Links of the week

I don’t care if its the middle of the week. All my diction is dripping with disdain today anyway.

First up, check out the sister and Sepoy’s brilliant summary of the FIA Red Book.  Why hasn’t this book been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, hainjee?

The strangest music video I have seen in a very, very long time.

The greatest film of all time (/end sarcasm) is sparking a strange political wave in Bahrain. (Via Fahad)

Screw nuclear weapons. Pakistan has a FACE READER on its side.

From Qifa Nabki: the iPhone app store comes to Lebanon.

And now, a special mention for the New York Times, which has a truly ridiculous article about sidewalks and benches in Amman. I kid you not. The streets in question are Wakalat Street (an ode to consumerism, if there was ever one) and Rainbow Street (where Brangelina bought ice cream) and marvels at how ‘benches’ seem to have changed this city.

It also features a quote that I personally found quite hilarious:

If you’re a girl and you’re just hanging out on a regular street or sitting on a sidewalk, it’s considered inappropriate,” said Reem al-Hambali, 20, as she sat in the bright winter sun along the first pedestrian plaza built here. “Everyone will look at you and ask, ‘Why is this girl sitting there?’ But here it’s O.K. We can sit here and it’s normal.

What Amman is this?! Its definitely not the Amman I lived in, where sitting on the street – any street – was perfectly fine. The only time I had a ‘strange’ experience trying to hail a cab in Jordan while sitting on the side of the road was, err, this.

Weekend reading

I am too tired to blog. Its not that I have blogger’s fatigue even though I’ve been using this space for over six years now. Its because of that bloody electricity breakdown – which The News is calling The Great Blackout – but I fondly like to refer to it as Apocalypse v.2. My head hurts from the heat, my back hurts because of all the tossing and turning and my eyes hurt because I’ve been going around staring wide-eyed at all the working electrical appliances, rejoicing in the simple delight of them working. Never take anything for granted in Pakistan.

But back to the matter at hand. Since I can’t be f**ked with presenting an opinion on any of the grave issues facing the country or the world, I’m going to revert back to being lazy and just write out my list of must-reads for the week.

Ayaz Amir writes about General Ashfaq Kayani’s Top Gun moment:

Flying into the danger zone.

The army chief, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, has grown on the job and is definitely a more confident man than when he took over from Musharraf. The Malakand operation and preparations for an assault on Waziristan have to a large extent rehabilitated the army’s image, badly tarnished by Musharraf’s policies. But it would be a pity if any of this went to Kayani’s head. We need good and able military commanders. But we’ve had enough of military saviours and can do without more in the future. And, perhaps, we can do without army chiefs trying to become F-16 aces. A flight through the clouds of Waziristan — a final victory lap, so to speak — may be in order once Baitullah Mehsud is beaten. Before that it would look a bit like President George Bush’s landing on the flight deck of the USS Constellation with a banner at the back proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” when, as events in Iraq were to prove, the mission had barely started.

Beirut-based blog Qifa Nabki provided the two gems of the week. The first – their sarcastic take on Lebanon’s national dialogue talks and how they probably go down

Raad: Ahh, actually… yes we can. In my capacity as the representative of Hizbullah, I have a proposal to make.

Hariri: Oh?

Raad: Yes. We have drawn up a national defense strategy. If we could just pass these papers around, you will see what it is that we’re talking about. Basically, we’re willing to dismantle the resistance entirely or incorporate it into the Lebanese Army… whatever works for everyone else.

Geagea: Huh?

Raad: We think that this is what makes the most sense for Lebanon, at this stage.

Hariri: Wait, really?

Raad: No! I’m just messing with you! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…!!!

Hariri: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…!!!

Geagea: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…!!!

(10 minutes later)

Everyone: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…!!!

Raad: You should… have seen… the look on … your face… Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…!!!

Hariri: (wiping tears of laughter away) Oh my God. You had me there man. Oh damn, that was funny!

The second gem - Twitter’s 140 character limit causes a major fail.

One opposition supporter who goes by the Twitter username “MousaviRulez” is alleging that the character limit prevented him from communicating a major discovery that could have provided proof for the opposition’s claims that the election was rigged.

“I came upon a huge warehouse in the outskirts of Tehran, and it was full of unopened ballot boxes from different districts all around the country. There must have been a several million votes in there,” MousaviRulez told QNION correspondent Jacob Tafnis. “As soon as I figured out what I’d found, I immediately sent a message to my Twitter followers with the directions to the warehouse. But I ran out of space.”

MousaviRulez says that when he realized he couldn’t fit the entire set of directions into one tweet, he tried to break it up across many smaller ones.

“But by then, it was too late,” he said. “People were re-tweeting my original tweet, then re-tweeting my staggered tweets. It was a huge mess. And then someone in the government who was following my tweets realized what was going on and they shut down the Twitter servers in the country.”

MousaviRulez says that within ten minutes, several officers arrived at the warehouse, cuffed him, and took him to jail. When he was released the following day, he made his way back to the warehouse only to find that it was empty.

“Ten more characters. That’s all I needed to get my message across,” he said sadly, sipping tea in a Tehran cafe.

“If only I’d used Facebook, things might have been so different.”

Ever thought what you’d do if you suddenly came upon Baitullah Mehsud? KABOBfest discovered a patent has been registered for a device that could give the words ‘switching channels’ a whole new meaning:

Screenwriters take note, this would make an awesome plot for another one of those CIA agent in the Middle East type movies Hollywood loves so much…

Germany’s The Local recently reported that a Saudi inventor filed for a patent with the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA) for a killer GPS-like microchip that would allow governments to locate and terminate known extremists and criminals (and possibly political opponents and dissenters?) at the push of a button.

The device is sort of like that nifty house-arrest ankle bracelet that we use here in the states, except for two important things: (1) it is surgically implanted; and (2) it will release a poisonous toxin into the carrier’s body if he/she’s ever deemed a security risk.

The letter of the week:

SMS for IDPs:

Thousands of posters have been put up in Lahore citing ‘an appeal from the chief minister to send an SMS for a ten-rupee donation’ for the IDPs. Will the provincial government kindly explain how many SMSs are required to cover the cost of one poster and how much will be left over for the IDPs?

Five Rupees finds Zardari rapping to the EU:

Asif Zardari contradicts just about every statement he has made over the past three months without sacrificing his arrogance. For best effect, read this rhyming statement with some P. Diddy beats playing in the background:

‘What I need is trade, not aid. I’m looking for MOUs (memoranda of understanding) and not IOUs and I intend to get them,’

Have a great weekend everyone. Pray there isn’t a thunderstorm in interior Sindh again. Also thank the Pakistani cricket team for single-handedly distracting the country from the apocalypse by their spectacular win against South Africa last night.

Sunday viewing: back to the future in the Middle East

I finally got around to watching Waltz With  Bashir today – the film that made headlines for the latter part of 2008  – won several awards and managed to be privately screened in Beirut. More thoughts on the film later – I feel like I need more time to digest it before I make sweeping statements.

But with creepily perfect timing, Syria News Wire just posted about an Al Jazeera mention of Closed Zone,  a short film made by Yoni Goodman, the director of animation for Waltz With Bashir. Closed Zone is an apt description of life in Gaza – the world’s largest open-air prison.

Robert Fisk’s contradictions

Robert Fisk’s opinion piece today is a pile of contradictions. He talks about the label of Holocaust that has been attached to the war on Gaza, yet rebukes himself and wonders if it isn’t anti-Semitic, as many (and he says as well)

Yes, I know what all these people are trying to do: make a direct connection between Israel and Hitler’s Germany. And in several radio interviews this past week, I’ve heard a good deal of condemnation about such comparisons. How do Holocaust survivors in Israel feel about being called Nazis? How can anyone compare the Israeli army to the Wehrmacht? Merely to make such a parallel is an act of anti-Semitism.

Having come under fire from the Israeli army on many occasions, I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. I’ve never understood why strafing the roads of northern France in 1940 was a war crime while strafing the roads of southern Lebanon is not a war crime. The massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila camps – perpetrated by Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli soldiers watched and did nothing – falls pretty much into the Second World War bracket. Israel’s own estimate of the dead – a paltry 460 – was only nine fewer than the Nazi massacre at the Czech village of Lidice in 1942 when almost 300 women and children were also sent to Ravensbrück (a real concentration camp). Lidice was destroyed in revenge for the murder by Allied agents of Reinhard Heydrich. The Palestinians were slaughtered after Ariel Sharon told the world – untruthfully – that a Palestinian had murdered the Lebanese Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel.

–

No, the real reason why “Gaza-Genocide” is a dangerous parallel is because it is not true. Gaza’s one and a half million refugees are treated outrageously enough, but they are not being herded into gas chambers or forced on death marches. That the Israeli army is a rabble is not in question – though I was amused to read one of Newsweek’s regular correspondents calling it “splendid” last week – but that does not mean they are all war criminals. The issue, surely, is that war crimes do appear to have been committed in Gaza. Firing at UN schools is a criminal act. It breaks every International Red Cross protocol. There is no excuse for the killing of so many women and children.

I should add that I had a sneaking sympathy for the Syrian foreign minister who this week asked why a whole international tribunal has been set up in the Hague to investigate the murder of one man – Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri – while no such tribunal is set up to investigate the deaths of more than 1,000 Palestinians.

I should add, however, that the Hague tribunal may well be pointing the finger at Syria and I would still like to see a tribunal set up into the Syrian massacre at Hama in 1982 when thousands of civilians were shot at the hands of Rifaat al-Assad’s special forces. The aforesaid Rifaat, I should add, today lives safely within the European Union. And how about a trial for the Israeli artillerymen who massacred 106 civilians – more than half of them children – at the UN base at Qana in 1996?

Lebanon and the mystery of the rocket attacks

Robert Fisk solves the mystery of the rockets landing in Israel from Lebanon:

The “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command” – the quotation marks are necessary since this outfit controls at most 500 cadres – is responsible for all the tin-pot rockets fired into Israel from Lebanon this past week.

It is not the next “front”. It is not the beginning of the “northern front”. No one was injured when three rockets fired from southern Lebanon fell in open areas near the Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona yesterday. A blaze of outdated rockets on northern Israel – “about 1944, I date them”, as one Palestinian put it in Beirut – is not going to ignite another conflict for Hamas in Gaza. In Lebanon, the guns are silent – and when they are not, the world will know about it.

He also delivers a rather ominous warning at the end, one I suspect the Obama administration will look at as a clear sign that their Middle East agenda will be chock full in the next four years. Though the events of Gaza, with over a 1000 people dead, do point to the IDF as a hub of terror.

The Israelis do not want a second war right now. It’s not the moment to claim that the PFLP-GC, with its nests around Sidon, is the “centre of world terror”. That will be a surprise for the West’s “analysts” – and for the Obama administration – in due course.