But according to Nagla al-Imam, this isn’t true. She believes that fighting Israeli occupation with sexual harassment is actually the key to resisting it. She recently “invited Arab youth to sexually harass and rape Israeli women as a form of resistance”:

Interviewer: Egyptian lawyer Nagla Al-Imam has proposed that young Arab men should sexually harass Israeli girls wherever they may be and using any possible method, as a new means in the resistance against Israel.

[...]

Interviewer: We have with us the lawyer Nagla Al-Imam from Cairo. Welcome. What is the purpose of this proposal of yours?

Nagla Al-Imam: This is a form of resistance. In my opinion, they are fair game for all Arabs, and there is nothing wrong with…

Interviewer: On what grounds?

Nagla Al-Imam: First of all, they violate our rights, and they “rape” the land. Few things are as grave as the rape of land. In my view, this is a new form of resistance.

Interviewer: As a lawyer, don’t you think this might expose Arab youth to punishment for violating laws against sexual harassment?

Nagla Al-Imam: Most Arab countries… With the exception of three or four Arab countries, which I don’t think allow Israeli women to enter anyway, most Arab countries do not have sexual harassment laws. Therefore, if [Arab women] are fair game for Arab men, there is nothing wrong with Israeli women being fair game as well.

Interviewer: Does this also include rape?

Nagla Al-Imam: No. Sexual harassment… In my view, the [Israeli women] do not have any right to respond. The resistance fighters would not initiate such a thing, because their moral values are much loftier than that. However if such a thing did happen to them, the [Israeli women] have no right to make any demands, because this would put us on equal terms – leave the land so we won’t rape you. These two things are equal.

This transcript is from MEMRI, a notoriously anti-Arab news source. However, it looks like al-Imam did all the work for them: she makes herself look worse than any outlet could.

More terrifying is that she is a lawyer and the head of a human rights organization. It’s beyond reprehensible that she advocates sexual harassment as a kind of payback or a solution to a group’s problems, given her position as someone committed to the rule of law and human rights.

How can she advance human rights (which include the safety and well-being of all women) while claiming that Israeli women aren’t entitled to the same safety she wants Palestinian women to have? If someone is trapped in a hole, it’s impossible to shovel oneself out; shoveling only creates a larger hole that is more difficult to climb out of. But this seems to be exactly what al-Imam wants.

Though Israel is no saint in this, al-Imam’s statements do nothing to advance the cause of Palestinians.

This is not the way to end the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinians. This is the way to make it worse.

Born on 25 January, 1926 to a Christian family in Alexandria, his father was an attorney of Lebanese origin, while his mother was Greek.

Growing up, the pentalingual Chahine home was as cosmopolitan as the city in which it rested, although as Chahine later joked, as with other Alexandrines, he failed to master any of the languages completely.

After studying engineering at Alexandria University for one year, Chahine convinced his parents to allow him to pursue his interest in acting through studying in Hollywood, where he passed the years 1946 to 1948 at the Pasadena Playhouse on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

On his return to Egypt, he entered the film industry after embarking on apprentice work with the Italian documentary film-maker, Gianni Vernuccio, and cinematographer, Alvisi Orfanelli, the latter of whom introduced Chahine to the major production companies of the late 1940s.

Orfanelli subsequently assisted in Chahine’s early films, Ibn el-Nil (Son of the Nile) in 1951, Nisa Bila Rigal (Women Without Men) in 1953, and Bab El Haded (Cairo Station) in 1958.

Already a resident of the movie hub of the Middle East – Egypt has been a steady source of movies since the 1930s – Chahine commenced his first film, Baba Amine (Father Amine) in 1950.

Nevertheless, it was his second film, Ibn el-Nil that catapulted him to success as the movie’s début at the 1951 Venice Film Festival drew more crowds than anticipated due to a sudden turn of meteorological fortune.

Caught in a flash rainstorm, festival goers thronged into his showing in gowns and bikinis alike, and discovered a cinematic revelation that would seal the fate of Chahine’s reputation in the movie industry.

With a directing career spanning 58 years, Chahine’s work inevitably has challenged as many boundaries as it has garnered awards.

In his endeavour to recapture and defend the spirit of multicultural tolerance against the forces he saw undermining it — fundamentalism, dictatorship, censorship, and imperialism – he also courted controversy.

The first, Bab El Hadid, has proved a classic of Egyptian cinema, yet nevertheless shocked viewers both by the sympathy with which the “fallen woman” is depicted, and by the violent nature of her demise.

Al Asfour, (The Sparrow), in 1973, attacked Egyptian corruption and blamed it for the defeat in the Six Day War, and was banned by Sadat’s government. Written by Chahine in collaboration with Lofti el-Kholi, the film traces the familial and national divisions rife in society during the conflict between Israel and the United Arab Republic.

In 1994, an Islamist lawyer succeeded in getting a court to ban his film Al Mohager, (The Emigrant), in November 1994 due to the semblance of the plot to the story of Joseph, found in the Bible and Quran. The movie was subsequently banned for a second time in August 1995, on the grounds that it contravenes Islamic ruling on the depiction of prophets.

Chahine was then, a ground-breaker. As the first director to introduce art films to the Arab world, his cinematic triumphs spawned the genre “Chahinian” film, pieces often marked by his ability to render the plot not necessarily the main factor of success, but rather by enabling the mise-en-scène and the shocking reactions of all the different characters to occupy the viewer’s attention.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, Chahine switched to an autobiographical style, recounting his childhood and American experiences through the Alexandria Trilogy: Iskanderiya…Lih? (Alexandria, Why?) in 1979, Hadduta Misriya, (An Egyptian Story) in 1982, and Iskanderiya Kaman w Kaman, (Alexandria Again and Forever) in 1989.

The first of the trilogy, Iskanderiya…Lih?, shattered cinematic taboos through the tales of two love affairs — one homosexual between a wealthy Egyptian man and an English solider, and the other between a Muslim man and a Jewish woman. Set in Egypt during and after World War II, the movie captured the complex identity of the country as races, cultures, nationalism and politics jostled for supremacy in the post-War society.

Chahine’s swansong, released this year, Heya Fawda (This is Chaos/Le Chaos) is no exception to it predecessors in grappling controversial subject matter. Co-directed with his protégé Khaled Youssef, the movie provides a sharp criticism of the Egyptian government’s crackdown on democracy activists, depicting a corrupt police officer who takes bribes and tortures his detainees.

To the end, Chahine shirked the fear that constrained many Arab film-makers, and established himself at the forefront of the art genre.

The film industry has lost a pioneer, but through his works, he has enabled other, new film-makers to venture in new directions.

In Egypt black coffee is strongly linked to mourning. After a funeral people who come to offer their condolences are given black coffee to drink, and it is to this tradition that the play refers. What the play mourns is everything that many Egyptians lament the disappearance of, from the lack of tightly knit families to the deterioration in the economy and the degeneration of pop culture.

So many positive reviews and so many friends of mine recommended Qahwa Sada that my expectations were very high and I became obsessed with the idea of attending the play. However, when I finally managed to see it (after an hour of standing in the ticket line and arguing with “organizers” who allowed late comers to enter at the front of the line) I was very disappointed by what I saw. Though the idea and execution of the play was, by Egyptian performed arts’ standards, above average, it was still mediocre by international standards.

The first thing that hit me once I was there is that the play is not really a play in the traditional sense, with a plot line and development in characters and story, but is rather a number of scenes strung together to give a sort of overview of the many flaws of today’s Egypt. Apart from the opening scene and the “fight for bread” scene the way these very familiar flaws are handled lacks originality or aesthetic subtlety.

During the hour and half of the play, audiences are shown one scene after the other in what is more like a checklist of almost everything that is wrong with Egypt: the degenerate pop culture that is spreading among the youth, the fear that the culture and Arabic dialect of Arabs of the gulf is taking over the media, the bigoted nature of Egyptian tycoons, the ugliness of the streets and buildings of today’s Cairo as compared to what Cairo was 50 years ago, favoritism in job application (known as Wasta in Egypt), absurd fatwas, the weakening of family ties, the dire poverty and marriage expenses that has led to girls becoming old maids and boys dying in the sea as they try to illegally enter Europe, and finally the loss of a sense of belonging and an awareness of one’s history .

The opening scene was by far the most original though a bit too nostalgic. In it the 21 actors slowly bury items from the days when Egypt was a prosperous country; pictures of political and social reformers, old actors and actresses, ads about iconic movies, in short items that symbolize the good old days. While this was a sad scene, the other original scene was very hilarious. In this “martial arts scene” as I like to call it the protagonist plays a mime scene in which he avenges the death of his friend by fighting with several men until he finally reaches the “boss” who give in and hands him what he wants: bread!

Of all the scenes of the play the poorest in taste, if not outright vulgar, was the “nursing fatwa scene”. In order to criticize the ridiculous wave of meaningless fatwas we have been bombarded with lately the cast used an absurd fatwa that was issued a while ago according to which the only way an unrelated adult female and male can be together alone in one room and not violate the Sharia rules is if the female nursed the male so that he would be her son (In Islam if a woman nurses a baby who is not her child several times, that child becomes according to the Sharia like a biological child to her and a sibling to her biological children). The fatwa was satirized by showing how male civil servants fought to get nursed by one female civil servant who was loathed by other female workers because she was preferred to all of them. The role of the female workers is played by men and the dialogue is very vulgar. And I found it very ironic that in a play that just a few minutes ago had severely criticized the degeneration of pop culture such a scene should follow.

The fact that there were so many people in the cast and each had no more than a ten minutes role did not allow for anyone to shine. In addition to that, the sound track, though mostly relevant, was so high I had to shut my ears or they would have burst and when I did that I could hear my heart pounding real hard from the vibrations of the speakers, needless to say I left the play with a big headache. However, this incredibly high soundtrack is just typical of such events in Egypt where, most probably due to the unbelievable high rates of noise pollution, it seems Egyptians are becoming less and less sensitive to high sounds.

In spite of all these flows why Egyptians loved the play so much to the extent that many saw it more than once says a lot about the dire situation of the performed arts in the country. Though it’s not great or brilliant getting the chance to see something well performed that deals with actual current events, rather than being poor remaking of old foreign drama texts does not happen very often in today’s Egyptian theatre.

The first is a flyer for an event sponsored by The Egyptian American Medical Society, Egyptian American Professional Society, Egyptian American Business Association, Egyptian American Group, and the American Muslim Union.

I laud the efforts made by the community to form organizations that seek to enrich our lives in the United States of America. It makes me proud to be an American-Egyptian. One of the greatest privileges we enjoy in this country is the freedom to participate in civic life without government interference. It is a privilege we should never take for granted and always jealously guard.

Yet my pleasure at seeing such civic engagement was tempered by a factual error in the email. You see the event is intended to honor the Ambassador Sherif el Kholy who happens to be a nice man. The only problem is that as far as I can tell he is not the Ambassador. Nabil Fahmy is the Egyptian Ambassador to the United States.

This minor detail matters immensely. As an American-Egyptian I fret that our propensity to use titles that glorify figures of authority has been carried to our adopted country. Has this mindset, I asked myself, already become entrenched in our civic organizations here in the United States? Didn’t many of us come to the United States and achieve our success as immigrants precisely because we believed in America as a meritocracy?

Why use a title that hasn’t been earned?

Nor am I entirely sure why so many Egyptian-Americans are honoring the representative of a repressive police state that has become notorious throughout the world for torturing its own citizens. Again, this has nothing to do with Sherif El-Kholy, the private citizen. As I indicated earlier he is a perfectly nice man.

But it has everything to do with Sherif El-Kholy as the official representative of a government that has neglected the well-being of its people and is regarded as a repressive regime by large sectors of the population.

Nor is it altogether clear why the ’’Ambassador’’ was chosen instead of a prominent American-Egyptian who has served the community and contributed to its well-being. What are the criteria for deciding such matters?

This brings me to the second email I received. It is a Youtube video by a fellow named Amr Adeeb who laments a sycophantic birthday greeting for the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak even as he alludes to the gains made during his rule. Mubarak has been in power since 1981 following the assassination of former president Sadat.

This birthday greeting appears in a state-controlled newspaper and constitutes what he characterized as a literature of praise for sultans. Adeeb, for all his concessions to a morally bankrupt regime, lamented the tendency to turn the ruler into a God, to overlook the simple fact that he is a human being and to use a national newspaper as a forum for personal praise. Therein lies our tendency to resent the praise of sultans and to simultaneously honor figures of authority regardless of how often we vent our frustration. In the small clip that I saw Amr Adeeb failed to mention the food riots in Egypt.

By the same token our community constantly circulates videos that protest the excesses of the Egyptian regime. It is not unusual to hear people complaining bitterly about the lack of democratic rule in Egypt. Yet these same people have no qualms about attending events that honor the official representatives of this very regime, often for reasons that are unfathomable and for achievements that appear quite nebulous to the general membership.

So like Adeeb I find myself asking a similar question; namely, why are so many American-Egyptian professional associations providing a forum for foreign diplomats or dare I say personal friends?

Now, it is common knowledge that this is something of a going away party for the ‘’ Ambassador’’. So why not host a party for him in one of those fancy Mcmansions favored by our community?

Such a state of affairs can be deeply demoralizing. It reinforces the notion that communal life is still dominated by the big man cult and a coterie of adoring minions. Together they tango, or belly dance at the end of every event, to reproduce authoritarian patterns of behavior and create what are often prohibitively expensive events. The Egyptian American Medical Society, for instance, often sponsors dinners accompanied by live entertainment that cost 200 dollars per couple.

At times, then, it becomes difficult to discern whether these are associations meant to benefit the public or private clubs intended first and foremost to entertain the self-designated communal elites and to curry favor with the powerful.

Is it déjà vu all over again? New Jersey as Masr al jadida? Or should I say el-kadama? I for one don’t wish to become a cynical spectator and fear that we may be building institutions that mirror our worst autocratic traditions.

Some traditions are worth preserving. Others, such as the obeisance to authority figures, threaten to impoverish our civic life and turn us into passive spectators. The gnawing cynicism can erode our faith in civic engagement altogether.

I know we can do better. We must. But not if we suspend our critical judgment and allow our budding associations to be run by non-democratic principles. Transparency is essential. The rulers aren’t always the only obstacle to participatory democracy. We are equally responsible for how our associations are run. Democracy is not simply a matter of rhetoric but also of practice.

It takes slaves to reproduce tyrants and sheep to keep the shepherds running the show.

Now will the real Ambassador please stand up ya Basha….

The only problem is we may not have an appropriate title with which to address him. Unless, of course, we revert to the regal one of your majesty.

Gharib is the pseudonym of the Egyptian-American author.

In her bio, Ms. Mahdi lists her mother as her source of support in pursuing her goals. She also lists her background in graphic design and advertising. She has done freelance work for a variety of Egyptian publications, so, if you’re in Egypt, she might already be familiar.

Mahdi looks like she is no friend of the George W. Bush administration, though she takes on other subjects just as freely (Osama Bin Laden, Brad Pitt, and Tony Blair among them – personally, I’m a big fan of the Brad Pitt caricature; considering the fact that this man’s perfectly chiseled face has been staring at me from every newsstand).

Mahdi is working in a male-dominated field, in a country where bloggers and other outspoken individuals can wind up in jail. For this alone, she ought to be admired, methinks.

Her commentary on the Shia-Sunni rift and the political exploitation thereof caught my eye, and will stay with me for a long time. By contrast, the depictions of George W. Bush as Satan/monster lack bite (notwithstanding such depictions’ popularity in Egypt, and beyond).

I think if Mahdi were to focus more on specific aspects of current U.S. foreign policy, her work would become more pointed – and accessible not only to the Arab world, but to those beyond it.

I think as Mahdi continues to hone her craft, more good stuff will happen.

Vroom… vroom, roared the Harley before its engine was turned off outside the pharmacy on duty in Geneva one quiet Sunday morning a few years ago in September. The six foot ‘quelque chose’ rider dismounted the daunting machine, took off his intimidating German helmet, neatly tucked it under his left arm, and walked slowly inside the drugstore.

Click…clack, he steadily thumped his way across the aisles in his huge boots and leathery attire. Elderly Sunday morning shoppers could not hide their disquiet at the site of this unusual visitor with his menacing looks, but pretended to mind their business. With the dark sunglasses carefully hiding hung-over eyes, but betraying weekend stubble, disheveled hair and an overgrown goatee, he placed his helmet on the counter.

“Beba 2-HA, s’il vous plait,” he demanded from the almost trembling lady at the cash register.

No, that was not the trade name of prescription heroin for a morning junkie. Nor was it extra-large, strawberry-flavored condoms even, in case you’re wondering. Nor anything else too wild or bohemian; that was actually me buying baby formula milk for my son, but decided to take the bike because it’s quicker – and makes the assignment more fun on a sunny day like that. Whatever remaining aura of mystique or coolness that has not by then already turned into powder milk had soon subsequently vaporized as I explained to the staff that although the packet says from 6-12 months, the pediatrician said that little Omar could continue to take it even if he was already 13 months. I swear I could hear relieved customers giggling around me as I said this. Yes, this unforgettable scene sums it all up if someone asks me about the changes that fatherhood brings into one’s life.

Other changes are less awkward. For example, when I blast my car stereo to Boney M’s Bobby Farrell singing “She’s crazy about her daddy, oh she believes in him…,” I’m actually thinking of my little Sama, the bluest sky of my life. But you know what? Although I learnt by heart every Barney and Elmo song out there, the outcome of every Tom and Jerry chase, the name of every Teletubby and PowerPuff girl, the man behind the mask of every Scooby Doo mystery (and the plots of a host of other weird cartoons that cannot possibly be targeted for child or adult entertainment), I still wouldn’t trade it for the whole world. Children are an immeasurable source of joy, and a daddy is still cool, Bobby.

Of course, being a father is a walk in the park compared to a mother’s job. That’s where the real hard work lies, believe me, and in our part of the world we don’t always appreciate that. Indeed, the cruelest thing ever said to a mother was what I witnessed when I went to Cairo last April to give condolences to a dear friend whose young brother had died of a heart attack, leaving behind a young wife and two children.

In Egypt, Muslims receive condolences differently than us in Jordan. They do it not in the family house, but in two adjoining halls to a mosque, one for women and another for men, at the same time, and only for one night. So when the sheikh started reciting the final prayers for the deceased towards the end, one line struck me as especially insensitive and downright disgusting. After asking God to enlarge his grave, make it comfortable and what have you, the preacher went on to request that God gives him a better house than his current one, and other similar requests for better things than he had in life.

But it was when he started saying “God we ask you to give him a wife better than his wife” that I really wanted to climb up his high chair and drag him down by his beard.

The poor widow was next door, listening to these prayers. As if she was not traumatized enough by her loss, this guy comes and rubs it in by making such an obscene remark. I cannot imagine a more hurtful thing she could have heard at such a moment. But the truly sickening episode was what happened next. This dirty old man came down from his pedestal and sat right next to me as people were leaving and started making passes at me that I will not dare mention here – after inviting me to have dinner in his house that night. I could not believe what I was hearing; it was already almost midnight while this guy wanted to take me home, and I assure you dinner was the last thing on his mind.

If there is a surreal Egyptian movie, this was it and I was a main character – or about to become one, depending on how I would react to the plot. Well, it wouldn’t be vain to point out here that I have been hit on a few times in my life, mostly by females I have to stress, but never before in a mosque and certainly not by such a character. I could not tell this to my grieving friend (although the next morning the story cheered him up and gave him the first real laugh since his tragedy), so I SMSed a friend in Amman informing him that I was about to be sodomized by the sheikh. My friend immediately replied saying: “You’re a writer, aren’t you, so go to the dinner and write an article about it. It should be interesting to read.” The problem is that he was serious. So there you go, and thanks for your solidarity and sympathies, Firas.

Cairo was a mixture of so many things all happening at the same time; I think it is one of the most difficult cities to describe. There is too much history, too much geography, too much misery, too many contradictions, and way, way too many people. The ability of the Egyptians to keep their contagious smile and their trademark sense of humor in spite of all the odds is truly incredible. I don’t believe there are another people on Earth more prepared to laugh at absolutely everything and anything at absolutely any time or any situation than the Egyptian people are. It is like the entire population is on a 24-hour readiness alert to laugh and make you laugh.

Perhaps it is a defense mechanism people develop to live with the absurdities and predicaments of the grueling everyday life. Another less refreshing subconscious mechanism to release frustration which you cannot escape noticing is the uncontrollable tick drivers have which urges them to keep blowing their horns in the endless traffic jams of Cairo – despite the forensically proven pointlessness of this exercise. So I decided to observe this phenomenon by closely watching when and why drivers do it, and whether there is any rationalization to this nervous habit.

To my disbelief, I found that drivers were still doing it not only when traffic was frozen on a red light stop and was unlikely to be influenced by noise, but my cab driver was also blasting away even when the street ahead of him was completely clear or when he was in the first row of cars on traffic lights. So I casually asked him why he was blowing his horn if there were no cars in front of him. In typical Egyptian lightness and ironic smile he said, “I’m doing it for the cars behind me, ya beh.”

So you can understand why returning to Geneva is literally like traveling to another galaxy, and driving is not even half the story. Speaking of outer space, I always believed that the best place from which to sit back and get an objective overview of anything is always from the outside, and therefore, in order to get a uniquely sobering view of our world and of humanity, it has to be done by outsiders. But since I don’t believe in extra terrestrials myself, I have used some imagination and found the following scenario to be really mind-opening. Imagine that a highly superior race of scientists from another galaxy were traveling on board a fact-finding spaceship and have spotted planet Earth for the first time. They want to report back their findings on the status of our relatively primitive species. So they lower their UFO over North America and begin their observations from there. Here is how I think the summary of their report would roughly read:

The first activity we detected was of people walking across open green fields holding a variety of different metal rods. They seem to be trying to get certain small white round objects into small man-made holes in the ground. Many other people are intrigued by watching this process on the field and around the world.

Although humans have advanced to levels by which placing these white spheres in the holes can be done by automated machinery, these creatures seem to enjoy playing games beyond their childhood years. This would have almost lead us to conclude that this is a peaceful, fun-loving species were it not for the fact that the main community of these club-wielding men appears to be comprised of owners and managers of institutions that are depleting and usurping the resources of this planet for the benefit of a few other like-minded men obsessed with the same round white objects.

Meanwhile, further down south, a great number of darker-skinned people appear to have been left to drown in their homes and very little attention was paid to them by the people chasing the white balls. Across the great body of water to the right of this land, there is a continent with many more brown people, many of whom look like skeletons and are perishing by the millions for the lack of food and the spread of disease. The lands with not too many dark people in the north seem to have excess food and medicine and it is not clear why the dark people were left to rot as carcasses.

Further east, there are two peoples who speak a similar language with harsh, throaty letters. They have common ancestors, similar features and the same facial hair but appear to fight over the same piece of land and are both obsessed with an insignificant hill that has two temples on its top. One of the two parties, who has many more weapons and money, is supported by the same guys with the metal clubs and holes in the ground. Using that support, they have built a concrete wall over the lands of the weaker people in what appears to be an attempt to strangle them.

Further east, again it is uniformed fighters from the land of the men walking the green fields who have been causing massive gunpowder detonations (the recurrence of individuals from that land popping up everywhere is notable). They are blowing people up so far away from where they live for no apparent reason, resulting in untold death and mayhem. The residue left by these explosions is a substance so lethal it remains in the earth and atmosphere for literally billions of years and is proven to cause a slow and painful death for anyone in its vicinity, including their own people. In short, this is a planet where 20 percent of its population consumes over 70 percent of its material resources and owns over 80 percent of its wealth. That is why it is also a planet with an unlimited capacity to produce exaggerated gunpowder quantities per inhabitant.

Furthermore, the capacity to obliterate the entire planet is constantly becoming more efficient and gradually becoming more likely. Finally, both the leader of the nation of the men hitting the little white balls and the people he is trying to exterminate repeatedly attribute their actions to an alleged troublemaker whom they both accuse, without evidence, of instigating all the killing. They both refer to him as God. As of yet, no sighting of this alleged super villain was detected on the planet.

N.B. A strange looking fellow with a noisy machine is causing a commotion at an establishment selling non-edible, strawberry-flavored sheets of nylon.

Recommendation: A hopeless, incomprehensible species. Abandon mission and depart galaxy.

The above may seem like an idea for a science fiction movie. Why not? Sometimes in order for us to truly capture the morbid reality of what’s taking place on our own planet and visualize the implausible insanity of humankind, we need to look through equally unconventional lenses to see the truth. The way I see it, a dumb president and a few stupid leaders are making this world a very dangerous place for us and our children to inhabit. That’s why I think we should get rid of them before they annihilate all of us.

On the day my daughter was born, I switched on the camcorder on my way back to the hospital at night after grabbing a few things from home, to capture the moment, so to speak. Juggling both the camera and the steering wheel became a little too dangerous when I answered my mobile phone (I was too excited, and technically speaking, I was still only a few hours into my new role as a responsible father, if I ever became one). It was a friend calling to congratulate us on the newborn.

I suddenly found myself impulsively telling him how blessed and fortunate we felt to have our child born in such peaceful surroundings, without bombs falling on our heads, without checkpoints and sadistic soldiers forcing women to give birth in the street, without sanctions depriving us of the most basic medicines, without famine or disease, without the eternal evil of depleted uranium, without the daily fear of random death, nested away in safety from the barbarity that man inflicts upon his fellow man. I pray that my children would grow up one day and watch this clip. If hopefully they don’t notice the bad example of dangerous driving, I wish that they would learn to think of other people with less fortunate destinies by never taking their privileged situation for granted. The world would become a much better place if we all tried to do that.

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