Random Christmas Scene

The clock reads, “11:17.” Kate is already in bed as Jack walks in.

KATE (looking up from her book) Hey...

Jack approaches her, sitting on the bed...

JACK These last weeks, Kate, I know that I’ve done some...some unusual things. Kate nods.

KATE It’s been interesting, that’s for sure.

JACK But I’ve done some good things too, haven’t I?

KATE You’ve been Jack Campbell. And that’s always a good thing... She kisses him on the cheek. He takes her arms in his hands and looks her in the eyes.

JACK I need you to remember me, Kate. How I am right now, right this very moment. I need you to put that image in your heart and keep it with you, no matter what happens.

KATE Are you okay, Jack?

JACK Please, just promise me you’ll do that. You have to promise, Kate. Because if you don’t, then it’s like it never happened and I don’t think I could live with that.

She’s a bit confused but she couldn’t be more in love with him.

KATE I promise, Jack...

JACK Promise me again...

KATE I promise. Come to bed, honey.

Jack stands up, heading toward the door.

JACK Soon...

Arab Flight Attendants

Monday's New York Times ran an article about Etihad's trailblazing female Arab flight attendants.

The article gushes about how states like Abu Dhabi offering "freedoms and opportunities nearly unimaginable elsewhere in the Middle East," but the catch is that the Emirates are offering these opportunities for other Arabs' daughters, not their own. All of the flight attendants mentioned in the article are from other, poorer places like Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. The Emirates are the cradle of sociological change for other Arab expats, but Emirati families remain staunchly conservative in most cases. They can be because they have the money to be. One wonders if the Emirates are fostering positive change that will eventually come around to their own country or simply causing problems for other societies.

Some highlights:

Flight attendants have become the public face of the new mobility for some young Arab women, just as they were the face of new freedoms for women in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

...
In the midst of an Islamic revival across the Arab world that is largely being led by young people, gulf states like Abu Dhabi — which offer freedoms and opportunities nearly unimaginable elsewhere in the Middle East — have become an unlikely place of refuge for some young Arab women. And many say that the experience of living independently and working hard for high salaries has forever changed their ambitions and their beliefs about themselves, though it can also lead to a painful sense of alienation from their home countries and their families.
...

Despite the increasing numbers of women moving to the gulf countries, the labor migration patterns of the last 20 years have left the Emirates with a male-female ratio that is more skewed than anywhere else in the world; in the 15-to-64 age group, there are more than 2.7 men for every woman.
...
For many families, allowing a daughter to work, much less to travel overseas unaccompanied, may call her virtue into question and threaten her marriage prospects. Yet this culture is changing, said Musa Shteiwi, a sociologist at Jordan University in Amman. “We’re noticing more and more single women going to the gulf these days,” he said. “It’s still not exactly common, but over the last four or five years it’s become quite an observable phenomenon.”
...
Young women whose work in the gulf supports an extended family often find, to their surprise and chagrin, that work has made them unsuitable for life within that family.
“A very good Syrian friend of mine decided to resign from the airline and go back home,” the Egyptian flight attendant said. “But she can’t tolerate living in a family house anymore. Her parents love her brother and put him first, and she’s never allowed out alone, even if it’s just to go and have a coffee.”
“It becomes very difficult to go home again,” she said.

Censorship in Oman

An Omani blogger posted the below comments today. The original Arabic can be found here.

While I would agree with the blogger that personal freedoms in Oman are incredibly circumscribed, the situation is not as bleak as it would seem to some reading her comments. It seemed to me when I was in Oman that many Omanis were unconcerned about the lack of freedoms as long as development continued to progress, the Sultan continued to be an enlightened leader, and the country continued to hold onto its identity, pride, and peace. I know some Omanis find the restrictions stifling, but it is nothing like the situation in Saudi Arabia, for instance. That being said, Oman and the rest of the Gulf states are going to have to deal with increasing pushback against their draconian policies on personal liberties and public criticism in general. It will be interesting to see how it is done. The Sultanate cannot afford for it to be done wrong.

In Oman, forms of expression are subject to censorship and those who speak out face threats and abuse. There is no freedom of expression or of the press. There are no basic public rights. Demonstrations are prohibited. The establishment of newspapers requires a political decision from the Council of Ministers headed by Sultan Qaboos. These papers are subject to monitoring and censorship prior to their publication. The formation of civil society organizations is subject to a backward (not sure if this means backward as in archaic or retroactive) law and is only permitted with a security agreement that guarantees control over the organization.

In this year, 2008, the Omani blogging (tadween) movement was born on the internet. Despite its young age and the small number of bloggers, they have become wanted and hunted. The situation worsens when the identity of the blogger becomes known and he writes under his true name. This is what has afflicted the Omani blogger Hamad al-Gheithi who was forced by internal security to change some of the topics of his blog. Under this pressure, the blogging movement, which is still in its
infancy, may be aborted for good. This confirms the justice and validity of the option of anonymity for some Omani bloggers, and I am the first among them.

The security establishment, with its various but unified arms, has taken up following the writing on the internet in interactive forums and blogs. Participants in these outlets are constantly and systematically subjected to various forms of aggression against their personal and public freedoms, from fixed trials, to direct threats, to prohibition from writing, to damage to their interests and livelihoods. The Omani people are held hostage by the security establishment that rules the country and rides roughshod over the laws and institutions which are generally for show and ineffective in the truth of the matter, partly or fully.

Oh conscience, oh world: You have all of what the blogger, the artist Hamad al-Gheithi wrote and breathed in his blog until he became a target of police intimidation. So, world, bear witness.

Adulation.com

Anyone know who or what agency put together the new website http://www.oman-qaboos.net/?

It is a slick new homage to the Sultan. Tons of pictures, but not a whole lot of information.

The Video

The Sport of Shoe Throwing

President Bush made a surprise appearance in Baghdad today. At a news conference with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, an Iraqi in the audience threw both shoes at Bush. This is a favorite Iraqi insult that combines the shame of having things thrown at you with "unclean" aspect of the shoe and the sole of the foot.

I'm not sure if I'm more surprised by the Iraqi's impressive accuracy, Bush's quick duck, or the fact that Nouri al-Maliki was basically unsurprised by the whole affair and managed to nonchalantly block the second shoe-jectile with his hand.

Sickening

Washington Post reports on "Iraqi Women, Fighting for a Voice."

Some excerpts below. The one that stands out most comes first:

Rashid has received numerous death threats. In an e-mail, someone threatened to rape her for being un-Islamic.
...

Hawjin Hama Rashid, a feisty journalist in bluejeans and a frilly blouse, had come to the morgue in this Kurdish city to research tribal killings of women. "A week doesn't pass without at least 10," the morgue director said, showing Rashid pictures of corpses on his computer screen.
First, a bloated, pummeled face.
Next, a red, shapeless, charred body. "Raped, then burned," the director said.
Then, another face, eyes half-closed, stab wounds below her neck.
...
From the southern port city of Basra to bustling Irbil in northern Iraq, Iraqi activists are trying to counter the rising influence of religious fundamentalists and tribal chieftains who have insisted that women wear the veil, prevented girls from receiving education and sanctioned killings of women accused of besmirching their family's honor.
...
"Without changing the way society thinks, changing laws on paper is useless," Rashid said.
...
Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, satellite television, cellphones and Internet access have deepened the West's imprint on the relatively stable Kurdish region of Iraq, known as Kurdistan. Today, many urban women wear Western clothes and eschew Islamic head scarves. Women make up more than a quarter of the regional parliament.
...
In the first six months of this year, 206 women were killed in Kurdistan, 150 of them burned to death. The killings were up 30 percent from the previous six months, according to the Kurdish regional government's Human Rights Ministry. Activists say many honor crimes go unreported or are portrayed as accidents. They also say that some women have immolated themselves out of despair.
...
"We're still suffering from the past," said Jinan Q. Ali, the minister of women's affairs in the Kurdish regional government. "You can't say the government and police are not doing their job. To transfer a society from a violent one to a peaceful one won't happen suddenly."
...
Last year, Saud also visited morgues to tabulate the number of women killed in Basra for a report to Iraq's parliament. She found 150 victims. She said she had known three of them: Maysoon was killed with her brother, both shot five times in the head for being Christians; gunmen killed Lubna for walking a little too close to her fiance; Sabah was murdered in a market for not wearing a head scarf.
...
Saud shakes hands with men in public. She refuses to wear a head scarf, which she views as a symbol of submission. She wears a shawl only because her family fears for her life. But she is careful not to anger the religious conservatives who rule Basra.
...
Anwar Indalel Shubbar, a local government official with the ultra-religious Fadhila Party said that women are entering "illegal relationships" if they have premarital sex and that honor killings are sanctioned by tribal laws.
"Our religion rejects the honor killings, but we can't stop the habits and traditions we have inherited," Shubbar said. She said she favors the imposition of Islamic law.
...
Even the biggest victory of Iraqi women is bittersweet: A quarter of all seats in Iraq's parliament are constitutionally required to be filled by women. But out of 25 committees, only two are led by women. And most female lawmakers belong to the ruling religious parties. "It's all abayas and female mullahs," Saud said.
...
A day after her visit to the morgue in Irbil, Rashid interviewed a pale 17-year-old inside a women's prison. Eyes clouding with tears, the teenager recounted her romance with a young man. Her relatives had accused her of dishonoring her family and tribe; her brother had tried to kill her to restore that honor. She had taken refuge here, behind walls topped with barbed wire.
A few days earlier, her father had offered to forgive her -- if she became the second wife of a relative old enough to be her grandfather. She refused.
"I know my family will kill me if I go back home," she told Rashid.

Port Sultan Qaboos on Local News

I was watching my local news this morning (in America), not really paying attention, then looked up to see a sign in Arabic and English. It was for Port Sultan Qaboos. The story was about the attempted hijacking of M/S Nautica, which is in port in Muttrah now. The story included some views of the port and the hills between Muttrah and Muscat. Unfortunately (or fortunately for the ignorants who might misidentify the country with the hijacking) Oman was not mentioned in the story or even in the text around the images.

Condemnation

In a perfect example of the sort of opprobrium I was calling for in my last post, Muslims in Mumbai have refused to allow the terrorists killed in the November attack to be buried in Muslim cemeteries on the grounds that they are not Muslims because they killed innocent civilians, according to the BBC. They have even threatened to come out in the streets to protest any move to force their burial in Muslim cemeteries. Perhaps if dead terrorists in other parts of the world received this sort of treatment rather than a welcome as martyrs, then fewer people would be aching to blow themselves up or set off bombs in crowded marketplaces full of innocent people. Some might argue that "your terrorist is my freedom fighter" and I agree that the line is blurred in some circumstances, but the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians can only be labeled as terror and murder. I applaud the Muslims of Mumbai for taking a stand against those who purport to be murdering in the name of their religion. People around the world could take a lesson from this that no one needs to be "fighting for God." In an aside, these "mujahideen" reportedly brought with them stocks of alcohol to steel themselves during the lengthy siege they anticipated.

More on Acid Throwing

The New York Times posted this video the other day about acid throwing attacks in Pakistan. It's worth a look. Once again, where is the Islamic outrage at this barbarism amongst their own? The threat, the stereotype, the phobias, the fear, the hatred is all manufactured by such barbaric acts within the ummah.