcomings that I would be the first to denounce, Iran is still a country that at least has a cinema industry competing in Cannes and Venice, and its Tehran Philharmonic Orchestra leaves a lot to be desired in the Sunni dominated world. They not only allow their women to drive, but they have women Ministers and women Members of Parliament, and you would never hear that an Iranian woman would get sentenced to one hundred lashes after she was gang-raped by seven men, or that little school girls would be forced back to their deaths inside a burning school to avoid them exposing their hair in public.

Iran never invaded any Arab country, nor has it facilitated the invasion of an Arab country, and if its only crime is in supporting the first and only Arab party to give Israel its first taste of defeat and humiliation, then I smell a rotten rat in all this dubious war-drumming, Persian-punching extravaganza.

May all our martyrs rest in peace, wherever in God’s earth they may be resting.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

The upheaval in my head was about the human tendency which we all share when in dire times of trouble: to plead for salvation to what is supposed to be an omnipotent force that holds our fate in its hands – without ever questioning the meaning and purpose of this instinctive exercise. Why, the question kept haunting me, do believers need to implore God for an intervention to save an innocent little girl like Madeleine, if they believe that He has the power to do it anyway.

Does a most merciful father need us immortals to beg him to do the right thing? Does He need the Pope to intermediate to end a grief-stricken family’s plight?

This dilemma has no comfortable answer for someone like me who has reached his belief in a Creator through an arduous process of rational thinking and reasoning rather than by indoctrinated fear of torture in hell fire.

That’s why all the other believers with whom I tried to share this philosophical issue were unwilling to come near the question of how far God is involved in our daily lives, and whether He is responsible for the inexplicable incidents of pain and suffering that plague humanity. They were too afraid to confront the eternal taboo of whether our misery and unnecessary anguish are man made or God made.

Personally, I want to convince myself that only an evil criminal intentionally causes misery, such as causing the disappearance a young girl, and then expect her parents to beseech him for mercy, while keeping them hanging for a verdict of life or death. No, in my book, the party responsible for abducting Madeleine McCann is the sick individual who took her away. God has nothing to do with it. If He did, Madeleine would have long been in her parents’ arms. This is the only God that my mind can fathom, and is the only one worth worshipping for that matter.

Nor can God have anything to do with causing – or preventing – the crushing under tons of concrete of the thousands of families in the latest earthquake in China. Only a sick joker, let alone a compassionate supreme being, would look at our planet one morning, and then decide to give the earth a little shake underneath the province of Schezuan so that 70,000 souls would expire in the most excruciating and slow manner.

I can sense that this topic is already too much to handle for the unsuspecting reader, so I will shift to another, hopefully lighter, aspect of this tragedy (as if anything can be light in dealing with a disaster of this magnitude – but here it is anyway). I noticed something else while following the earthquake story, something we are all guilty of, but we do it subconsciously without too much thought.

Average Jordanians tended not to focus too much on the vast human toll of the Chinese earthquake because deep down in the unexplorable alleys of our minds, we think China is a massively overpopulated country whereby a few thousand less inhabitants are not a cause for spectacular mourning this side of the Asian continent. Don’t get me wrong; the key word here is ‘subconsciously’.

I am not saying that when we switched on the news of the Chinese earthquake, as we all did, and flicked away so swiftly to another channel, as we also did, we acted this way because we are heartless and indifferent monsters. Apart from the deceptive numbers game (there are over a billion Chinese people, the logic goes, so they can afford it), it is also this overwhelming media conditioning we are all subjected to that sets our priorities of what is newsworthy for precious airtime and what is mundane and lame stuff.

We are under the spell of organizations who direct us towards what should amount to a grieving moment, such as the loss of a beautiful Princess in a car accident in a Paris tunnel, as opposed to the routine loss of a few hundred lesser people in a train crash outside Bangalore, where we yawn and switch off. Of course we don’t do it because we have a grudge against the Indian people, but it is still worth pondering why and how we manage to behave like that; how we turn away as if nothing has happened when thousands die in a flood in Mexico, and how we get glued to the TV when, say, Madeleine McCann goes missing.

And let us admit, in the rat race that is life today, we are all equally guilty in this inclination to be too apathetic and oblivious to the news that really matters. We developed a lazy conscience and just cannot be bothered to determine for ourselves what warrants our attention and sympathy, so we have subcontracted that task to amoral news merchants who are too happy to pick and select on our behalf.

In the case of China, I may personally be adversely influenced by them being the nation who invented fireworks, something that has always been very close to the heart of the child in me, until, of course, Amman became the world capital for the gratuitous daily use of these explosives, smack in the heart of sleepy, residential neighborhoods. Sarcasm aside, there is something seriously twisted in the law enforcement agencies that permit the uninhibited detonation of these bombs right in the middle of our peaceful backstreets, every single night of the week, while having the audacity to pull me over for not wearing a helmet while riding my motorcycle.

Do I have to wait until one of these missiles lands in my balcony before any Jordanian official visualizes the criminal aspects of allowing Amman to resemble, on a nightly basis, West Beirut in the summer of 1982? I just find it insane to live in a society that does not waste a breath without complaining about sky-rocketing prices, but co-exists happily under the constant barrage of another ludicrously money-wasting form of sky rockets.

But I will not go down (or blow up) without a fight. I shall create my own loud bang and will be heard in my own way: by immediately writing to the Guinness World Records institute and get Jordan a new footprint in history books for being the nation that sets off the biggest number of individual fireworks annually in the world (and while I’m at it, for having more mobile phone shops than any other nation).

And the people of Jordan dare to complain about how expensive life has become? And to top that, the government dares to single out motorcycles and ban them in Jordan?

Speaking of the global inflation phenomenon, it is most ironic that only after just more than a decade since the collapse of communism, the whole capitalist system has not yet had the time to take a triumphant breath and yet is itself on the brink of total collapse. And it is happening all because of the incurable human sin of pure and utter greed.

I’m not talking only about the price of gasoline and diesel here. Analysts studying the financial crisis in the US and Britain have warned that the Great Depression of the 1930’s could be a walk in the park compared to the inferno brewing under the ashes of the world’s financial systems today, and that the recent US housing loans crisis is only the tip of a giant iceberg looming behind the façade of cooked books and sugarcoated profit and loss statements.

But why is capitalism doomed to these endless cycles of booms and recessions? Let’s see what’s taking place with the oil markets as an example of my point.

As OPEC and other oil experts would confirm, there is absolutely no shortage of oil in the world today, despite the surge in demand by our friends the Chinese (a fact that every learned economist and taxi driver would tell you these days to explain away why the whole world is sobbing at the gas pumps). So why are prices continuing to climb as I write, and as the head of Russian Gazprom predicted, would reach US$250 a barrel by the end of the year?

The way this humble observer sees things, the unprecedented surge in oil prices is purely caused by greed and speculation by a bunch of unscrupulous global players who can’t get enough profits to feed their insatiable and extravagant lifestyles. Supply and demand as a price-setting formula has just become a tired magical potion used to justify the unjustifiable when suppliers want to con the demanders. There is absolutely no reason why the supply taps cannot be re-opened to relieve the crisis, except for, again, pure, unadulterated, and crude greed, to borrow an oily adjective.

Back in small and oil-less Jordan, what are we to do? I can assure you that no amount of prayers to the Lord can save us from the unspeakable scenarios of steeper rises in oil prices anymore than it has helped to save poor Madeleine McCann or succeeded in undemolishing a single school in China.

All I can advise is that if we all get on our bikes, as the saying goes, no one will feel the weight of the soaring price tags as these machines are very economical, and all of Jordan would then be, just like me, writing their own happy and totally incoherent motorcycle diaries, under the illuminated skies of our nightly 4th of July celebrations.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

This article was originally published in Jordan’s Living Well magazine.

This thought visited me again most recently when I travelled to attend a conference and unpacked my favorite navy blue suit out of my suitcase, the one I usually put on when I am about to meet a bunch of very serious people.

Mankind, I said to myself as I examined the state of my official uniform, was able to squeeze billions of documents and complex data inside a tiny microchip, retrieve them at will, save them back and then retrieve them again in mint condition. All inside a piece of silicon the size of a finger nail. Mind-boggling stuff, almost like magic, we all agree.

However, we have not yet figured out a way to place a business suit inside the common suitcase and retrieve it at our destination without creasing the hell out of it. If that task is physically impossible, why can’t the federation of world manufacturers of travel bags come together and decide to rename the famous suitcase to something else, like underwearcase or sockscase, since it has been forensically proven that the worst item you can fold into a suitcase is an actual bloody suit?

You try to fix the problem.

Some hotels often leave you an ironing kit inside your room, assuming that you have just arrived in a luxury hotel and would want to start performing a tedious manual task, one you have not even considered attempting when you were a broke student, let alone the guest of a five star hospitality institution. This makes me wonder even more.

Mankind was able to invent machines whereby you insert a thin disc into an automatically sliding compartment and a crystal clear moving picture comes out on the screen. We perfected machines where you throw in a small sack of plastic, press a button, and a nice cup of espresso comes out of the other end, with a choice range from Bourbon Amarelo to Decaffeinato Intenso. Yet, we still cannot fix the creased shirts dilemma; we cannot invent a machine in which to throw all those garments with the nasty wrinkles and receive them crisp and silky at the other end.

Blindfolded, I’ll put my money on the inventor who starts drawing the designs for the next big thing: The Decreasinator, the portable device that is certain to outsell the entire world’s output of DVD players, suitcases and coffee machines, combined.

Such is the folly of scientific achievement in our world today, which is only a reflection of the inherent deficiencies in the evolution of our brains. We can send a rover light years away to reach and photograph planet Mars, but we still cannot reach out to each other to resolve our differences back on Earth. We can discover DNA and map the human genome, yet we are unable to find a cure for the common cold. We can peek at other galaxies with giant telescopes and google-earth our houses and backyards, but we still cannot locate Osama bin Laden’s hideout in the mountains of Terroristan.

We can remove a human heart and replace it with an artificial or even an animal equivalent, yet we cannot get rid of simple bad breath. We can afford to spend trillions on building enough bombs to turn Earth into dust in seconds, yet we cannot allocate a small fraction of our nations’ wealth to fund research to cure cancer.

We can invent technologies that enable us to talk to each other across continents at the press of a speed dial, yet we miserably fail to communicate with each other face to face to avoid waging genocidal wars against each other. We can build gravity-defying flying machines that serve Dom Perignon while crossing the Atlantic or send a man to the moon and bring him back, yet we cannot achieve peace between Arabs and Jews that would send a Palestinian child walking to school without the risk of getting killed.

Indeed, we can espouse many stubborn beliefs linking us to a benevolent, omnipotent Creator of this life, yet we are unable to recognize that the single most act this Creator would abhor is the unnecessary taking of this same life in His very name.

It is obvious that we have got our priorities mixed up somewhere along the way. For example, I could never understand how so many people can get overly obsessed with the prospect of certain species becoming endangered, all along oblivious to the impending extinction of our own kind in a man-made nuclear holocaust. Why are we so worried that killer sharks, for instance, are dwindling in numbers?

What possible inconvenience can such an eventuality add to our already complicated daily lives, apart from many divers and surfers feeling safer while frolicking in the oceans? What great loss to humanity has the extinction of dinosaurs brought about anyway, except to make Steven Spielberg much richer than he already had been?

I bet you if these giant lizards were running around today causing mayhem to lives and properties, we would make them extinct yet again, because all the arguments about protecting the eco-balance of mother nature would go down the green drains they came from when you or your child are being chased down the street by a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex. You and I would kill the bastard without hesitation, even if it was the very last one walking the Earth, and so would all conservationist freaks, although they wouldn’t like to admit it.

The same goes for snakes and alligators. I, for one, am not going to lose sleep if none of these nasty reptiles are left to spread their venom and terror, and will be very happy if my wallet or shoes were made of raccoon skin instead. My children are not going to mind either, and are going to be equally happy poking fun at elephants or chimpanzees when they go to a zoo, because neither of them has yet complained that they cannot go Apatosaurus back-riding on the weekend.

Don’t get me wrong here, but I’ve had it with the fantasy world of the scaremongering green industry. Their alarmist tactics have gone too far, and their conviction in their trade has turned into zealotry, seldom relying on solid scientific grounds. For example, I’ve always had a hunch that Al Gore’s dabbling in documentaries had more to do with his apocalyptic mood after conceding the election to a monkey than him sincerely fearing the extinction of all monkeys.

I’ve always felt that his “Inconvenient Truth” was never really about truth as much as it was about the re-invention of Al Gore as the savior of this planet. I was right. Last November, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the best experts on global warming that money cannot buy and the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore for their work on the subject, finally published their findings.

Contrary to the green lobby’s assertion that a 20-foot wall of water would drown low lying cities in the near future, the IPCC predicted that oceans would rise by no more than one foot over the next century, as they have also risen by one foot during the last 150 years, a natural phenomenon that we have hardly noticed when it did happen. Here is a conclusive quote from their report: “Catastrophic scenarios about the beginning of an ice age… are mere speculations, and no climate model has produced such an outcome. In fact, the processes leading to an ice age are sufficiently well understood and completely different from those discussed here, that we can confidently exclude this scenario.”

There is a lot more evidence out there to prove that Al Gore’s hysterical claims are not only unfounded exaggerations, but at points mere fabrications. I am not saying that we therefore should continue desecrating our environment and continue burning those fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow. On the contrary, there is nothing I find more detestable than the black diesel fumes coming out of all those trucks and buses on the streets of Amman.There is nothing I despise more than a family not cleaning up every single piece of litter after a picnic in the Dead Sea.

But for Al Gore to make a movie telling us to start building Noah’s Arc because of carbon emissions, while ignoring the real catastrophe of his country’s intentional littering of Iraq with thousands of tons of depleted uranium – a substance so poisonous that its cancerous qualities have a staggering half-life of 4.5 billion years, a substance that has already caused a cancer epidemic for those Iraqis who were fortunate to survive the unprovoked war against their country – this I find to be the most immoral course of distraction from the real environmental evil facing our planet, and is in my opinion the lowest depth of unashamed hypocrisy.

My son will hate me for saying this, but to hell with all the sharks. Let us first worry about the well-being and survival of human beings. Once we’ve achieved that – and we are very far from doing so at the current rate – then, and only then, we can perhaps start dedicating resources towards saving the great white killers, and all those other man-eating beasts out there that we like to stare at as long as they are securely chained in captivity.

Take care, and if you ride – or scuba dive – do it safely.

This article was originally published in Jordan’s Living Well magazine

If anyone could deduce anything from the previous Uglification articles (exposing and denouncing the stranglehold that the treacherous cult of Wahabism has tightened around the neck of Islam today), it is the conclusion that such an organized destructive movement could not have been empowered to hijack one of the world’s greatest religions and cultures – with the unprecedented financial power that this movement wields – except through a conscious conspiracy of collusion by the West to resuscitate and permanently sustain such a sect of madmen by installing them to be the official guardians of this awfully disfigured and intentionally falsified religion.

Those who went further in reading between the lines may have grasped the crucial role the Zionist movement played in justifying the barbarity of Israel, through its powerful grip on the world media, by fortifying the message that the victims of Zionism are nothing more than an irrational breed of suicidal savages who loathe every manifestation of culture, from music and architecture, down to children’s kites. In other words, the obvious fact which I may have shied away from blurting out more openly is the unmistakable existence of the “C” word, the great, but nowadays automatically discredited, conspiracy theory.

Yet, a conspiracy is not always directly implemented and constantly monitored by its creators. The conspiracy I’m talking about here is not as one imagines the word, i.e., a group of evil men sitting down in secret in a dark room to dictate the next move of the Wahabists. No, that would be a little paranoid (although on many occasions when an urgent fatwa was needed, this was exactly what happened, such as the custom-tailored fatwa in 1990 that American forces can be relied upon to wage war against fellow Muslims in Iraq).

In the annals of the ongoing Wahabist conspiracy, the wheels have been set in motion a long time ago. While they may continue to be oiled every now and then as the exigencies of empire require, external intervention can be kept to a clandestine, undetected minimum. Today, the backwardness of this Islamist scourge has assumed a life of its own. I’ll give you a live example.

As I left the house of a friend one night, I tuned in by chance to the BBC Arabic service in my car, and got a jolting reminder of how efficiently executed such Uglification scheme has been, albeit without the need for constant involvement by the conspirators.

The idiot on the radio, your typical ignorant Islamist from Egypt, was parroting the recent announcement dominating the news coming out from Al Azhar clergy these days: that a woman should not become a head of state in a Muslim country. The fascinating aspect of this discussion was not in the actual merits of such an opinion, but in the absolute and almost surreal irrelevance of the whole bloody discourse.

The question being debated was exactly akin to a heated argument being initiated about whether Egypt should send female astronauts to space, fully knowing that the closest any Arab, let alone a brain-dead Egyptian Islamist, will ever come to conquering space at the current rate is by tuning in to the naked thighs of Nancy Ajram over a TV ‘space’ channel.

Yet, Al Azhar has been making some news lately. In addition to the recent fatwas of breast-feeding at the workplace and legalized prostitutional marriages, the flow of enlightenment emanating from this Wahabist-dominated institution culminated recently in a group of Al Azhar clerics confronting the nation with a most peculiar and highly topical debate: should a woman be allowed to become the head of state of an Islamic country? Without conspirator involvement, left to their own devices, the Islamists proved that they can be relied upon to produce a wealth of pure comic genius. Egyptians in particular have been known to exhibit a unique sense of humor, and this was just another classic joke.

I say this because the closest any Egyptian woman is to ever becoming the President of Egypt these days is for the current President to have a sex-change operation. Yet you have a whole national debate erupting over the proper Islamic ruling over whether such an eventuality is legitimate in the eyes of God. The comedy here is in the concocted distraction from the real issues facing Egypt and the Arab world by indulging in yet more woman-bashing by a group of very disturbed individuals.

Indeed, who on earth decided that the Egyptian people should give one second of their undivided attention to the question of whether to have a woman head of state, when such prospects are as probable today as the Egyptian people reincarnating Tut Ankh Amun to life while having the Sphinx stand up and start tap-dancing? But you can understand why these debates are springing up by digging further.

In the same week that his colleagues went ahead and issued this unprovoked opinion that women should never be presidents (unprovoked in the sense that it was not related to something about to take place in Egypt), the top man at Al Azhar decreed that those who buy newspapers spreading false information about the government shall burn in hell. Aha, now it makes sense. You would have thought that Hillary Clinton was running in the Cairo Primaries, or that Argentina or Germany – or some other country with a woman chief executive – was about to annex Egypt. But there was none of that. There was just a whole lot of journalists being sent to prison for the most trivial of charges, and Al Azhar came to the rescue by posing an absurd question about women presidents while Byzantium was burning.

Such frequent obscenity about breast-feeding from female co-workers and the other gibberish about a woman ruling Egypt is definitely not a result of a fresh conspiracy. Nor for that matter was Ibn Baz’s famous fatwa that the earth is flat with the sun revolving around it, and that no one really landed on the moon. These amusing by-products of Wahabist genius are purely home-made, I believe.

On the other hand, a fatwa ordering Muslims to donate billions of dollars to American banks by refusing to receive the interest due on their huge deposits is not. The latter was a fatwa commissioned directly by the Federal Reserve, because US banks cannot legally refrain from paying interest on deposits, so they do issue the interest and receive it back from these unlikely Muslim benefactors, which the banks then record in their books as donations or unclaimed funds, boosting the US banking sector in most unexpected twists of fortune.

The point I’m making is that a conspiracy is a very convenient business. When you neuter a dog, you pay for just one operation, so that you don’t have to keep restraining the poor animal afterwards. The sterilization is complete by the initial intrusive surgery, and you can rest assured thereafter that the animal will always be shooting blanks. And the Islamists will always entertain us with their sick jokes, because ignorance breeds ignorance by itself, seldom needing outside help.

I must say that the mother of all conspiracy theories is the belief that, since conspiracies are abound in the shaping of every corner of our region, then the conspirators must have exerted every effort to flood the minds of our people with so many other ridiculous conspiracy theories in order to increase the confusion and add to the congestion of fiction with truth and the mixing of fantasy with reality. That way, the real conspiracy gets lost in the mayhem, as conspiracies become discredited before they are even articulated.

For example, if you walk the streets of downtown Amman, or any other Arab capital, the worthless literature being sold on the pavements along with the falafel sandwiches is overwhelmingly dominated by the kind of books that insist that Saddam Hussein and his sons are still alive, along with illustrated versions of the famous hoax of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In a region where reading is a foreign practice and almost an extinct habit, this is what our intellectual capacity and literary output have been reduced to.

In addition to the usual host of the prevalent Wahabist manuals on how to become the quintessential ignoramus in this life and in the one after – disguised for the masses as religious books – you have quite an array of non-illustrated books about the unattainable and forbidden joy of sexual intercourse. With so much garbage floating around, the real conspiracy to keep us feeding on superstitious nonsense gets neatly disguised.

In other words, a conspiracy to conceal a conspiracy, if you like, is underway (this is what happened after 9/11 in the US as all sorts of implausible wild theories were circulated to hide the major and scandalous flaws in the official version of events). But the original plot is too damn obvious in our case. A British army spy in the name of John Philby (father of another famous spy, Kim Philby) did more permanent damage to an entire nation in his desert trips to Wahabist villages in the early 20th century than the Mogul and Crusader armies combined could have inflicted throughout our history.

Indeed, the home-grown mutilation inflicted upon Islam by forcing us and the whole world to accept Wahabist doctrines as the real thing is an irreversible process. Thanks to Philby and his MI6 masters (whose legacy was inherited by the American empire’s long alliance with despotic Islam in the campaign to counter communism), the fundamentalist cancer today is spreading all over the place, even biting the hands of its Western inventors, and there is no cure or end in sight.

A woman called in the BBC show before I arrived near my house. Yes, I was telling this story, if you remember. The caller wiped the floor, as we say in Arabic, with the Egyptian cleric on the radio. But she became part of the plot herself. She got engaged in the tragic game and started defending the capacity of mothers and pregnant women to be effective leaders, overlooking the whole farce of the hilarious context.

I then arrived in my garage, vowing to sit behind my computer and write this article. I know I’m swimming against a sweeping tide – and it is getting near the wee hours of the morning and I have a meeting at 8.30. But I must keep saying these things. I may be a staunch enemy of the conspiracy to deform Islam, but the far more shameful exercise would be to succumb to the greater conspiracy of silence. That’s not an option right now.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

Being a lawyer, I’ve always pictured the ultimate courtroom drama to be destined to take place on judgment day. In fact, any day that shares its title with the name earthly courts give to their final verdicts pretty much deserves this legal honor.

Amongst the colorful array of evidence that would be presented by the prosecution to demonstrate mankind’s obsessive tendency to misbehave over the ages, my personal guess is that “exhibit A” is going to be the medium Al Gore (who would be biting his toenails with regret) claimed he invented. Yes, my friends, the people behind the internet are going to be the star prosecution witnesses in this mother of all trials before we get the barbecue that we truly deserve.

Before you jump to conclusions, I can tell you that my prediction has nothing to do with the fact that over 95% of the entire content of the internet is dedicated to the graphic display of the sin of fornication, although this would be sufficient reason to discredit this medium in any courtroom. To condemn us just for that would be too petty, I think.

I am talking here about a totally different sin altogether, one that has also been abbreviated into another four letter dirty word: SPAM.

Ok, maybe you’re right and I cannot claim to have a clue about how judgment day would look like, if I can even assume with such confidence that one would ever take place. But I do have my reasons for this theory.

I don’t know about you, but I feel there is something profoundly demoralizing about beginning your every day by visiting your e-mail inbox only to find it overloaded with two types of relentless and unsolicited messages. The first ones are the hundreds of different invitations to freely share other people’s money because someone out there thinks you can be gullible enough to believe that a huge figure needs to go into your bank account and make you filthy rich out of the blue.

The other kind consists of messages extolling the virtues of the happiness that a few added inches can bring into a man’s life, by offering to sell us products that demolish the comforting myth with which men console themselves about size not mattering (it seems the jury is still out on whether it does, since, like on many other issues where they enjoy keeping us guessing, women don’t seem to make up their minds and give a unanimous ruling to put this matter to rest).

Some people just delete these spam messages and never think twice about them. But I find both types of these daily solicitations to be particularly revealing of the folly of civilization in the 21st century. For here you have a remarkable tool, which represents the pinnacle of human genius and which could be utilized to engender boundless benefits for the people of this world, being exploited instead in the most debased manner: either to manipulate people’s need for money by luring them into financial destruction, or to manipulate every guy’s fantasy of going as deep as no man has gone before.

It is true that only total idiots respond to such emails and that such certified fools deserve what they get. But this doesn’t change the fact that the internet has allowed these crooks to enter my and your private daily lives whether we let them in or not. Maybe I’m not using the proper repellent filter or software, but I personally feel that the sheer volume of such messages and the persistence of those who send them is a constant reminder to all of us – which I don’t particularly need with my morning coffee – that no matter how far civilization can reach, the same old dirty rotten scoundrels are destined to accompany us hand-in-hand on this journey wherever we go.

This reminder eats away at the core of our sense of progress as a species as it belittles everything else we have achieved and can achieve. For example, for each odd email you receive about a heroic stand of a human rights activist, or about a closer step towards curing cancer, there are forty emails offering you to inherit the money of an African dictator, or asking whether your partner would savor a little more width and length. So then, is that what we’re are all about after all: just money and procreation? Surely, there must be more to life than loads of unearned cash and a huge appendage to go with it, wouldn’t you have thought?

On another note, I personally feel sorry for all those other genuine thieves and money launderers who do sincerely want to entrust you with the fruits of their labor but now find that their messages get lost in between all the fake ones. How frustrated must you be if you’re really working with a trust fund in the Bahamas and did actually stumble upon a dormant account that you need to secretly funnel and share with an email user you have diligently researched and chosen to help you out with your heist?

What must you do to convince your potential partner that you are not one of those daily thousands of pretenders and imposters, and that you are truly a family member of imprisoned Russian oligarchs seeking the discreet movement of funds outside Russia, or that you are in fact the confidant banker of a diamond-mining family who perished in a plane crash leaving behind unattended tens of millions in a secret account? Life must be difficult if your name is really Abdul Falafel Precious Stone from the Republic of Moon Islands and after discovering you have terminal testicular cancer you decided to donate all your family’s wealth from decades of banana farming to your dear brother in Islam whom you have chosen to administer the plundering of your fortune on charitable causes.

I feel your pain, Abdul. With all these cry-wolves in abundance, truly unique opportunities to make a nice buck have gone down the drains, all because of dishonest spammers who have ruined it for everyone.

But seriously, you’ll be surprised to find out the type of people that do fall for these email offers of instant riches. A former colleague of mine in Geneva, a former vice-president of a major company, fell for the scam and even attempted suicide in the aftermath, despite my numerous warnings to him to laugh at these jokes and then delete them, and his assurances that he wouldn’t reply to them. I guess this is the price we pay for living during the zenith of capitalism, right at the centre of the greediest period in human existence, when more people are given incentives to dream of easy money than in any other time in history, and with no end in sight to the vast market of luxurious lifestyle previously only affordable to Kings and Agha Khans.

With its burgeoning mass consumerism – facilitated also by the internet – this is by far the most materialistic century of all, and this is an undisputable fact. Al Pacino acted out an unforgettable scene in The Devil’s Advocate as he revealed himself as the Devil impersonate to Keanu Reeve’s character when he rightly claimed the twentieth century as having been his own. Indeed, Satan rules supreme today.

Everyone’s out to milk you dry, conveniently leaving any semblance of scruples at home, and they are coming up with the most sophisticated techniques to do so by evolving with the times and accommodating with technology, no matter how many lives are destroyed in the process. I guess a lot of the blame also has to rest with Hollywood who has consistently glamorized outlaws in thousands of movies, from Bonnie and Clyde all the way to the latest Ocean’s 13, great films in which bandits and robbers are always made out to be either misunderstood souls or the coolest people on earth.

The honest and likable thief is indeed a character that got so much more than it deserves from the producers and directors of Tinseltown, so I might as well add these culprits to the list of the accused on the day when we’re all going to Hell. Objection, yells the defense. Overruled. We find the defendants guilty on all counts. This court is adjourned.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

With these distressed words, art expert Zoja Finci implored the late Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic, to save the Islamic relics of her beautiful city from destruction, despite the fact that she is Jewish herself. This was back in 1995, soon after the end of the Bosnian war, and she was referring to the Begova Mosque in Sarajevo, the largest Islamic monument – and arguably the most ornamented – in the former Yugoslavia. The vandals she was denouncing were not Serb militias, but none other than the Wahhabist hordes who traveled all the way to Bosnia to complete the destruction they started in Mecca.

As if the desecration of the graves of the Prophet’s wife and companions, and the complete demolition of every single remaining vestige of Islam in Mecca and Medina were not enough, the Wahhabist bulldozers set their eyes on Europe. Since 1995, a post-war crime of a different nature has been ongoing to erase the beauty of Islamic architecture in the Balkans under the guise of Islamic Aid.

You wouldn’t have thought for a minute that Wahhabis were particularly concerned with architecture to bother themselves with such expensive restoration efforts in far away lands, until you discover that their aim has nothing to do with restoration and everything to do with obliteration. All across the Balkans, even the slightly damaged structures were not repaired, although it would have been the easier thing to do, but were razed to the ground to be rebuilt from scratch in the ugliest form imaginable, and as far off from the original shape and design as humanly possible.

Then came the end of the war in Kosovo in 1999, and the architectural vultures immediately went after the corpses there as well. Harvard University Fine Arts Librarian and expert on Balkan Islamic architecture, Andras Riedlmayer, goes so far in condemning the grotesque defiling of ancient mosques in the Balkans to pronouncing that “the Wahhabis, with their wealth and fanaticism, are a menace to heritage, in some ways more dangerous than the [Serb paramilitary] Chetniks, since about the latter, at least, no one harbors any illusions regarding their uncharitable intentions.”

One foreign expert described one of the architects involved whom he had interviewed (and who never practiced the profession) by saying that “his ideas for mosque design involve knockoffs of Saudi-modern shopping mall architecture with odd touches inspired by the décor of the Love Boat, including portholes! He is the very model of the modern zealot, narrow minded, arrogant, and so dumb he doesn’t even realize it.”

Centuries old Ottoman mosques, libraries, schools and graveyards were knocked down for no reason except to implement Wahabist doctrines attacking any semblance of architectural splendor by inventing sayings of the Prophet decreeing that the ornamentation of mosques or tombs is a crime in the eyes of God. Reidlmayer recalls that prior to the War in Kosovo, “when the Wahhabis took out sledgehammers and set about smashing the 17th century gravestones in the garden of Peja’s ancient Defterdar Mosque, angry local residents beat them up and chased them out of town. I was shown the damaged gravestones, beautifully carved with floral motifs and verses from Qur’an. That was in the late summer of 1998. Six months later, in the spring of 1999, Serb paramilitaries came and burned down the mosque. Unlike the fundamentalist missionaries, they were not interested in the gravestones.”

So why do these Wahhabist scavengers travel the globe to implement the uglification project, you may ask? Who ultimately benefits if our culture and civilization is made to look as ugly and primitive as possible in the eyes of the world?

The plot thickens when you enter the domain of politics and consider the urgent need to reverse a natural human emotion called sympathy. It is well known that nations across the world sympathize more and develop a closer affiliation with a people whose contribution to humanity is materially felt and seen to be one that is positive, refined and sophisticated.

Americans, for example, still revere the Japanese culture, admire their history and savor their food, despite having incinerated two of their cities with atomic bombs. So how do you make sure that Arabs and Muslims remain reduced to a barbaric, uncivilized and useless people, who deserve what comes their way in terms of occupation and dehumanization? By working very hard to ensure that the association in people’s minds is always automatically connected with ugliness. Not with Samurai or with Sushi, but with filth and depravity. For the world is less likely to be bothered if a few more ugly terrorists get killed or robbed of their land, because all what the world can see coming out of their culture is repulsive and unattractive.

When the words ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’ are mentioned, no one should recall anything as miraculously breathtaking as the Dome of the Rock or the Taj Mahal, lest they rethink their apathy towards these apparent savages and, God forbid, sympathize with their suffering. The world should always conjure up images of Bin Laden and other Wahhabist creations when thinking about our lot. That way, it becomes much easier to dispossess a few million ‘nomadic’ Palestinians for the sake of saving a chosen race of European achievers, scientists and artists, who have no where else to go, and who would likely turn ugly deserts into lands of milk and honey.

If all what people see are hideous images of our people, coupled with decapitation videotapes of squealing victims, then the looting of the Baghdad museum under the nose of the Marines becomes more digestible by the world community, because, at the end of the day, what could possibly be inside this building? Surely, more ugly artifacts of an ugly civilization. Mission accomplished indeed.

But there is a huge, annoying crack in the uglification project. There is a place in Europe that Wahhabis cannot touch or destroy, and it is a source of constant irritation to the uglifiers.

Indeed, how could you put on a straight face and explain to the queues of millions of tourists who visit Andalusia each year that they are walking in the footsteps of the same people who today exemplify everything crooked, violent and evil? What if these people went back home and started believing that the Arab Islamic civilization was worthy of some respect after all? Hell, what if they started to make the link with the Dome of the Rock and attempted to criticize Israel for weakening the foundations of Al Aqsa Mosque by their useless excavations in search of a non-existing temple? Houston, we have a problem.

Not to worry, you solve it by committing the most dishonest forgery in history: by changing their name to begin with, by calling them Moors, and never refer to them as Arab Muslims. But where does this strange name come from? It doesn’t matter, just make sure to repeat it, and the world would buy it. Oh, the Moors. It just sounds ancient and exotic, like the Mayans of Latin America, and is the perfect cover up for the fact that the entire 781 years of the magnificent civilization of Al Andalus was purely Arab, not even Berber, and overwhelmingly Muslim.

This falsification plan also comes complete with troubleshooting contingencies. Whenever the endless pilgrims to that region think for themselves and ask the tourist guide why the endless calligraphy on the walls is not in “Moorish” language, they immediately acknowledge the Arab element but confuse matters by introducing a man called Maimonides, the lone Jewish figure that Westerners must always associate with the beauty of Al Andalus, although he lived all his life in North Africa and wrote his books, only in Arabic, in Egypt.

You then hit two birds with one stone by claiming that this civilization was Judeo/Islamic, despite the unanimous agreement of all historians that such claims are a load of fantastical dreaming and pure wishful thinking (along with the other embarrassing and discredited attempts to claim that Alhambra Palace was based on the design of the never-seen-before Temple of Solomon, a fantasy that fails to explain how the Arabs could borrow the designs of a temple no one has ever seen before, a temple that exists only in the imagination of the zealots who believe in its pointless excavation).

Before I go, I’ll tell to you a little story told to me by my brother about a music DVD he had bought in the Fnac store in Geneva, which shows the extent of the psychological complex suffered by the uglifiers. They cannot just relax and admit the Arabs into the league of civilized cultures. They have to always keep their vigilance, and create and employ tools from our midst, to keep us out.

The best-selling DVD he bought was of the famous Shehrezade ballet by Rimsky-Korsakov, performed by the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg. The DVD was produced in Europe by ART Haus, and although not mentioned on the DVD cover, the story of Shehrezade is otherwise known in English as “Arabian Nights”. Pay attention, not Moorish nights, not Hindu nights, not Polynesian nights, but Arabian Nights. The stories take place in Baghdad during the reign of Haroun Al Rasheed and his wife, Sit Zubaidah, who is one of the main characters of the ballet (Zubide).

Here we have a splendid performance, marvelous Baghdad decorations, outstanding colorful costumes, captivating music, and guess what? Zarqawi and Mullah Omar do not star in it, nor does any other Wahabi character. It takes the audience on a trip a thousand years back into a magical, mystical world. Indeed, nothing can be more Arab than Arabian Nights, now can it? But they cannot let go even for a bloody DVD. So you flip open the leaflet on the cover, and it reads:

“Shehrezade is a work filled with love and passion, guilt and deception, anger, pain and desperation. The anger of Shahriar, the Sultan of India and China, who suspects his wives of…..”

Did they just say “Sultan of India and China”? You bastards, even the Arabian Nights!

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

When my father-in-law passed away last year, someone advised that his tombstone should not be raised above the ground. When I asked why, I was told that this is how it should be done in Islam, and that any structure erected above the earth level is forbidden.

Abu Khattab, God bless his soul, was a man whom I especially loved and admired, and of course, no amount of elaborate masonry would have done justice to his cherished memory.

But I was still furious at the prevailing presumption that Islam had wanted it to be that way, and that’s why the suggestion was swiftly overruled.

These widespread fallacies made me think again about the true rationale for this edict about inconspicuous graves. Don’t kid yourself, for it has nothing to do with austerity or any other spiritual explanation. These teachings are in fact an integral part of the larger “uglification” conspiracy and an essential tool of the concerted campaign to erase our history.

It’s a simple equation. Since Muslims have fascinated the world with their breathtaking mausoleums from India to Marrakesh, so why not hit them where it hurts the most, by decreeing that beauty and art are forbidden in such fields? And where better to start? Armed with this poisonous ideology, the Wahabist bulldozers set off to work razing to the ground the most sacred burial places in Islam, the graves of Al Baqe’e, the resting place for the companions (Sahaba) of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina, leaving unmarked bricks on barren land where domed enclaves once existed. The Sahaba’s old houses in Mecca did not escape the criminal destruction either and were also completely flattened.

Like the Buddhist statues of Bamiyan were dynamited by another Wahabist creation, today there is no archaeological trace of the old Mecca in order to chronicle the origins of the existence of Islam. It is gone forever and has all been replaced by ugly hotels and shopping malls. The madmen justified their actions by the ridiculous claim that it was feared Muslims would worship the shrines themselves, and hence it would constitute a return to idolatry which Islam had wiped out.

This assumption that Muslims are such a bunch of morons that they would today relapse into worshipping edifices built of stone after 1400 years of quitting the habit because they can’t tell the difference between a brick and a God perhaps should also make us demolish Al Ka’ba while we’re at it, lest we mistake it for a dark chocolate cube and eat it. These treacherous hands have even reached the tomb of the Prophet’s beloved wife, Khadijah, the first person to embrace Islam and the staunch incubator of the new faith. When you contrast the magnificent splendor that bejeweled the different mausoleums throughout our history, and when you see the current shameful shape of Khadija’s tomb, you will understand exactly why this was done and how they want Islam to look like in the eyes of the world: hideous and plain ugly.

These clerics with bulldozers claim that this is the correct Islamic way, and this begs my question: why do these 20^th century newcomers and their forged textbooks think that they know more about our religion and what it allows or forbids than the contemporaries of Islam’s revelation and their offspring, from the Rahsideen up to the Ottomans, whose testimonial monuments have, by God’s grace and His merciful providence, escaped the ruinous claws of the “uglifiers” and still stand tall for the whole world to marvel at?

If this sect of endless prohibitions decrees burial in unmarked graves, then the surviving architectural heritage of Islamic mausoleums is the conclusive proof that these heresies have absolutely no foundations in the genius of the true Islamic civilization, and are merely a product of a lately re-installed savage culture bent on destroying every trace of elegance in its path.

The “uglification” does not start nor stop at the tombs and mausoleums. I remember when I was a kid at school during religion classes, a great deal was made of how Islam forbids the drawing of human or animal portraits, going even as far as prohibiting the photography of persons or the hanging of their pictures on our walls. Despite the innumerable gems of Islamic artifacts and paintings adorning museums throughout the world, from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg to the Louvre in Paris, these enemies of the exquisite things in life think they know better about what God wants from us.

Indeed, if this had been the divine intention all along, then generations of Muslims before us must have existed on another planet. But for these salafi gurus, it has never really been about God or His teachings. The world they want Muslims to inhabit is a dull, artless, lifeless, uninspiring world of retarded clerics and male-chauvinistic cruelty, a horribly off-tune symphony of madness where men are dumb and women are slaves.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the music. These people want us to believe that God was petty enough to ban all forms of music. Only recently, I read in the main Islamic weekly paper in Jordan an assessment of the Islamic jurisprudence on the subject of music, concluding that we are better off refraining from this whole activity since the weight of the authorities tilts towards banning it altogether, with the exception – for some weird reason – of the percussion instruments which were permitted. Actually, it is not such a weird reason after all, if you keep the “uglification” plot in mind. Music without musical instruments is the essence of primitiveness incarnate. It is in fact the ultimate reversal of evolution and the perfect hindrance to a healthy advancement of any culture.

Of course, for these muftis and sworn enemies of refinement and human progression, Ziryab and the rest of the pioneering Muslims who invented every single precursor to the orchestral instruments of today would all be considered heretics. Like jungle monkeys, we should instead restrict our audio instincts to the dry beating of unmelodious drums, lest the magic of a piano or the lamentation of a violin corrupt the harmonious rhythm of the primeval societies we have created.

It is such a sad state of affairs that words aren’t effective any longer to describe the tragedy of “uglification”. Our forefathers who left their indelible mark on all facets of human civilization apparently didn’t understand their religion as well as our bearded lot. That is why we should all take what Islam means from the mouths of the legitimate Islamic authorities of our current dark ages, such as, let me think, ah, perhaps such as those institutes chasing people with sticks in the streets, promoting virtue and preventing vice, the same people who let 15 innocent girls burn to death in a school in 2002 by forcing them back inside the inferno because these little kids were not covering their heads. Yes, perhaps that is the way to go in the 21^st century.

Until the diaries are back with a special edition about Islamic architecture and the people who want to take that away from us too, take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

I always wondered whether there was a deliberate Western conspiracy for the “uglification” of Islam, or whether it was the Muslims themselves who did not need outside help in this regard. I accidentally coined the term “uglification” a little more than a year ago on these pages, and by that, I was referring to the stubborn campaign to reduce Islam into a peculiar sect of sorcery and senseless mythology.

This campaign is underway to represent Islam as devoid of beauty and good taste, despite the overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary, and the slanderous attempts to turn its prophet into a prolific babbler of jumbled fairytales, instead of the magnanimous humanitarian and genius – and even revolutionary women’s rights advocate – that evidence shows he truly had been. While I’m not usually prone to believing conspiracy theories, I did encounter personal evidence proving that the elaborate plot of “uglification” was a result of a mixture between the two: our own devastating ignorance and adherence to forged texts, but also the West’s active participation in promoting and perpetuating the outright lies.

One case in point which I shall never be able to forget took place exactly twenty years ago, during my first weeks at Charterhouse, the boarding school and bastion of the British establishment in which I landed at the tender age of 16. In that pillar of the English public school system, they used to invite certain speakers to address the students on various occasions, to educate the offspring of the British elite, so to speak, about other cultures and to promote tolerance and understanding.

At one such event, we were gathered to listen to a presentation about the different world religions and their contrasting beliefs and practices, given by a person introduced to us as an expert on this subject. After giving us a tour of the basic tenets of what everyone else believed, the lecturer then turned to Islam. I vividly recall the excitement I felt at that moment as a homesick student, proudly waiting for my schoolmates to find out what this misunderstood religion was all about.

Our guest speaker stood there with his aristocratic posture and impeccable upper class accent, and confined his description of Islam to the following short sentence: “Islam is a religion from the Arabian desert that set many teachings for its followers to abide by, for example, the requirement to eat food with their right hands, the rationale being that the left hand is designated for cleaning oneself after going to the toilet”. That was it. The time he allotted for Islam was over.

I swear by the God of all the religions which I learnt about that day that this was the only example that came out of his mouth. Coming from a supposedly learned authority, this incident confirmed to me that this guy came to the auditorium with a premeditatedly devious purpose, and could not have uttered what he said to this knowledge-thirsty audience out of sheer ignorance or lack of information. So, while Jesus died on the Cross for our sins and Buddhism preached peace and tranquility, Islam was apparently all about wiping your behind using the correct hand. So much for my pride amongst my peers that day.

Needless to say, I survived the racist atmosphere and bigotry purposely instilled in the minds of young Brits by such “educational” talks and, with the exception of a few fist-oriented episodes of defiance on my part, I continued on to law school at Southampton University quite peacefully. There, I came across an example of our own role in the same “uglification” project.

Philip, an older postgraduate friend of mine from Syria, wanted to marry his childhood sweetheart, Yusra, and was willing to convert to Islam to satisfy her father’s only condition. So he asked my advice on how to go about conversion, and I assured him that, if he must, no formalities were needed since it should all be in his heart. Still, he said there was paperwork that Yusra’s father in Syria demanded to see and that such proof of conversion could be obtained from the local – and only – mosque in Southampton. He asked me to drive him there to assist in getting one of these off-the-counter deeds of faith.

At first, I tried very hard to convince him out of it because I heard of no such proof of conversion to Islam before, and I didn’t particularly want to discuss the subject of his foreskin either (I also knew that this pathetic excuse for a mosque was right in the middle of Southampton’s unglamorous red-light district, and that it wasn’t exactly supposed to be the first monument on which Philip should feast his eyes upon entering his new faith). But Philip, who was an accomplished violinist, was also a hopeless romantic and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not being one to stand in the face of a love story determined to challenge traditions, I hopped with Philip in my car and headed down to St. Mary’s sleazy alleyways and drug-infested streets (the name given to that part of town was not very fitting from a Christian standpoint either). On the way there, I joked with Philip that in Islam he would already gain points (hasanat) with God by visiting the mosque, because the trip in itself involves a great deal of resisting temptations. He soon appreciated what I was talking about.

After getting past the hooker or two standing near the door (and convincing them that our visit to their seedy neighbourhood was to accomplish a somewhat different type of union), we entered the main room of this so-called mosque where a typical Taliban style madrasa for little kids was in full blown session. I noticed Philip was taken aback by the horrible stench of the place, but was being too polite to point it out. We walked over the shoulders of the young boys crammed on the floor – who were making noises like a swarm of bees while swaying their heads up and down in a trance, reciting what were supposed to be verses from the Quran, without understanding a word because none of them spoke any Arabic. The Imam then took us into a private multi-purpose bedroom where we could hear ourselves speak. In there, he sat on his bed and started fiddling with typed paper forms to choose one for Philip to sign in order to officially join the tribe. All of a sudden, Philip’s face twitched and froze in astonishment as the Imam took grab of the bed sheets underneath him and used them to blow his nose for what seemed to be a deafening eternity.

“Fill up these papers and take them down to the mosque in London for authentication”, the Imam with a flu said to my gobsmacked friend. Authentication in London? There is useless bureaucracy in God’s name as well? We took the papers and, again, stumbled over the bodies of the lost generation of future Bin Ladens on the way out. “Are you sure you still wanna do this”, I ironically asked Philip as we headed towards the car, waving goodbye to the same mini skirts stationed outside. “See you later, luv”, one of them winked back at me. Sounds like a dirty good idea, I said to myself. But seriously, there was Philip to worry about here. I could not be vindictive and give him the ‘I told you so’ routine. What could I say to him, I wondered? “We’re not all like this, you know”, I apologetically mumbled to my poor friend, who was now, whether he liked it or not, one of us: “the best nation bestowed upon mankind”.

Indeed, there was really nothing that I could say to make sense of why a nation with such a glorious history accepts today to be dictated in its matters of faith by the most ignorant of its sons. The tragedy was very complicated, and I could not do justice to it while leaving the vicinity of St. Mary’s brothels. Nor is it possible to do so in this short article, but I’ll try to summarize.

The clandestine relationship between that venomous British ‘expert’ on religions back at Charterhouse and the Imam who could not be bothered to reach for a tissue to clean his nose was not self-explanatory to me at the time, nor, in the least, to the love-struck passenger next to me. However, the sinister connection between the two became clearer later on when I researched the origins of the Wahabist ideology and discovered the role of the British colonialists in digging up and empowering this fundamentalist cult of absolute madness.

Apparently, through the laborious efforts of such evil men of empire as the one who visited us in Charterhouse that morning, this obtuse sect of Islam was rescued from oblivion and pumped up from an insignificant speck to become eventually capable of drowning the entire mainstream Islamic literature with oceans of austere edicts and perverted prohibitions. Using the infinitely generous petro-dollar funding to lay down the foundations of the religious education curricula for every Muslim child and adult from Qandahar to Southampton, our religion has been robbed from us and was being totally and irreparably deformed.

Today, I remain absolutely convinced that the same forces who have for decades persevered to keep Islam permanently associated with ugliness and bad taste are still at work, in Nahr El-Bared, Gaza, and other wretched places. They may be spearheaded by the same misinformation factories in the West, but they are also financed and embraced by the willing participants in our midst. In this grand scheme of “uglification” of Islam, the only innocent party is Islam itself. The rest of us are all guilty, either of complicity in action, or worse, complicity in silence.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

Motorcycle Diaries Part VII was deemed too “local” for our tastes, but we do hope you enjoy the triumphant return of the series in Part VII.

(This article was originally published in Jordan’s Living Well magazine)

I lost my gloves one day in a coffee shop in Geneva, and I tell you, it’s difficult to ride without them when it’s really cold. So as I was paying for a new pair with a credit card, the salesman, whom I knew was from Israel, tried to start some small talk by asking me what my family name means. I told him that it relates to the city of Nablus where my family is originally from.

Suddenly, the most bewildered look was plastered on his face. “Where is Nablus?” he asked, “I’ve never heard of it.” Then, after realizing that I knew he was bullshitting me, he pretended to remember, “Ah, Shkheim you mean?”With my insistence not to learn these ugly names that the deranged Zionists have dug up from oblivion to erase our identity, that name certainly didn’t ring a bell. But now it was my turn. Although I knew where he was from, I asked “And you’re… from?” As he smiled while reminding me, I replicated the same look on his face moments ago. “Israel? Where is that?” Then after a brief pause, “Ah, the land of Canaan you mean. Palestine”.

You see if you want to get biblical on me, there is no such thing as Israel either, and I made that clear to this smartass. Here we were all of a sudden; my family descended from a place called Shkheim, and this guy a Palestinian. God does work in mysterious ways, but I still thanked Him for His small mercies that at least my name was not Zaid Shkheimy. “Have a nice day”, I told my Israeli friend. It was in fact a very cold, but still magnificently sunny day to hit the roads. The gloves warmed up my grip on the bike, but my heart was still frozen. I just cannot stand thieves who steal your gloves, or any other kind of thieves.

It was then that it finally occurred to me. Zionism is a sickness, for it takes much more than just a twisted ideology to make people think like that. It requires a profound leap of immorality of a higher order to instill this mentality in your followers. Zionism is not merely a political movement, but in its essence represents a deeply disturbed view of the world, which is a reflection of a terrible disease of the mind.

Indeed, to deny the existence of a vibrant community such as the Palestinian society in the early twentieth century and describe Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land” is a disease of the mind.

To assert property claims over real estate after the lapse of more than 2000 years with the same certainty of title as if one resided there yesterday is a disease of the mind.

To describe the colonial immigration to Palestine of a European people with no proven historical link to the ancient Israelites – and whose great, great recorded ancestors have never set foot there – as some kind of a “return” to that land is indicative of a perverted misunderstanding and misapplication of the verb to “return” and can only be a result of a disease of the mind.

To blame the Palestinians for being unreasonable in rejecting a partition plan in 1947 which gave the Jews, who only owned 7 percent of the land, an astonishing half of Palestine, is a disease of the mind.

To demand of the Arabs at the time to peacefully succumb to such partition, where 86 percent of the land designated for the proposed Jewish state was Palestinian-inhabited and owned land, is a disease of the mind.

To eventually grab 78 percent of Palestine through war and to force the flight of the population through deliberate massacres and then call it a war of independence is a disease of the mind.

To deny the orchestrated massacres and eradications of hundreds of Palestinian villages in 1948 and then denounce the Israeli historians who later exposed this truth as self-hating Jews is a disease of the mind.

To claim that having escaped the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Dachau is a justification for the murder, expulsion, and occupation of another guiltless people is a disease of the mind.

To legislate that any resident of Poland, Hungary, New York, Brazil, Australia, Iceland, or even Planet Mars, who happens to be blessed with a Jewish mother (yet cannot point to Palestine on the map) has a superior right to “return” and settle in Palestine to someone who has been expelled from his very own land, confined to a squalid refugee camp, and still holds the keys to his house, is a disease of the mind.

To blame God for the theft and occupation of someone else’s land by claiming that it was He who had pledged this land exclusively to the Jews, and to seriously promote the myth of a land promised by the Almighty to His favorite children as an excuse for this crime, is a disease of the mind.

To milk the pockets of the world for the atrocities of the Nazis, while stubbornly refusing a simple admission of guilt, let alone compensation or repatriation, for the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people is a disease of the mind.

To keep reminding and blackmailing the world of the plight of the Jews under Hitler 70 years ago, while at the same time inflicting on the Palestinians today the same fate of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, is a disease of the mind.

To impose a collective guilt overshadowing Western civilization for the Holocaust and then to criminalize all legitimate historical debate of the nature and extent of that horrific event is a disease of the mind.

To virtually incarcerate the Palestinian people inside degrading cages, destroying their livelihoods, confiscating their lands, stealing their water and uprooting their trees, and then to condemn their legitimate resistance as terrorism is a disease of the mind.

To believe you have the right to chase the Palestinians into an Arab capital city in 1982 and to indiscriminately bombard its civilians for a relentless three months, murdering thousands of innocent people is a disease of the mind.

To encircle the civilian camps of Sabra and Chatila after evacuating the fighters and to unleash on them trained dogs (while providing them with night-illuminating flares for efficiency) and then deny culpability for the carnage is a disease of the mind.

To publicly declare a policy of breaking the bones of Palestinian stone-throwers to prevent them from lifting stones again and to enact this policy is a disease of the mind.

To have the sadistic streak of exacting vengeance on the innocent families of suicide bombers by punishing them with the dynamiting of their home is a disease of the mind.

To describe the offer of giving the Palestinians 80 percent of 22 percent of 100 percent of what is originally their own land as a “generous” offer is a disease of the mind.

To believe that you have the right to continue to humiliate the Palestinians at gun point by making them queue for hours to move between their villages, forcing mothers to give birth at check-points is a disease of the mind.

To flatten the camp of Jenin on its inhabitants and deny any wrongdoing is a delusional condition which is symptomatic of a serious disease of the mind.

To build a huge separation wall under the pretext of security, which disconnects farmers from their farms and children from their schools, while stealing even more territory as the wall freely zigzags and encroaches on Palestinian land is a disease of the mind.

To leave behind, in the last 10 days of a losing war in Lebanon, more than one million cluster bombs which have no purpose except to murder and maim unsuspecting civilians is a product of an evil disease of the mind.

To believe that the entire world is out to get you and to denounce any critic of the racist policies of the State of Israel as an anti-Semite, the latest victim being none other than peace-making Jimmy Carter, is an acute stage of mass paranoia, which is a disease of the mind.

To possess, in the midst of a non-nuclear Arab world, more than 200 nuclear warheads capable of incinerating the whole planet in addition to having the most advanced arsenal of weaponry in the world while continuing to play the role of a victim is a disease of the mind.

Yes, and for that salesman in peaceful Geneva to be so insecure as to refuse to acknowledge the name of the largest West Bank city under his country’s brutal military occupation is, sadly, nothing but an infectious disease of the mind.

That’s all what it is, ladies and gentlemen: Zionism is an incurable disease of the mind.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.