Shlofn Riz

Muslims attack churches in Egypt

2006-04-14T16:09:00.000+01:00

A while ago there was a big cry in the jordanian blogs about how an Israeli attacked a church causing damage inside it. Three such mentions are at I ♥ Amman, SugarCubes and Black Iris.

There was however no mention that Muslims attacked Coptic churches in Egypt, apparently this is an organized attack at several churches at the same time. The attackers used knives to attempt to kill the attendees of the churches. One died and several others are wounded.

~~I don't really expect everyone to be multi-sided (as opposed to one-sided), but the events are fairly close to one another so I thought to highlight it, just for a bit of balance.~~

Update: As was pointed in the comments, there are now indeed posts on this in the Jordanian planets, I did search the blogs before posting to see if there is anything up and didn't find anything, but I probably should have waiting more to give peoples a chance to get to the topic.

Karni closure

2006-02-05T16:15:00.000Z

Apparently the Karni closure that folks love to complain about is not the only cause to the loss of products. The PA prevented the products from being transferred through a different crossing.

Technorati tags: karni crossing.

Hudna

2006-02-03T14:42:00.000Z

Hudna as far as I know, means truce. A temporary truce. Haaretz published today that according to Khaled Mashal (from the leaders of Hamas) they will not agree to recognize Israels right to exist, will not agree to a permanent peace agreement and the best they are willing to do is to agree on a Hudna. This is according to an article by him in the Alhayat Aljadeeda newspaper. The newspaper is in arabic and there is no translation so I cannot know the exact words he used.

Seems like it will take a while before the sides will be able to sit and talk. We first need to agree on what we are talking about.

Arabic Transliteration

2006-02-03T11:48:00.000Z

I'm seeing quite a few Arabic names written with numbers in them to represent letters. Is there any "official" guide to this? I would like to be able to pronounce the name while reading it and not knowing the corresponding letters makes it harder.

Thanks!

One state to two nations

2006-02-01T19:10:00.000Z

A small discussion on a single state for two nations (Israel and Palestine) is happening at the comments section to Lina's blog for her What Hamas is Saying post.

I do not see any chance to this idea which was floated a long time ago, there is also a sister idea of a federal state with Israel and Palestine (and sometimes Jordan is added to the mix as well). These ideas are unlikely to happen because they can't be good to any of the nations. The case of multiple ethnic groups in a single state as in the case of Yugoslavia is a reminder of what can(does?) happen in such cases. Former Soviet Union is breaking up, other states splinter as well along ethnic/religious lines.

Europe and the US are two places where the opposite happens, Europe is merging and the US is a large mix of ethnicities and relgions. But the US is not free of internal conflicts along ethnic lines and Europe had a while to have their war wounds heal and they still go at it very slowly and will probably never be more than a loosely couples group of nations for more mostly economical reasons.

I believe that Israel and the Palestinians need two different states, and that no other solution will solve anything. It can only cause more friction and more bloodshed. The Palestinians won't be happy with not having their own country and the Israelis will not be very happy to relinquish full control over their own state.

Palestinian books

2006-02-01T17:23:00.000Z

Lawrence of Cyberia posted about the Palestinian school books. It's been long said that the books are full of hatred towards Israel and do not really help the peace process. He provides a different outlook and says that the books are an inheritance from the times of Egyptian and Jordanian control of the Palestinians and that the Israeli control of the area didn't do anything to change that.

I guess that Israel didn't change the books both because it would have created an uproar about us trying to force our own view on the Palestinians and the need to actually invest money in order to do that.

I do wonder why the books are not being updated at least from more modern Jordanian/Egyptian books, I guess this would be faster than trying to redo all the books.

The media

2006-02-01T16:42:00.000Z

Ethan Zuckerman gives an outline of the talks in the Aljazeera Forum, from his accounts:

Marc “Abu Aardvark” Lynch offers his perspective as an American university professor who speaks Arabic and covers the Arab media. After 9/11, he tells us, a lot of Americans are responding not to the arab media, but to what they’re being told about the arab media. The gap in worldview between the US and the Middle East is a massive one. Arguments about Israel, Palestine and Iraq are well developed ones in the arab world. But they sound like “code words” when reported in the US media. Listeners in the US hear inflamatory quotes that have been carefully cherrypicked. Most americans think of Al-Jazeera as “jihad tv”. Something that could be a bridge has not been.

As a professor, what Marc tries to do is give students direct access to what Arabs are actually saying. People don’t have to agree - we should have arguments - but we need to engage in the same arguments. He hopes that the lively debates that happen in the Arabic media can be translated so that English speakers can see how much disagreement

This is exactly the reason why I started reading Arab blogs, to hear directly what they have to say, even if I disagree with it. It's far better to know what they really say rather than what the media says they say.

Why this blog

2006-01-28T16:42:00.000Z

I read a post by Hanan Cohen (Hebrew) that mentioned a blog aggregation of Arab bloggers and also a planet for Jordanian bloggers. I've been looking for Arab/Palestinian blogs for a while now but only found hate blogs, not something that makes you feel like learning of their opinions. This time I found quite a few cool-headed bloggers, that might not like Israel, but do not resort to expletives whenever they mention its name. This is the sort of blogs that you want to read in order to learn about the other side.

For a while now I have the feeling that I want to learn about the other side and not through the prism of the media, through which we get a fairly one-dimensional view. The arabic media is also fairly one-dimensional so reading blogs seem like the only way to learn about my neighbours.

It's only been a few days since I started reading these blogs and it appears that the comments sections on these blogs would be abused by sometimes irrelevant chatter of discussions generated by yours truly, so I opted to open a blog where I can post my thoughts and where I won't feel that I create undue noise on someone elses blog.

Hopefully this blog will make for an interesting discussion platform and I'll learn some more about the world around me. No promises though.

So far I'm reading the following blogs:

The Black-Iris by Nas, Jordan.
I love Amman by Faris, Jordan.
Raising Yousuf by Laila, Palestine. A very well written blog by a Palestinian Journalist.