Archive for June 19th, 2009
Great Teachers
Posted by: adonis49 on: June 19, 2009
Great Teachers
1. I have no musical ears.
I tried to learn and read notes.
My classmates waited my turn to sing
To rewind and have a good time.
That was a long time ago,
And it was too late, even then,
To train my ears.
2. I have been told
That Maestros can allow a mistake
At the beginning of a piece,
That they can forgive a wrong note
In the middle,
But the ending has to be perfect and glorious.
3. Great teachers see the end products of their students.
Their job is to discover who their students are.
Then, they make them repeat the endings
Until tears of boredom and despair are running,
Until they master the ending,
Flawlessly and grandly.
4. Great teachers don’t care about the beginning of an assignment:
All it takes is one step. We can take one step.
Great teachers don’t care about finishing a task:
We can, somehow, make a task end.
Great teachers are after how much human life
You’ve got inside you.
5. How much human life have you got inside you?
Only you can know yourself:
That is not an Earth shattering truth.
You will never know yourself
As long as there is a soul in you.
Reinvent yourself and then, repeat, repeat, and repeat.
6. While you reinvent yourself,
It does not matter
How soon death comes,
Or how great
People think you are.
You died perfect and in glory.
Women keeping up the struggle
Posted by: adonis49 on: June 19, 2009
Of Sand and Land: Women to keep up the struggle (June 4, 2009)
It is 1968. Syria is undergoing a state of socialism after the humiliating defeat in the war of June 1967. Aida is forty years old and has so far five kids; the oldest boy is 16. Aida got lost boarding a bus and the family had hard time locating their mother. Aida had to confess that she is illiterate and could not read the name of the stop stations. The eldest boy was angry and refrained to talk to his mother because Aida had given him the impression that she could read. Actually Aida used to get herself busy in the kitchen when asked about school homework. One day, one of Aida’s daughters brought her the good news: the women syndicate is opening a school for the grown up illiterate. A year later, Aida is helping her younger babies with their homework. (You may read my post “The Blemish”)
The Union of Women in socialist Syria was very active and opening schools and artisan shops all over Syria and encouraging women to learn about their legal rights and responsibilities. One lady teacher said “The Bedouin women are the brightest. They are like blank pages needing to be filled. The Bedouin women come to school with dignity and confidence wearing multilayer of colorful and bright clothes, compared to the drab and plain clothes of urban older illiterate women; the Bedouin women proudly shake the gold bracelets on their forearms.”
It is mid July 1967. Nada is trotted by three urchins, bare footed and oversized blouses. Nada is heading to the “potable” water truck; a long file of women waiting for their turn. Nada lives in tent #56, street #7 of a makeshift refugee camp 40 kilometers of Amman. Nada lived a week ago in a house by the foot of a hill and tended a small garden across from the Jordan River in the town of Bethlehem. Nada’s husband Kamal is back to Amman for the nth time searching for a job. The eldest daughter Amina is ten and attending the refugee’s school tent run by refugee instructors. The eldest son Farid is twelve: Farid is not seeing life in roses; life to Farid will be scarlet red: he is getting military training with the Fedayyins after school. What was taken by force will be recovered by force: International Diplomacy has proven its efficiency 20 years earlier when Nada’s parents were chased out of her home in Jafa, never to return.
The Israeli soldiers kicked her door in Bethlehem while sitting for supper. The neighbor called wolf “they are going to blow the house”; the same kind of “caring” neighbor who called wolf 20 years earlier. Nada is wearing her gold bracelets on her arm with pride: her husband and parents loved her and she showed her loving pride. It cannot look any poorer around the camp but Nada’s Palestinian robe with golden brocades fits a princess.
Mounira is a young and fragile looking woman; she is a delicate flower sitting on a oversized couch in a villa in the Capital Amman. Mounira was chased out of her land in Palestine; her husband has been studying and working in the USA for two years now and is asking her to join him. Mounira is a militant with Al Fatah, the new Palestinian resistance organization in the Diaspora. During the failed incursion of Israel in the village of Karama on the borders in Jordan in 1969 Mounira and 15 other women fighters and nurses joined the battle when they heard the news on the radio. The Palestinian fighters could not believe their eyes; the militant women fighters can late but resumed the task of taking care of the wounded and the transport to nearby hospitals.
Cairo, Egypt 1968. Basna is a young social assistance. She says: “the emancipation of women in Egypt might have progressed quickly. Our husbands do not consider us vulnerable and need protection but still not as equal. Marriages are still based on economy: the man wants to know how much the job of his prospective wife will compensate his misery salary. Many women rent their flat and could enjoy the luxury of not moving in with their mother-in-law. Men are consulting their wives on important decisions, especially in financial matter. Thus, as social assiatant I have to figure out courses on how to educate women in handling money and family accounting. A few years ago, the eldest girl had to sacrifice education for the cadet because of lack of resources. Many school girls have to supplement university expenses by prostituting with rich people in between courses.
Note: These accounts were extracted from a French book published in 1970 by Laurence Deonna who reported on the conditions of Palestinian refugees after the June 1967 war.
Jewish religion is dead
Posted by: adonis49 on: June 19, 2009
Jewish religion is dead: replaced by Zionist State ideology (June 18, 2009)
Religions, monolithic or not (it is primarily a mental distinction and never real), did not mushroom spontaneously in specific regions. Religion is the same and was translated and interpreted into different languages and cultures. Religions were imported/exported along with the material baggage of trade and commerce; they were built upon and modified to correspond to customs and traditions. Religions developed to extreme abstractions in urban centers or reduced to basic common denominators in remote rural areas; they were the primary cultural communication among people based on trust, confidence, and belief that there is always someone more powerful and more knowledgeable than the lot.
It is because people need to create a God that religion was the main communicator among nations; religion transcended peculiar customs and traditions and reached straight to the deep fear and apprehension of man. Fear of the unknown is shared by everyone and all men are similar in that one characteristic.
There have always been all kinds of civilizations; that the archeologists failed to uncover relics and artifacts is irrelevant to that fact. Every civilization prospered on slavery; whatever names slaves were given. Slaves had their own God; at day they shared the God of the usurpers of their freedom and by night they unveiled their “True God” and worshiped him genuinely as only desperate souls know how to pay tribute. A few slave “tribes” revolted and confirmed their nightly God at day break and paid retributions. Most of these “slave tribes” succumbed to the power to be and its social structure (constructed around a religious hierarchy); a few preferred to be chased out and suffer another kind of life hardship. No, there was no dignity in the daily life of the forsaken slaves who wandered in the wilderness; even their nights were different: they had to reinvent a God compatible to their wretched new life, an altered the God of the One they used to worship at night before the Diaspora.
Nomadic tribes didn’t need religious clerics to convince them of a “God”: as they sat around by night they could watch the vault of the sky reaching down and they felt they could touch the stars. There is overwhelming majesty during the peaceful nights in desert like regions, a sky sparkling with millions of beautiful stars twinkling overhead (a few moving, many fixed) that offered reprieve, courage, and hope for another day of desolation, loneliness, and harsh nature. Nomads appreciate the varieties of Silence: they can feel the God of Silence before major cataclysms and desert storms.
It is because nomads needed to believe more in a God than other settled people to ward off the persistent and real fears of the days for survival that their God was more powerful and more compassionate than other Gods; the God of the nomads was personified in the one seeking refuge for the night; the visitor was lavished with the respect due to the wandering God paying visit to the tribe members and he was fed with whatever meager substances the clan had saved. The God of the nomads knew their traditions and customs and refrained from interfering or crossing the lines; otherwise, the visitor was punished for false representation.
There are various God. There is the God of the nomads, the “Night God” of the enslaved, the God of the urban and settled people, and the God of wandering homeless people, rootless, and abandoned because their God refuses to be set free. My article concerns the God of the stragglers. This God was created a brute, ruthless, and blood thirsty; an avenger out of ignorance, an insulated, merciless, and uncompromising hatemongering God. This is the God of Thunder, War, Lightening, Storm, Sword, and Skull. This is the God who rebuffs any tender offer to mingle with other civilized Gods, to soften His manner, to come to maturity, to associate, to adjust, and to keep pledges.
This is the God who obeyed his creators; as He started to appreciate modern and civilized habits He was reminded by his creators, called prophets, that He lost his way and the reason why He was created. This the God who was resurrected countless time from his compassionate leaning and collaboration with other worthy Gods to lead newer generations, whose hearts and minds were burned alive from birth, to take on a chimerical revenge on real people because chimerical stories and myths are truer than reality.
The Jewish religion is dead. It was replaced by a State ideology called Zionism. Jehovah (Yahweh) was again called upon to mete out his benediction to countless genocide against the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, and Egyptians. The ancient “prophets” were rejuvenated into modern-day prophets, very much as archaic as Ben Gurion, Menahem Begin, Ishak Shamir, Sharon, Ehud Barak, and all the lot who want their “promised land” that they usurped by the sword, lies, and blasphemy.
The Jewish religion is dead as Israel was recognized in 1948. It is not what the Books say; it is how it is practiced. It is how Zionism behaved in Gaza, Sabra and Chatila Palestinian camps, the camps in Jenine, Jabalya, the massacres in the villages of Dar Yassine, Kfar Kassem, Yafa, the shelling of the town of Qana, of the UN compounds in Qana, Gaza, and the West Bank, the execution of over 6,000 Egyptian soldiers prisoners in the war of 1967; the destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure 8 times, the destruction of the infrastructures in Gaza and the West Bank, the demolition of schools and hospitals, the routine assassinations of leaders, the apartheid Wall of Shame, the refusal of abiding by UN resolution 194 for the return of the Palestinian refugees, the insistence of refusing to share Jerusalem Capital to the Palestine State, the transfer methods of the Christians from Jerusalem, and claiming that Israel should be accepted as State for Jews before any peaceful negotiation.
The Jewish religion is dead. It was replaced by a State ideology called Zionism, founded by the Eastern Europe Ashkenazi.
Note: The UN described Zionism in mild terms as “a form of racism”. As the USA pressured the UN to desist of this mild description then Zionist ideology was no longer restricted to Jews; it transformed to an umbrella for the fascist, Nazi, Stalinists, Gang of Four, Khmer Rouge, Neo-Conservative, apartheid, and isolationist ideologies; it had contacts with Taliban, Ben Laden, Qaeda, and a variety of religious extremists of Moslems, Hindus, and the Christians of the Sirilanka Tamul terrorists.
Adonis Diaries 