It’s not from the pigs
Every time I’ve mentioned swine flu to someone in Syria, I’ve gotten the same response: “Well, thank goodness we don’t have many pigs in Syria.” Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.
There have been two reported cases of swine flu in Israel (from Israelis who recently visited Mexico), but I don’t imagine Israel has a lot of pigs, either. In fact, the Israeli Health Ministry recently renamed the illness because, as Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman explained, “We will use the term Mexican flu in order not to have to pronounce the word swine.” Observant Jews, like observant Muslims, do not eat pork.
All governments, of course, have a robust Orwellian tradition of redirecting public consciousness through names — hence, the U.S. has a Defense Department to help coordinate preemptive attacks, the Israel Defense Force slaughters civilians in Gaza, and Egypt and Syria, to a lesser extent, were “victorious” in the October War.
However, in this case, as amusing as I find Litzman’s reasoning, the renaming could at least help reduce the illusion that the disease is a result of proximity to pigs; in fact, it spreads from person to person.
I wonder how the Syrian government would rename the flu if it made it here (God forbid, as I can only imagine how fast it would spread). Israeli flu?
Report Internet Censorship…
…using Herdict, where you can see if other users in your country have reported being unable to access the same websites.
The Naked Maze
Images of the desert slip easily into the minds of most Americans–at least judging by the questions I’ve been asked at home–when they visualize the Middle East, despite this landscape’s decidedly marginal role in most people’s daily life in an urbanizing region. All of the Syrian novels I’ve read have been concerned either with cities or with the sea, but the Arab world has a great poet of the desert in the Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Koni, for whom the desert is, far from being the paragon of Arab experience, an escape from it and a venture into a universal realm far removed from the binding concepts of shame, honor, and family that only serve to shackle his protagonist; in the desert, and only in the desert, can one move beyond a shallow culture and narrow religion, then inch closer to something more expansive and more real.
Wadi Rum, Jordan
“The devil doesn’t live only live in the oasis of A’yn al-Karma, but rather in every oasis, each and every one.
But here in the desert all the devils die of thirst, and only the expanse remains in the open country and in the heart. Silence in the ear and silence in the heart. Calm in the desert and calm in the heart. The water of A’yn al-Karma cleanses the body, but only the desert cleanses the soul. You purify. You empty out. You free yourself from work. And thus it is easy to set off to unite with the endless openness. With the horizon, with the space that leads to a place outside of the horizon and outside of space. With the other world; with the afterlife. Yes, with the afterlife. Here, only here, on the extended plains, in the naked maze. Where the three sides meet: the open land – the horizon – and space together weave the celestial sphere that spreads in order to touch eternity, and what comes after.”
– from his novel at-Tibr
It’s never the wrong time for a debke: or, Independence Day in Syria
As the green striped bus pulled away from the curb, all but four of its riders leapt off of the metal and plastic benches to congregate in the center aisle. A drum was quickly produced and pounded on energetically to provide a rhythmic backbone for what became a knot of several dozen Syrians who began to sing at the top of their lungs, clap in time with the music, and dance as the bus roared away from Jeramana towards the Occupied Golan. It was 6:45 a.m on Independence Day in Syria.
Eastern Orthodox Easter
Balloons and parades through the streets of Bab Tuma marked the Eastern Orthodox Easter today:
The Syriac Orthodox Church
Students drummed...
And the kid's corps brought up the rear.
The recycling of stone
The crusader castle at Apamea sits, like all other crusader castles I’ve seen, on a hill–the better to observe from and defend against enemies.
Before the age of mass tourism, no government cared that villages sprouted in old monuments and filled in the void of abandoned capitals; afterward, they saw fit to evict the ruin-dwellers to make way for paying ogglers from afar. Hundreds were relocated out of Petra, in Jordan, in the 1980s, and several decades before that the French had removed the villagers of Syria’s Krak de Chevaliers (which owes to the subsequent renovations its status as the most fabulous relic of the Crusades left in the country). Apamea’s castle, however, had fallen too far into disrepair to make an evacuation worthwhile; and anyway, the structure is far overshadowed by the remains of the Roman city nearby, so the castle on the hill mixes a centuries-old outer wall and the occasional inner pile of rocks with currently-inhabited concrete and cinder-block buildings.
يحصل جوزف مسعد على منصب مثبَّت بعد هجمات مفترسة…هل يستحقه؟
ذكر العربي الغاضب مؤخراً أن الأستاذ الفلسطيني الأردني جوزف مسعد حصل على منصب مثبّت في جامعة كولومبيا حيث درستُ، ومع أنني استنكرت تعرّضه لهجمات صهيونية إبان السنوات الأخيرة، فلم أقتنع بعد قراءتي لكتابه الأخير (Desiring Arabs) بأنه يستحق منصباً مثل هذا نظراً لبعض المشاكل الموجودة في الكتاب، الأمر الذي سأشرحه بعد الفاصل. وغير ذلك يسعدني بطبيعة الحال أن هجمات لم تنحج في تدمير حياته المهنية، وأعترف بأنني لم أقرأ كتابه الأول عن تاريخ الهوية الأردنية الذي قد يكون أكثر قيمةً، ولكنني أتمنى منه عملاً أحسن في المستقبل.
Green Syria
The valley outside of the old crusader castle at Apamea, in the northwest:
A slightly longer absence
I’ve been travel around Syria too much lately to write much on the blog, and now that some sort of virus seems to be devouring my flash drive, I won’t be posting pictures before I resolve that. Coming soon, I hope!
Best April Fool’s I’ve seen in a while…
…from Qifa Nabki:
DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Fresh on the heels of a regional summit in Doha where President Bashar al-Assad had reaffirmed his support for resistance against Israel while expressing reservations about the Arab Peace Initiative, the Syrian president dropped a bombshell by embarking on an epoch-making visit to Tel Aviv, Wednesday morning.
Read the rest.
Thanks, Anas : )
