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Qaddafi is Not Funny

Muammar Qaddafi is known to be the joke of the Arab world. Just type his name on youtube and you'll get an endless number of some hilarious speeches and remarks he's made in interviews and conferences. He clearly suffers from one or more psychological conditions that seem to be refractory to medical therapy.

That would have been funny to watch if Qaddafi was a celebrity not reluctant to embarrass himself in any possible occasion.

But when it comes to ruling a large and a very oil-rich country inhabited by only 6 million people, it stops being funny. One would expect such a country to have the best schools, colleges, hospitals, roads and energy plans in the world. Instead, Libya remains a third world country in most aspects. It's doing well when you compare it to the rest of Africa, but when you compare it to what it should be, it is centuries behind.

To my surprise I met many Libyans living who live in the United States, and among them I haven't met anyone who admired Al-Qaddafi. What's even worse is the horrifying stories I heard about how he handled any opposition to his regime.

One of these stories was his involvement in the war against Chad. Al-Qaddafi decided to get involved in a civil war in neighboring Chad, and actually did occupy part of this country as if he need more land (Libya is the 17th largest country in the world). One day he told high school students in Libya they were going on a field trip. He sent buses to their schools, gave them guns and sent them to fight in Chad. Thousands of Libyans died and got injured in a brutal war in 1986. Qaddafi claimed a decisive victory in Chad initially, but when he suffered a bad defeat he went on Libyan TV to criticize the "stupid military that decided on its own to get involved in this war". He didn't want Libyans to see those who were wounded with visible injuries such as head injuries or amputations, so he ordered the military to kill those injured. Yes that's right, he ordered the silent execution of those Libyan civilians and soldiers who were forced to fight in an unnecessary war against their will and were severely injured. Instead of an apology or compensation he got them killed. Nobody can argue with him. Nobody can call for change.

There are numerous of stories in Libya that reflect his brutality and make Saddam Hussain look like an angel. Unlike Saddam who established a solid health care system and got his people (men and women) extremely well-educated, Qaddafi tried to keep his people oppressed and incapable of any critical thinking.

During the very short period I worked in Jordan, I was shocked at the number of Libyan patients who traveled to Jordan to get medical care. Libya has the potential to build a Mayo clinic in every little village. Libyan doctors seem only to shine when they the country. Wealthy Libyans would never stay in Libya to get treated for anything or receive education. Leaving the country is the way to secure a future even though their country is so damn rich.

Even though I've never been to Libya, and I don't intentionally follow their news or read books about it, I can easily come up with a list for 1000 reasons why Qaddafi has been a terrible president. Maybe I will when I have more time.

To symbolize the corruption and autocracy the Libyans are subjected to think, think of the beloved son, Al-Saa'idi Al-Qaddafi. He decided to play football, placed himself as the captain of the Libyan national team even though he didn't play for any club at the time. He ordered the players to pass him the ball in every game. When the team was coached by a talented Italian coach (Bersellini), the first thing he did was fire Al-Saadi because "he wasn't a football player". The Libyan Federation fired the coach instead and brought Al-Saadi to the team. Al-Saadi then paid millions of dollars to top-quality Italian clubs just to include him in the squad. They didn't let him play a single minute, and he was eventually asked to leave Italy because he failed a drug test.

This is how Libya is run, violent dictator, family running the country, opposition is crushed (literally), corruption is the rule, and stupidity is king. Qaddafi seems funny when he talks, but nothing about his corruption or violence is funny. It wasn't surprising to learn today that he asked his military to shoot peaceful demonstrators from helicopters. What was surprising to me was to see protests growing in numbers, which gives me another reason to be very proud of those people. His people have had enough, and they're willing to sacrifice their lives for a better future for their kids. It's good to be an Arab these days.

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(Aboce is a picture of Qaddafi with a picture of Omar Al-Mukhtar. Reminds me of a picture of Madonna wearing a cross)

Mission Impossible.... Mission Accomplished

Egypt

First, some people in South Dakota are asking me if my family is safe. For them Jordan is Egypt is Yemen is Pakistan. It's the same country. I just tell them my family is OK, thank you very much.

Let me start by stating the obvious: Mubarak is terrible person. He's even worse than we expected. What was going on in Egypt with military cars running over people was disturbing. But almost any other Arab leader would have done much worse than that from day one of the protests. It's not a Mubarak problem, it's an Arab leader problem. Arab leaders would do anything, anything, to stay in power.

I don't think many people will agree with me on this, but it's not only Hosni Mubarak who is responsible for the situation in Egypt right now. Jamal Abdul -Naser and Anwar al-Sadat are also to blame for implanting dictatorship as an acceptable way to rule a liberal country like Egypt, and allowing intelligence officers to spy on their people and report whoever had unfavorable opinions about the president. As much as I respect Abdul-Naser, he paved the way for Egypt to become an autocracy. Al-Sadat was even worse, supporting empty-headed radicals who eventually assassinated him.

Egyptians proved to me to be much more civilized than what I've thought. All the protests were very peaceful until the government thugs started beating people. I still consider it a white revolution. Contrary to what most Jordanians believe, Egyptians do have class. Protesters themselves even cleaned the streets at the end of each day.

Some analysts in America continue to produce statistics about how radicalized the Egyptian society have become, and are concerned that the leadership in Egypt will be a fundamental one, one that will abuse women's rights and persecute Christians. I can't deny that such mentality does exist in Egypt, but it's the incredible oppression, poverty, and lack of freedoms that allowed these irrational ideas in Egypt in the 1950s to become somewhat popular. Egyptians and Arabs desire freedom as much as Americans do, and it's such a hypocrisy from some Americans to be stand against their own beliefs and values being practiced in other countries. I expect that from their presidents, but the people themselves, come on!

Finally the protests in Egypt are not between Egyptians and Mobarak, they are a fight between Arab citizens and their tyrant leaders. Never did Arabs have fair and just elections but for the past 2 weeks each one of us had an ambassador in Midan Al-Tahrir. Pick your side, it's a struggle between good an evil as clear as good and evil can be. Whatever will happen in Egypt will affect other countries

Whatever was going on in the past 2 months gave us hope and pride to be Arabs again. They'd better mark Mohamed Bouazizi's grave well because one day I will be going there and thank him. He started an era where Arab leaders will be afraid of their people and where opinions will be respected if they're unpopular. How will the future evolve is something I'm uncertain of, but it will be better.

Why the Jordanian Teacher Terrorizing that Kid Should Not Be Punished

I watched the clip of a Jordanian teacher terrorizing a 1st-grade student in a public school. It was painful to see a young kid being humiliated, but it was more painful to see the reaction of a wide array of people to this youtube clip.

It looks like the people who were "shocked" the most were those who never gave a damn to start with. We all know that children get beaten up in almost every single public school in Jordan. Sometimes they get brutally beaten up, tied by chains, humiliated, and the physical abuse may even qualify as torture in some cases. Some students died, actually died, as a consequence of violence targeted at them from teachers.

The ministry of education doesn't pay attention to these cases. The principles of these schools don't care, mainly because most of them support the right of teachers to treat their students as their kids (i.e. beat the shit out of them-if necessary!) And just like having 10 kids can be a burden to a father, having 50 kids in one class is a huge burden. There is not time to pay any special attention towards kids.

I'm not even going to discuss sexual abuses against kids since I don't have names (obviously not clips either) but we hear the stories about teachers who have been "investigated" by school administration and asked to teach a different class because of clear sexual abuses against students. Things have got so bad in a public school in Madaba that a school shut down its restroom because of such sexual.

All these fake reactions by the ministry of Health were a result of the clip going viral, and not because of the violence itself. That little kid is lucky. His misery that went viral will almost guarantee he'll never be hit again , at least for a while. But make no mistake, this morning in Jordan a big number of students in Jordanian schools will be beaten up in schools by teachers and principals and nobody will record it on youtube, not allowing the Ammani elitist living in a bubble to pretend to be have feelings to allow them to feel sorry for kids who seem to be living in a different planet.

At least that teacher was teaching that kid something other than that his country is giving up on him and unless his parents were rich and connected he didn't belong to this land he lived in anymore.

Great Old Clip: Prince Abdallah, the Young Teenager, Watching Cartoons and Queen Mona Talking

Here's another one of these nice old clips, this one is a short documentary about late King Hussein, including interviews with him and Queen Mona around 1971. I believe this interview took place right before their divorce. You can see their 2 kids, Princes Abdullah and Faisal, watching TV and training with troops.

I haven't seen any interview with Queen Mona, so this is pretty interesting.

The most shocking moment of the video was right at minute 16:00, very interesting answer.

You can visit the site http://www.britishpathe.com/ and find more clips about King Hussein, late King Hussein (his grandfather), King Talal....

very interesting site

here's the documentary, click on the picture

KING HUSSEIN

Good Old Clip: King Hussein Getting Married

from April, 1955

This is truly incredible!!

Click on the picture and it will take you to the clip

ROYAL WEDDING

Video of the Month: Coronation of King Talal in 1951, and How Amman Looked Sixty Years Ago

This segment shows some rare videos that attract very few youtube viewers but I think are valuable enough to be seen.

Here is the coronation of King Talal in the summer of 1951. He ruled Jordan for 13 months, removed for health-related reasons.

King Talal was very influential, much more than what he gets credit for. He wrote down the constitution of Jordan. In 1951, Jordan was six years old. It could have gone in so many directions, but the constitution that the late King Talal came with gave a lot of liberty to the people and to women. Unfortunately it was "modified" afterwards to limit many of these freedoms and rights in the name of security.

Best 5 Movies of 2010 (from a non-movie expert point of view), and Why (No Spoilers)

5- Inside Job: Insightful. The best documentary of the year. It's good enough to embarrass the president of the United States.

4- Inception: a wonderful use of visual and sound effects, good story and powerful enough to make you take your dreams seriously, at least for a couple of nights.

3- Black Swan: This movie is so good that even I, a secure fat man, felt like I was the slim female ballet dancer going through the internal struggles that Natalie Portman was going through. The movie seemed to me similar to the Wrestler in many ways, and I checked after the movie and turned out it was the same director. Brilliant.

2- You Don't Know Jack: Jack Kevorkian, the doctor of death, tells his side of the story saying how he helped hundreds of people by killing them. This film surprises you and will probably leave you with many questions and no answers.

What's even better is that Al Pacino plays Dr. Kevorkian.

1- 127 hours: boy I could feel this rock in the movie pressing on my own arm. It's unimaginable. And the performance of James Franco should be taught in acting schools everywhere. Advice: don't read anything about the movie, just go watch it and live it yourself.

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(I have to mention that I haven't seen the King's Speech or the Fighter yet, and animation movies are for kids under ten so Toy Story 3 and Avatar should never be included in any list). The picture above is of Natalie Portman , it might be from Black Swan, or just a random picture she took while laying on a pavement, doesn't matter, looks good)

Why I think this is the best picture of 2010

This isn't just a picture of a crazy man taking off his shirt. This is not just a picture of someone who did something huge. This picture is so amazing because it shows a blend of thousands of emotions while they were evolving in nano-seconds in front of our eyes.

Unless you have been living on a different planet, or in the United States, you will know that this Andres Iniesta celebrating the winning goal for Spain in the World Cup final.

Even though this moment might as well be the happiest moment any footballer can experience, none of the expressions on Iniesta's face is actually cheerful. It's a mixture of incredible excitement and a "what-the-fuck-has-just-happened" moment. If adrenalin had a face, this is how it would look like. This is fierceness, intensity and power, all in one face.

And in the background, Dutch players, shattered, destroyed, and tired, very tired, knowing that once again that they will be keeping the title of the best team to never win the world cup. Always visible, but only in the background.

Not only that.

Andres Iniesta, above, joined the Under-16 Spanish team in 2001. As he grew up, he won the European Championship for the Under-19 Spanish team in 2003. He then went on to captain the Under-21 team. Along this road, he was playing alongside his teammate Dani Jarque.

Iniesta played for Barcelona. Dani Jarque played for Espanol. Those 2 teams were not only rivals, they were enemies. There is literally blood between the 2 teams. Fans of each team absolutely hated each other, and games between the 2 teams are not always pleasant to watch.

Dani Jarque was playing a friendly game in 2009 when he collapsed and died suddenly of a heart attack.

One year later, as in the picture above, Iniesta scored the winning goal for Spain in the World Cup. As nearly one billion people were watching, he lifted his shirt showing the words, "Dani Jarque, always with us" (Dani Jaqrue, siempre con nosotros"

Since then, the Espanol fans stopped booing Iniesta during any Barcelona-Espanol derby. Sure they still boo everybody else in Barcelona, but when it comes to Iniesta they can't forget the man who didn't only bring the world cup to Spain, but also brought class and grace to the game during the best moment of his life.

Feliz Navidad

If Jesus was to be born today, his parents won't be allowed to get to a hospital and Virgin Mary would have to go into labor at an Israeli checkpoint

Merry Christmas !!

Cheap, Very Cheap, EasyJet Cheap, from Amman

In the last decade, there has been a very rapid emergence of low-cost airlines in Europe. These airlines offer much better prices but the service provided on the plane is suboptimal. No meals, no allocated seating (you'll still sit, but on first-come first-serve basis) and they charge for services such as checking in luggage. It was even rumored that one airline , Ryanair, was going to charge passengers for using restrooms. It turned out that the CEO of Ryanair made that claim to bring more publicity to his airline. At any rate, the price for tickets on these airlines is dirty cheap, therefore they have been growing very rapidly , causing nightmares to more well-established airlines such as British Airways.

One of these airlines, EasyJet, is coming to Amman. They are going to start an Amman-London route three times weekly starting the end of March.

I went to their website to get an idea on their ticket prices, and it's all good news. The price for a round-trip on economy would be 164 Euros , excluding luggage. If you want to include one piece of luggage, you add 22 Euros (total 186 Euros, nearly 175 JDs) total. I searched all the other airlines serving Amman around that time, and the cheapest among them was a BMI flight for 760 dollars (nearly 540 JDs or 580 Euros). I did my search online. The EasyJet ticket was 20-50 Euros more expensive if you would travel on other dates.

The drawback is that they will fly to Gatwick airport, which is a little farther from London than Heathrow.

I encourage everyone to fly with these guys. If you are looking for a good first class treatment skip to the more expensive Royal Jordanian or British Airways. If you are like me, someone who believes that flying always sucks no matter what you're fling and you just want to get to your destination safely, then hop on to an EasyJet flight. If many people fly with them , we can get to have more flights to more destinations in Europe for much less expensive prices.

Welcome to Amman cheap airlines. No matter how bad their customer service will be, I guess Jordanians have all been accustomed to what's worse.

Dead Waters

Whenever there is drought in Jordan, people pray for rain. Praying for rain in Jordan is like praying for God to cure your cancer after it had already spread to your brain. It was never the solution, nor will it be the solution in the future. I'm not talking about praying, I'm talking about the rain. Praying, even though scientifically will not improve the chance of raining, is a good opportunity for people to meet together for a good cause, so I'm all for it. But more rain doesn't sound like the solution to the water shortage we have been suffering from since the foundation of our country.

Khalil Nasrallah was a young Lebanese boy living in Lebanon when the civil war erupted in Lebanon. His father had to move to Egypt with the family to save his business. Khalil then went to Canada to study, got a degree and went back to Egypt in the early 1990s. He realized that Egypt did not have good-quality domestic olive oil, and decided to start a business producing olive oil. In order to start the business, he had to go the middle of the desert, in the sand, spend a fortune to dwell wells in order to find water for his olive trees. All that came at a big risk of failing, but he was smart and successful and somewhat lucky. He co-founded Wadi Foods, which is now a massive company in Egypt that produces healthy food at an affordable cost. To this day he is still using the water from the wells he dwelt nearly 20 years ago.

The Jordanian government, for a long time, has not been always serious about the water crisis our country had always faced. A lot of bureaucracy and stubbornness delayed Al Wahda project with Syria for years, eventually the project seemed to even create more problems with our Arab neighbor. (Check this NPR story from 2007). You can drive by Jordan River nowadays and not recognize it because it has dried up for the most part. The Eastern Ghour water channel was a disaster. The majority of Jordanians do not get water for most days of the week, and it's sometimes unpredictable on which days they'll be getting it. We had a scandal of contaminated water that cost prime minister Abdul Salam Al-Majali his position. (Check this Hajjaj cartoon), and we always blame the weather, Syria, Israel, money and the common man for the never-ending crisis.

Only recently did we hear some good news. The US committed 275 million dollars to help Jordan improve its water supply, and you know well, that when 275 million dollars are donated for a good cause, all the money allocated will be spent on the intended project. It's expected that the Disi project will be completed in 2012, and it will supply Amman with more than a 100 million cubic meters of water every year. Sure it is contaminated by radioactive Uranium , but that doesn't matter, because as a good Jordanian citizen you're supposed to believe what the government tells you instead of those Westerner scientists in Yale and other Jewish universities.

I am still inspired by the story of Khalil Nasrallah, because he is a individual, just one person, with an age close to mine, who dug water out of nowhere, just to produce olive oil. That's all what he wanted, water for his olive trees. I believe if Mr. Nasrallah was able to do so, our Jordanian government can do much better than that. Digging for water is better than digging for oil, at least if you look for the future.

Julian Assange, Arrested

If world leaders can come together to fight one thing, it's the truth

127 hours.....

This is not a movie review, it's only an opinion

127 hours is one wonderful movie, a masterpiece in my opinion

except for the first 10 minutes, the only actor in the movie is one person: James Franco, he does a wonderful job , I don't think there was anywa

y to better act this part

I'm not going to give the whole movie away. Basically a hiker gets stuck when a rock falls on him, and he has to get himself out. It might sound boring however the movie is about how much pain are you willing to go through for a chance to save your own life.

Inception was a more fascinating movie, however this is in my opinion the best movie of the year, maybe because it was based on a true story. While watching it I couldn't h

elp but I feel I was the one trapped , thinking of ways to free myself out.

They still make good movies.

Argentina 1- Brasil 0

Watch the real world champions, not the world cup champions

enjoy the magic

enjoy football

Why Are Jordanian Christians Freaking Out After the Church Bombings in Iraq

Last week, militants linked to Al-Qaeda took over a church in Baghdad and killed 58 people. Following the attacks , Al-Qaeda threatened to attack Christians wherever they can be reached, which is serious threat because we know that Al-Qaeda, at least some of its loyal sympathizers, live in every single country in the Middle East. For any person living in Jordan it's easy to notice that Jordanian Christians are panicking after the attacks. But is that justified?

On a humanitarian level, those attacks are less tragic than many attacks on mosques, where the death toll is often worse. Just last week an attack on a mosque in Iraq left 63 people dead. The majority of the 100,000 Iraqi civilians who were killed since the US invasion of Iraq are Muslims. Outside Iraq, Islamic militants have just bombed a mosque in Pakistan, leaving 90 people dead. Worshipers in mosques and churches are usually unarmed people, minding their own business, who often pray for peace in their country.

Christians in Iraq have been treated pretty fairly under Saddam Hussein. Not that they were necessarily supporters of him, but the hardships Iraqi Christians faced were not religious-based, and were not very different from those encountered by Iraqi Muslims. Saddam put his trust in some Christians around him, including his vice president and personal guard.

Fast forward to 2003, the US invades Iraq. Since then there have been multiple separate attacks on churches leaving casualties, and some priests and bishops from different sects were kidnapped and murdered. It was obvious that those were not random attacks and that Christians specifically are being one of the targets of Islamic militants in Iraq. The church attacks last week were just a continuum of a series of attacks that are likely to continue. The majority of Iraqi Christians have already left Iraq, and it's highly predictable that they will continue to do so.

Make no mistake, even the most religious Muslims I know vehemently condemn these attacks and consider them unjustifiable. However it's hard for most of them to understand why are Christians in Jordan panicking over this recent incident.

Arab Christians have been feeling vulnerable recently, and Jordanian Christians are no exception. First, their numbers are decreasing significantly and that's attributable to several factors which we can't get into now, but it's a fact. Jordanian Christians used to constitute nearly 20% of the population in the 1950s, and now they're less than 5%. Numbers do matter. You feel less significant when there aren't lots of you.

Secondly, they are a minority, a well-treated minority, a well-respected minority, but a minority. Unfortunately their opinion or take on vital issues may be considered less important because they're a minority.

Also, many Muslims believe the most significant war taking place now is between Christianity and Islam, and that makes a lot of Arab Christians very uncomfortable because they don't want to be held responsible for the actions of the "Christian" Western governments especially in Afghanistan and Iraq and their support of Israel.

Then comes the under-rated Muslim-Christians conflict that's been going on for at least two decades in Egypt. All the events there have been underplayed by the Egyptian government but they were bad enough to get many Egyptian Christians to leave Egypt and allow some Copts in the US to tell stories, many of which may be inaccurate, of how Christians are being mistreated by Muslims in Egypt.

Even though, again, neither Islam nor the majority of Muslims encourage these attacks, they remain an attack by one religious group on another. It looks like Al-Qaeda, which a loose term nowadays referring to Islamic militants, wants Iraqi Christians out of Iraq and they're doing a good job with that. If they have their way they certainly want all Christians out from whatever land they claim to be Islamic.

Arab Christians, and certainly Jordanian Christians, are not an ethnicity or a group of people who want to live alone. Their culture, language and heritage is identical to that of the Muslim citizens. Jordanian Christians consider themselves Jordanian. They are protected by the Jordanian police, their borders are protected by the Jordanian army and their rights are protected by the Jordanian constitution and law. Unlike Shiites, Kurds or Jews, they do not seek to form a country of their own or be protected by a foreign army. Therefore, if they felt threatened, even if that threat came from a very small group against the will of the majority, they may start leaving the country in greater numbers and that would be a very hard decision to make. It doesn't take a mastermind to do something stupid. It just takes one dumb moron to be inspired by the al-Qaeda speech to carry a gun and shoot at a crowded church gathering or funeral or anywhere where Christians gather. Most Muslims can't do much to prevent this, but I hope they'll understand why Jordanian Christians are freaking out after the church incident and realize that it's not only that incident but whatever preceded it that's making them feel uncomfortable.

The Best Beatles Song

When it comes to music, the best is not usually the most popular. The Rolling Stones published their "Best 100 Beatles Songs" special edition. The number one spot belonged to "A Day in the Life".

This song was 2 separate songs, that got combined into one, and then Lennon and McCartney thought it was a good idea to bring some orchestra in the middle and let the musicians wear funny glasses and hats as if it was a new year's eve party. Having mysterious lyrics about death and drugs certainly helped.

You really need balls to make such songs because they are destined to either fail miserably or achieve overwhelming success. The Beatles had balls but also had a lot of talent.

The only song somewhat similar is Bohemian Rhapsody, but I prefer A Day in the Life.

Very Wrong

The wrong-est and funniest status yesterday, by comedian Doug Stanhope

"I have a very funny image in my head of being on ChatRoulette and stumbling upon the 33 trapped Chilean miners."