September 5, 2004 – 11:39 am
Not that there is any tangible left or right these days in the pathetic political arenas of the despotic Arab regimes, but I will try to steer through the muddy waters. A discernible phenomenon is the unprincipled alliance forged by some of the desperate Arab leftist trends with Islamist movements in the Arab world.
What a shame, for the comrades.
Here is an example of the unfortunate consequences when such an unnatural marriage takes place.
A venerable Lebanese writer and political activist who often appears on Arab satellite stations is as secular as they come. However, she also chose to become a columnist for “Assabeel.” Her choice of newspaper is symbolic of this unholy alliance. Read More »
March 31, 2004 – 11:40 am
My dreams always haunt my sleep in two opposite but equally strange extremes.
Sometimes I have these totally unintelligible hallucinatory visions that I wake up actually believing I must have severe brain damage to be able to come up with such convoluted shit.
On the other extreme, sometimes I make so much eloquent sense inside a dream that I wake up thinking I could have hardly been asleep at all. I compose long articulate sentences, remember things I couldn’t recollect during the day, solve mathematical problems, even compose original musical tunes. And I wake up remembering every single detail. Come to think of it, this also could be the result of severe brain damage.
Anyway, last night I had one of the latter, elucidated kind. Read More »
September 18, 2003 – 11:46 am
What’s the point of writing yet another political article seeking to change the world, I would say to friends who ask me, when the world has proven to be such an unchangeable place.
But I guess I’ve had it with the status quo. I’m fed up with the things that don’t make sense in this world. Things like using Latin expressions left right and centre, such as ‘status quo’. Why do people borrow words from a language only a few people understand and no nation in the world speaks? Is Latin to language and academia what French is to etiquette and food; thrown about to sound fancy and ‘sophistiquée’ – where ‘sophisticated’ would have sufficed nicely and delivered the same meaning? I say, ipso facto, that this bona fide habit when abused ad infinitum is prima facie a non sequitur act per se. How does that sound if not pretentious and downright silly? Read More »
April 27, 2003 – 11:51 am
As the dust begins to settle on the American/British victory in Baghdad, it falls upon all Arabs now to reflect seriously on the future. I cannot provide accurate percentages, but it would be fair to say that an overwhelming majority of Arabs were against this war, to say the least. A sense of outrage was palpable across Arab society. And I am not talking only of the underprivileged or the disenfranchised. The outrage, despair and humiliation, as hundreds of thousands of bombs pounded Iraq, were equally felt by palace and ghetto dwellers. Read More »
I am no historian, but those who are ought to be excited these days. They are witnessing a new phenomenon unparalleled in history. They will be the first to chronicle the absolute paralysis of 200 million otherwise hot-blooded people.
This is unlike the fall of Baghdad to the Moguls. This is no lamentable loss of Al Andalus. The peculiar situation of the Arabs today is that a whole nation has died en masse while it is still breathing – and having a jolly good time, for that matter.
Have we been there before? I don’t think so. The Arab Israeli wars usually lasted for a few hours or days. The siege of Beirut only lasted three months. But this is the longest and fiercest war of extermination to which the Palestinians have been subjected so far. Read More »
December 13, 2001 – 11:49 am
Never did I yearn to have the drawing talent of a satirical cartoonist more than these days as words can hardly do justice to the tragic black comedy the Arab-Israeli conflict has become.
The picture I want to draw today is of a mad circus with Sharon running a bizarre show of trained animals. In this number, Sharon, with his long hovering whip, orders Arafat to run after members of Hamas while sadistically preventing him from doing so by tying his feet together. When Arafat starts to run and falls down, more lashes come his way for failing to obey the orders to chase after Hamas. Of course, the whole spectacle has nothing to do with Hamas. The joke is being played on the ageing and helpless Arafat to humiliate and paralyse him.
Or maybe the setting would be in a bull ring with Sharon, the over-sized matador, teasing Arafat, the obliging bull, with Hamas as the muleta (red cloth). When the bull with the poisoned spears dangling from his spine is dared to aim for the muleta, the matador swiftly pulls it away to the cheers of the intoxicated crowds. The elusive red cloth was never the point, you see. The plan all along was to slowly exhaust the big fat bull until the matador could easily aim for the kill. Read More »
