An Arab Woman Blues - Reflections in a sealed bottle...

Not a very nice title to start the new year. But an Impasse it is. And it shall remain so. The deadlock of the Iraqi political process is not a coincidence, nor a mishap, nor wrong strategy, nor miscalculations, the Iraqi impasse is a natural outcome, a planned outcome, a wished outcome. Failure to understand that, will always lead to a skewed view. When the Americans invaded Iraq with a sectarian ethnic agenda, they knew in advance that the Shiite parties will have the upper hand, and will always control the political process. When the Americans came forward with bogus figures like Iraq is 60% Shiite, 20% Sunni, 20% Kurd, this ethnic sectarian division was the crux of the agenda. When the Americans encouraged, and extra funded the so-called Iraqi opposition, back during Clinton's era, knowing full well that most of this opposition was exiled in Iran, they knew exactly what the outcome would be. When both Right and Left, when both the Neo-cons like Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, ...

There is no such thing as Forgiveness. Forgiveness is a handy word you invented...so you can get away with it. There is first Justice be done, followed by Forgiveness. I am aware of all the proponents for Forgiveness...they are usually Predators. For, who will ask for Forgiveness but one ?! Had it been a one time off, an independent case, a singled out case , a something out of the ordinary...I would have forgiven. After all, humans are known to err...imperfect beings that they are. But... But, this is not a one off, nor an exception, this is a repetitive pattern, a repetitive pattern I have learned by heart (by the way that says much about your creativity or lack thereof...) How can you forgive a repetitive pattern ? Repetition means a deliberate repetitive Intention. When someone intends --- you have to equal that power of intention... Politics is all about interests, but it is also about intentions. You Americans did not harbor the best of intentions towards u...

Women are peculiar beings...whoever, whatever they are...they are always attached to home. Our home is our shell, our protection...the men may come and they may go, but our homes are our shelter...you take away our homes, you strip us naked... Many of us Iraqi women have been stripped naked that way, some of us even more, a full striptease...until we ended up in brothels... Most people don't understand...most people are stupid, make no mistake about the human race...very few of these fuckers are worthy of respect or consideration...they will only understand when they lose a home...until then, don't count on neither - nor their empathy, nor their understanding. Specially don't count on empathy from those in the "first world", they are too polluted, these are people cut off from the most basics...they are far gone - down. Forget them. Truth is -- don't count on anyone...take stock of your losses, all of them..all of them...if need be, ruthlessly strip ...

The New Iraq is a pathetic non entity of a nothing...a mediocre product of a new world order...a country that can't tell what is what, who is who, which is which...a country where every moron becomes a spokesman for something he understands nothing about...and behind all this facade of verbal diarrhea, the diarrhea of Freedom and Democracy, lies an autocratic rule, run by Shiite parties and Shiite militias where black chadors and black flags adorn every street, every neighborhood, where not one poster, but thousands of posters are plastered on every corner, the same faces, the same turbans, the same titles....titles, all forged titles, forged diplomas, forged ministries, forged identities, forged history, forged... The new Iraq is a forgery...a fraud...a FRAUD, a fraudulent experiment, a fraud of conscience, a fraud of morality...a make believe, a lie... Not the BBC, nor the CBS, nor the ABC will tell you any of that...they are there to sell you the final product, the experime...

I am constantly confronted with people's shadows...it is usually a mix of light and obscurity, and at times, most of the time - just pure obscurity. Seeing through the obscurity is not easy...it takes much focus, much senses, much intuition -- to feel your way through... Painstakingly so. If anything or anyone has been shrouded in much obscurity, it is Iraq. Not Palestine, not Syria, not Libya, not Egypt, not Yemen, not Tunisia, not Bahrain...not anywhere, but Iraq. At least with the others, if it is any consolation, even though it is not, the faces have names, some story one can write about, a location one can refer to...in our case, we remain anonymous, faceless, nameless, history-less. Iraq is the Haggar, the slave woman that no one pays attention to. Let her run and fend for herself...let her seek and beseech...she is nothing but a slave woman. The cover up is still thick, a dense veil, a black Chador...hiding the Truth, the Reality. It does not matter anymore how ...

I've had a Facebook account for several years now, which I hardly ever use. I totally dislike Facebook, their privacy and security levels are ZERO, and they effect many changes without notifying their users - it is a perfect place for a nest of spies. Hence my total dislike for it. However, Uruknet on its FB page, had some pretty nonsensical comments on one of my posts on Syria bearing all types of stupid accusations, and I decided I wanted to reply to set the record straight. By the same token I thought I'd make some changes to my Facebook profile. One of the changes I wanted to effect was add a secondary email to my Facebook account. To my surprise when I tried doing so, I was told that this secondary email of mine let's call it X is already in use by someone on Facebook. I found that most strange because I have never used that email X on Facebook before. So I researched a little and found out that my email X is indeed associated to someone impersonating me and u...

Developments to follow up on : - Yemen : on the edge of a civil war (Foreign Policy) - Bahrain : opposition asking for the government's resignation - Egypt : 80 wounded in clashes in post election, also seems that US had sent anti riot material to transitional govt and last but not least heavy arguments regarding some breach of trust and hurling of stones between some members of Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists - Syria : the massacres continue and ditto as in Yemen. - Lebanon : rocket "skirmishes" on the Southern border with Israeli retaliation. Lebanese government implicating "Al-Qaeda"- Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an ant- Assad, anti-Hezbollah group (yeah sure - old stale tactic) - Iraq : violence on the rise again, several bombs in different locations of Baghdad including the Green Zone, Mosul and Anbar. Several dead and wounded. Biden on visit there, also Iraq now rated as worst country to live in with worst standard and quality of life. Also more c...

I am jotting these observations and thoughts down for the record and for the future. I hope I can cover all the points I jotted down in my head first - been doing nothing but reading article after article on Syria, talking to Syrian friends, both inside and outside the country, and engaging some Syrians online to get their version of events. I am also subjected to more vile emails and over 1000 hacking attempts . Hence I feel there must be a good amount of truth in my previous post on Syria. In any event, this post is going to consist of thoughts/remarks/questions and maybe an analysis would deduct itself by itself. This post is for me first and foremost, not for any reader. So am not too concerned here if I make sense to you or not. 1. Spoke to Syrian family who is Christian, they told me that over 150 Christians were massacred in Homs. They believe it is "armed men" who are not tied to the regime, they were told they are bearded - the family did not say it but they im...

A dangerous and complex situation in Syria, very dangerous indeed. But then so are all situations when it comes to the Arab world. This is an attempt to make sense, and to infuse some light into what will prove to be a dark chapter of Syrian history. I am not sure I will succeed but I will try. I shall base my analysis on my various readings plus testimonies from the Syrians I have encountered. Nearly a 40 year rule by the Alawite clan of the Assad family. Alawites are a branch of Shi'ism, and very difficult to penetrate i.e to access full knowledge of their belief system. A strange combination of Shiism and Druze ideology. Alawites are a minority in Syria, originally from the lower echelons of society. Their rise to power under the Assad rule and their grip on key sectors of government was ensured by placing their own people in key positions, as one Syrian acquaintance said - they have infiltrated Syrian society like an octopus. This is how the Alawites of Syria were able to m...

Am surrounded by a strange kind of Silence... From my experience, I can recognize two kinds of Silence. One is because one chooses to be silent, either you don't have anything to say, or you're just enjoying the Quietness in a peaceful sort of way. The other kind of Silence is very difficult to describe in words. The only words I can find to describe it -- a murdered Silence. It's like when you have been badly beaten up, thrashed, shaken in the fibers of your soul, and you are left in that room alone after the event --and everything goes dead silent. It's like the aftermath of a battle in a war zone, when the cannons have stopped, you've survived and you look around and there's nothing but debris, rubble and that strange silence -- a silence that is in between life and death. Not quite the silence of the cemeteries - of Death, neither the silence of Peace. A strange kind of Silence, because the horror cannot be described in words. What to do with all this ...

The other day on Twitter, I tweeted some fresh info I had just received - namely that 9 people were massacred in Homs, Syria - on the day of the Eid, among them 2 girls and one woman. These were no protesters, they were unarmed and they were targeted by Shabiha snipers while crossing the streets. I will not go into the tens of videos that are streamed daily on uruknet.info of the brutality of a regime who despite its tanks, air power, and weapons is still powerless in the face of a brave people who are daily risking their lives and exposing the utterly vile nature of the beast. So in response to that particular tweet, I had someone calling himself a "Syrian Knight" a supposedly "patriotic" Syrian on Twitter, obviously on government payroll and most likely part of the Allawite clique respond to me in the following : I must also add that a few other Syrians and Lebanese are openly calling for THE GENOCIDE of SUNNIS in Lebanon and Syria and also for the ass...

No system is perfect - that is a given. Even your democracy is far from perfect - instead of a one man rule (which does not exist by the way) you have one clique rule. I don't see how that is any different. In the case of Iraq, depending on which geographical area you are looking at - you have one sect or one ethnicity rule. Baghdad, the center and the South are ruled by Shias and the North is ruled by Kurds. How democratic is that bearing in mind that Iraq is (was) a multi ethnic, multi sect, pluralistic society ?! What have the Shias or Kurds done for Iraq during those 8 years of American "liberation"? What does Iraq look like today? What has it produced, what has it achieved, what model has it shown to other nations ? NOTHING is the answer. Both rules - be it the Shia rule in South, and center of Iraq or be it the Kurdish rule in the North have done nothing but rape the country in a worse way than the Americans have. Prove me wrong and prove the opposit...

I have just spent over 2 hours watching in details almost every video available on the lynching of the Libyan leader and martyr Muammar Gaddafi. Not that I have a particular perverted penchant for sadism or masochism, nor do I particularly enjoy gory scenes, but it is something I felt I had to do, several times in a row. A bit compulsively, I must admit. I was looking for that one detail, that one image that would make sense of it all... And I found it. The images were somehow not unfamiliar to me, it was as if I saw them before, like a déjà vu. Yes they were happening in Libya but they had this eerie resemblance to what happened in Iraq. It's as if the whole film is being played again, with an uncanny tactical precision, almost scary to see the striking parallels. Even the words used - rat hole, sewage, drain, pipe, spider hole...the superimposition of the same pictures - the naked bodies of Saddam Hussein's sons, those of Muammar Gaddafi's son for public viewi...

I never liked gatherings nor banquets...I am allergic to hordes of people rushing to a buffet, gorging themselves with food, quickly stuffing down "all you can eat from 8 pm to 11 pm" I've always found these buffets grotesque. They have always conjured up surreal images of apparently civilized beings in suits and latest fashion dresses, turning into a "modern evolved" Gargantua... There is something crass, like morally and philosophically crass about this approach to eating. Something reminiscent of cannibalism, where you carnivorously appropriate human flesh so as to take on whatever attributes you have ascribed to it. This cannibalism - the eating of living human flesh is closely associated to necrophilia. In case you missed it when he was alive, you can always make up for it when he is dead. There is no better way to describe today's event - the "capture" and lynching of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. I am beyond politics right now...I am ...

Of course, you are going to crash, you may stall it for a while but ultimately it's inevitable... Nearly 3 TRILLION spent on the "war on Terror" and you don't expect to crash ? You terrorize the whole world, and you don't expect to crash ? Of course you will crash, and you will crash bad. Very bad. Honestly what did you expect ? Killing thousands of innocent people, families, women, children, elderly and getting away with it ? Absolving, redeeming, atoning with a bit of protest here and there, 10 years on, 20 years on...with a bit of hip hop, a rap song, a forum, a conference ? Why, are other's people's lives so cheap to be redeemed with a hip hop, a song, a forum, a conference, a petition ? Don't rap your shit...I know your shit by heart... You are collectively guilty for the murder of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans...and today 100's of Libyans and no amount of preaching, no amount of sermons, no amount of protest songs will obliter...

The Fraud called Democracy.

Darwin had this theory of the Missing link, I have a theory of the Common Link. That's just the way it is in the Middle East, to understand what's missing, you need to understand what's linking. As you may well know (I doubt it but let's give you the benefit), Bahrain has been going through a bit of turmoil lately. Turmoil instigated by Iran and Qatar through its Fox News channel Al-Jazeera. Bahrain has a Shiite minority (no they are not the majority as the Western press claims) and Iran since the advent of the disaster Khomeini has always laid claims to Bahrain as one of its provinces, the 14th to be more precise. With the fall of Baghdad, and the empowering of Iran by the USA, I had predicted, rightly so, that wherever there's a Shiite minority present, expect Iran to play the imperial sectarian card of divide and rule. Of course I was mocked then but am here to remind you again... Al Wefaq, the name of the Bahraini "opposition" is funded by I...

As of late, I have had a renewed interest in African American speeches, discourses, articles on Race and Racism. I believe that Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and the logical continuation - Libya (as the gate to Africa) have been the trigger. I am unhappy with the current Arab/Muslim discourse on invasion and occupation. I am searching for a more comprehensive framework in which to make sense of this string of "liberations" that has befallen us since 9/11 (official date). I can't, in the space of a blog, get too much into the history of colonialism. I am assuming you have at least heard about it, and it happened not too long, by the way. Instead, I want to use the discursive framework of African American thinkers and juxtapose it to us. By us I mean - us, Arabs and Muslims. This by no means, lessens whatever discrimination African Americans still face today in White American society, but it does however, provide me - me, the discontented Arab Muslim Woman - the nec...

Am so sorry to disturb you...am awake and you are asleep... Am so sorry to disturb your snores and your slumber...I happen to be wide awake. Sorry to nudge you in your coma, sorry to prick you in your amnesia, sorry that am not just laying down watching you breathe...measuring every one of your royal inhalation exhalation, like the good slave that am supposed to be...Am really sorry about that. Did I forget my "natural" place in those moments of insomnia, that gnaw inside of me like hot iron rods, like the sound of drills piercing my flesh, expecting me to hang on a wall like one of your "art" tableaux. It's nearly dawn in the ghetto, I just thought "I'd run my mouth" a little before the forces of law and freedom start ordering me about...before a car explodes in my uncovered face, before I get my early morning silencer gun threat, with my Corn flakes and OJ. OJ is the way they speak...they can't be bothered to say the whole word. They ...

This post is particularly directed to the "Muslim" Ummah. I don't know anymore what "Muslim" means nor do I know what "Ummah" means, I am using these words because you parrot them daily...so I figured maybe you know what they mean... There is NO Muslim Ummah and there is NO Muslim. There are appearances, shadows, of meanings and definitions... If you believe growing a beard and veiling yourself make you a Muslim then good luck with that. I have known way too many of you to know the fallacy of appearances. If you think quoting, repeating Hadiths and Quranic texts make you a Muslim, then good luck again, I have sat through a hundred of your sermons before... The time is now or never ! The time is now to dig deep. You are always on the defensive...justifying...the one who knows the Truth does not need to justify...you need the Truth it does not need you. You exchanged the Truth for slogans and appearances....and you got stuck there... And th...

The Jews have their Holocaust industry, you have your 9/11 one. I read a lot of your garbage - masculinity and 9/11, therapy and 9/11, unborn kids inheriting trauma and 9/11, love, forgiveness and peace and 9/11, Islamophobia and 9/11, conspiracy and 9/11, the new world order and 9/11, share your thoughts 10 years on from 9/11... Oh it's 9/11, yeah 9 and 11 are part of calendar, they will keep repeating year in year out, so will you...9/11. 9/11 is the only thing that happened to numbed out America. Come to think of it, nothing else happened. Finally they are something important, they got a 9/11. I mean let's face it in two hundreds years of history if only one 9/11 happened, just shows a) how irrelevant you are and 2) very few actually give a fuck about you to carry some 9/11. So I can really understand why you made it into such a big thing --you finally received some attention, you little ignorant narcissistic self seekers... Besides, it was a good ploy to flex som...

I was starting to feel guilty about my absence from this blog. Here I was supposed to continue on the Cleansing of Iraq, only to be faced with the Cleansing of Libya. I hear myself say the same words - who would have thought that Libya would be suffer the same fate as Iraq. Granted, there are some variations, differences, but is not the theme very much the same? Are not the discourses, be it from the media, the governments and that dreaded damned cursed "antiwar" the same ? Did the Americans, and NATO (France, UK, and the coalition of the willing) not use the same excuses, the same wordings, the same sentences, identical to Iraq ? Of course they did. And again, we are seeing it all over again, just like they did in Iraq, i.e use so called "Islamists" be it of the Shia (Iraq) or Sunni (Libya) type to invade and conquer another sovereign Arab state, destroy it and pillage its resources. The "Islamists" have become the puppets of the Emperor. It ...

I am dreading writing this post. Seriously. Even though I know the whole picture, I don't wish to complete it. Not that it will make a difference to you, but it does make a difference to me. My secret pathetic attempt to hold on to a peg of an illusion. Stark facts spoil the picture. That's why romance films have no stark facts- or let's say, the story has a happy ending. This is what the Western press likes us to believe, in particular the American press. Reporters are all too happy to wire stories of a pink Baghdad - lo and behold, they exclaim - things have improved - weddings are taking place, people walk the streets, it can't be all that bad...we did do a good job after all - is the implicit message. You see because in the American mind, a wedding taking place or someone walking the street is a favor bestowed upon another country. Like - hey what are you complaining about - you had a wedding in your neighborhood, or we filmed you going to the market, and we a...

When you destroy, when you ravage, when you pillage, when you annihilate, you are in fact cleansing...and Iraq is being cleansed of Itself . Most people are very stupid. When one talks about the cleansing of Iraq, they immediately think - physical liquidation - as in killings. Well you must be quite pleased to know that the above is ongoing, since 2003. The bulk of that form of cleansing has already been undertaken. Thousands have been killed, over 200 "fresh" mass graves have been unearthed, ethnic/sectarian cleansing of "minorities" has been achieved. Another form of cleansing of Iraq is the massive exodus, with thousands of refugees that no one hears about anymore. Add to the above the thousands of maimed, handicapped by the occupation and what ensued. Add the missing in the hundreds and add the psychologically traumatized for life debilitated by memories of torture, rape and loss and also add...yet another form of cleansing -- the ever lasting effect of D...