A young man turned war reporter asks…

A young man turned war reporter asks; why should he continue to bare witness to the atrocities around him when half the world refuses to listen and the other half cannot make it stop.

Image: Motaz Azaiza via Instagram

A young man turned war reporter asks; why should he continue to bare witness to the atrocities around him when half the world refuses to listen and the other half cannot make it stop. In the dead of the night he mourns the blackness of his hair as he sees even his beard begin to show signs of the trauma that is his fate. He wants to the see the world, he wonders if he ever will, as the world sees him at his most vulnerable.

His questions are understandable, expected even, and yet reading through his post one question 

halted my thinking. The young man turned war reporter asks the whole world and no one at once:

“If I made it and stayed alive, will I be mentally able to enjoy a moment in my whole life?”

Here lies the truth of this grave injustice. Those who survive are far more gone that those who perished.

Motaz and the brave reporters on the ground, of whom many have sacrificed their lives, have shown us. They have reported the devastation, the carnage and the agony. We bore witness yet the genocide continues and so, now he asks us not to talk about strength because we haven't been through it and he is right. How reckless the audacity of the world must seem to him, how ridiculous.

After a brief pause I pictured young Motaz getting out, seeing the world and hoped, that when he does, his smile would not be burdened. That the screams can be quietened, the blood can be washed off and the rubble will not forever obstruct his vision. That is wishful thinking I suppose, for wars survived leave lasting scars and genocides witnessed will never let you go.

The words have forasken us but we continue to write because the brave souls of Gaza continue to bleed. It is as if we are part of an endless funeral procession. The grief comes in waves, it ebbs and flows but mostly it crashes onto our hearts with great force and leaves us breathless. Helpless.

My thoughts are in Palestine this morning as they are every morning, and with young Motaz as he questions all that we have made real for him.

Narrow vision of Iran’s protests is a Western media catastrophe

Iran’s governmental regime has for decades enforced laws that are not only restrictive but ones that are also inhumanly implemented. Freedom of speech along with freedom of expression in almost all its forms is practically nonexistent. Protests have long been forcibly silenced with the aid of media blackouts.

In 2021 Iran saw the election of its new president Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline ally of the current supreme leader Ali Khamenei and seen as a frontrunner for his succession. With this new government came in full force the fist of the “Gasht-e-Ershad,” which translates as “guidance patrols” and is widely known as the “morality police”. It is a unit of Iran’s police forces tasked with enforcing the laws on Islamic dress code in public. The latest victim of this brutal enforcement is Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who after being detained by the ‘morality police’ for violating the law on headscarves succumbed while in their custody. Her demise has sparked protests in Iran and around the world demanding that the government end the reign of the ‘morality police’, a revision of the Iranian regime’s Islamic laws and justice for Amini.

The international media has been covering the protests with great zeal and rightfully so but as with much of this coverage we have yet again come to witness the narrow focus of the Western gaze. Yes, it is a worldwide responsibility for the media to keep its cameras rolling and its coverage live, aiding in the plight of an oppressed and unjustly treated people, but it is also the media’s responsibility to zoom out and understand that its rhetoric and analysis should encompass a wider perspective all the while considering the impact of their reporting. 

The Western media has casually named the worldwide protests over the outrageous killing of Amini the ‘Anti-Hijab Protests,’ with no regard to what such a naming would have on the hundreds of millions of Muslim women around the world who choose to cover their hair as a symbol of their religious faith. The manner in which the Western media packages and sells the news, be it unconsciously or with full knowledge of the consequences, has long played a negative role in portraying the majority of moderate Muslims who practise their faith in its true essence of peace and tolerance. Once again, we witness the erosion of this beautiful religion of peace at the hands of the media in the West. It seems nothing was learned from the racial profiling and emotional damage that the media has caused after the September 11 attacks of 2001 whose effects Arabs and Muslims in general still feel reverberating through most airport security checkpoints around the world. Muslim names, dark skin, long beards and headscarves are targets of unjust, racist and humiliating consequences of a media’s narrow coverage of news from the Middle East that the world must put up with for generations.

The so-called ‘morality police’ is a work of fiction that extremist governments have created to control their people, it has no background in the Islamic faith and never existed historically in any form since the dawn of this religion. It is and has always been a weapon for the collective mentality to control and silence individual expression. 

Sadly, Amini is not the first female to fall victim at the hands of the Iranian regime. In 2009’s Iranian presidential elections the world witnessed the final moments of Neda Agha-Soltan’s life broadcast through a cellphone camera, a student of philosophy and a music teacher, who was protesting the integrity of the elections and was shot in the chest; she was 26 years old. 

By painting the suffering of the Iranian people as a rage against Islam the Western media is not only misrepresenting these brave protests but demeaning them. The Iranian people are not protesting the ‘hijab’ or their faith, they are and have been for years protesting for freedom of expression of this faith, a freedom that is practised in Muslim countries around the world. The media need not cast its eyes away from this truth, the truth of a people’s true desire for freedom, and must be held accountable for the consequences of its categorical representation of the plight of oppressed people. 

The coverage of such injustices should not create new ones. Muslim women around the world who choose to wear the hijab or dress modestly should not because of the Western media’s rhetoric suffer being viewed as oppressed, they should not be judged for their choices or painted as a target for harassment. The hijab is not a symbol of an oppressive regime as the media would like the world to associate it with, it is a symbol of respect for a faith Muslim women around the world wear with pride. 

Muslim women have the freedom of choice, taking away this freedom is non-Islamic, it is dictatorship in Islamic clothing.

This article was first published in the Gulf Today Newspaper on 04-10-2022.

The subjective morality of human rights

 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was born from the belly of one of modern history’s beasts, the Second World War. It came to life in retaliation to the horrific injustices that occurred, a noble armour that would shield every human and offer protection from the theft and desecration of what is rightfully ours, those “basic rights and fundamental freedoms.”

The Declaration consists of 30 articles that draft its basic aims from the Four Freedoms State of the Union speech given by US President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 proposing that freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and from fear are the fundamental rights that all humans must have. This notion of human rights, which has become a staple in today’s rhetoric and commonplace for many an argument, is barely eighty years old. The idea has survived and at times gained momentum, but what of the strength of this non-legally binding unified agreement? How protective are its powers really?

Governments continue to violate human rights daily. The United States of America has designated itself as the defender of these rights and has justified great wars in their name even as its human rights records have been abysmal. Iraq’s invasion that followed the September 11 attacks stands witness to a wholly unjustified war against a country that was not involved in the terror inflicted on New York City that fateful day. Freedoms and security were promised to the people of Iraq and the motive, the definite knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was invaded, Saddam was neutralised, the Iraqi people are no closer to freedom today than they were in Saddam Hussein’s era and the mass destructive weapons… never existed. As per the human rights agreement someone should be held responsible for the atrocities that happened during this war and the sponsors of the crimes that have been committed on false pretences should have been prosecuted. None of that happened.

Figures show that even after the American military’s blatant use of torture and prisoner abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison hundreds of governments continue to engage in torture to this day. The Israeli government continues to ignore UN resolutions, breaking international laws by bombing Gaza, terrorising civilians and building unsanctioned settlements on Palestinian land. The Chinese government is holding Uyghur Muslims in detention camps where an entire segment of the population is subjected to all kinds of abuse in order to denounce their faith. Journalists are being suffocated, silenced, even shot through bullet proof vests by governments who do not believe that freedom of speech is a right every person is entitled to, governments who fear words more than arms. Women’s rights remain a continuous battle around the globe; where education as a basic right is nothing but a dream and where possession of their own bodies is a debatable matter.

The past decades have seen several wars ignited, as a result of which the United Nations recorded more than 100 million people have been forcibly displaced and seeking refuge. With this great influx of migration Western democracies saw their human rights idealism being challenged. The European Union’s opinion on asylum-seeking migrants was one of the key issues that led to the catastrophic blow of losing the United Kingdom. As the numbers of migrants increased and news of boats filled with searching souls capsizing on the shores of the West reached the world, we began witnessing how governments’ idealism wavered and suddenly those non-negotiable rights were being negotiated.

We hear the same term being used to make radically different arguments yet through actions it becomes obvious that the clarification does not comply with the justification, and we are left wondering, baffled by what hypocrisy is leading these debates and how articulate they have become in selling an oddly subjective form of idealism.

Human Rights are usually synonymous with the word democracy generalising from the onset that non-democratic governments are, by definition, ones that infringe on the rights of their citizens. The arguably biased International Human Rights law, which is viewed as one of modern humanity’s greatest achievements loses its power, is continuously being challenged, discredited and at times even ignored because of its ambiguity. Its Western leaning influence has left it tone-deaf to non-democratic societies and its unclear mechanisms of implementation has allowed for it to be challenged and defeated. An ambiguous law is a dangerous one because it allows for the concept to be misused, neglected or worse, weaponised. This is the reason why people are always left wondering how some injustices are justified by the nations who have drafted the law of rights and others are not.

These questionings are on the forefront of recent debates on the war in Ukraine. As Ukrainians fled the bombings European nations absorbed over 5 million refugees in a span of 4 months. In isolation this is an admirable gesture, one that should have chests swell with pride to see humanity moving so fast in aid of its brethren yet unfortunately, this is not an isolated event. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the situation in Libya and parts of Africa have forced millions out of their dismal lives in search of refuge to these same countries, who in over a decade have not taken in half the number of fleeing Ukrainians. Today the UK is under fire for its plan to deport Rwandan refugees, making way for ‘other’ migrants, with the knowledge that some will face irreversible harm.

There are those who conceive of human rights as a given and those who conceive of human rights as agreed upon. There are those who conceive of human rights as to be fought for and those who conceive of them as principles to debate and most are wading in the turbulent waters between the practical and theoretical.

One would like to believe that the idealising of human rights in progressive nations is a notion that will prevail against all evils and will eventually blanket the world with the humanity that every person rightly deserves but we live in a world of absolute realism. There is no longer any room for ideals in a world governed by political gains, financial incentives and the enthusiastically cultivated individuality mindset. 

Seeing as to how governments have failed in most cases to honour that which it held to be an absolute truth, one must insist that it is time we took another look at the laws of human rights, it is time we made it a legally binding agreement whose consequences are far more severe and absolute than to be vetoed by the mighty.

This article was first published in Gulf Today newspaper on 22-06-2022.

History cannot remain masculine

Women are mostly kept out of history books, and if they are marvellous enough to have made it into them their images most likely did not 

History is a past retold, a series of events that have been documented by those who have witnessed their occurrence. It is human nature to write of that which interests us, of facts that are deemed essential at the time of inscription and that is why history as is documented, is as much an interpretation, as it is a collection of facts. The names and events that have made it into history books have changed the world one way or the other, their existence and our knowledge of it is essential, but what of those names that were never uttered by history teachers, are their world-altering actions erased? Or do their trials and tribulations factor into the shaping of the future whether they are remembered or not?

If we casually flick through the history books we are most likely to see pages filled with iconic figures that have left their imprint on the world, most of which are men. Great and not-so-great men have both maimed and healed our world simultaneously and from their experiences we have much to learn. Even those of us who are not prolific in politics, sports or technology are instantaneously able to recognise an image of such men as Che Guevara, Maradona and Steve Jobs. Though just as it may be, to have such figures made iconic and embraced by pop-culture how many of those faces we see on posters, T-shirts and spray-painted on walls are of women? Does that mean that throughout history no woman has ever been iconic enough? Or is it that the telling of her story was not deemed essential to those documenting at the time of inscription? No female face would be so widely and easily identified except maybe those of whom who made it to the silver screen. Could you point out Florence Nightingale in a series of photos like you would Marilyn Monroe? Would you know the great Fatima al-Fihri’s contribution to the world just as you would Umm Kulthum’s?

Throughout the world and specifically throughout the Middle-Eastern one, much to do with women is concealed. Women are mostly kept out of history books, and if they are marvellous enough to have made it into them their images most likely did not. This makes it impossible for people to know of them and for those searching for them it makes for an absolutely exhausting task, in turn their accomplishments and impact on the world are rendered obsolete and the chance of people learning from them non-existent. Just as is the way of the world, change is inevitable and for women’s struggle with history, change is coming. 

Recently Muslim women have become more visible than they ever were, standing up to oppression and advocating the plight of minorities around the world. In a visual world where icons are required their images have helped immortalise their work. Malala Yousafzai’s survival and perseverance has become a representation of all women facing the horrors of extremism and the plight for female education. Young girls today have forces such as seventeen-year-old Ahed Tamimi, whose brave defiance in the face of Zionist settlers landed her in prison, catapulting her to icon-status for resistance against occupation around the world. Women have become revolutionary icons, Iranian Neda Agha-Soltan, a student, who died from a fatal shot to the head during protests in Tehran has become a symbol of an entire revolution. Along with Egypt’s Ghada Kamal Abdul Khaleq, known to the Western press as the Girl in the Blue Bra and affectionately dubbed Sitt el Banat (Leader of the Girls) in Egypt, whose image being dragged half-naked by police has become a source of artistic representation of oppression. 

During the Women’s March against the Trump administration in the United States an image of Munira Ahmed wearing the American flag as a Hijab (headdress) became the representation of American tolerance and pro-immigration ideals. And the latest brave soul who was unfortunately taken too soon is Palestinian Razan Najjar, a twenty-one-year-old paramedic, who spent her days saving the lives of fellow countrymen and women peacefully protesting the Israeli occupation. She was killed in cold blood by an Israeli sniper while attending to the injured, she will forever be a symbol of humanity amidst bloodshed.

Because we have borne witness to those women who have shattered glass ceilings and died for their rights we have the obligation to correct the errors of the past, to not let their work go unnoticed, to broadcast, interview, write and teach about those women who are changing our world. In the near future the images in history will differ and the faces who changed the world would no longer be reserved for the masculine. We always knew history to be a story told by him but the future will have one that is written by her as well.

This article was first published in The Gulf Today newspaper 10 June, 2018 http://bit.ly/2JCRplR  
Arabic version of the article appeared on the same day  in Al Khaleej newspaper http://bit.ly/2McgVg4

Barricaded in Ideological Bunkers

The world has shrunk. The vastness that our ancestors experienced is no longer. We have paved roads, built bridges, rode the waves and flew among the clouds to make sure that no place was beyond our reach, we aimed for the moon and touched it. As a generation we are today the most connected we have ever been, the most exposed and yet our social and intellectual disconnect is ever so prevalent. Information is abundant, it flows through so many sources that what once was a river one waded through is now a flood we struggle to keep afloat in. How difficult it has become to decipher the truth from the fictitious, to trust one’s own eyes over the art of image distortion. Information is power and if readings have taught us anything, it is that power inevitably corrupts. 

Realising that the information torrent is not to be restrained we built dams, cyber dams that attempted to identify us and according to our online actions, categorised and sorted information based on what the algorithms concluded our interests were. At the onset it seemed a logical solution to an impending problem, one is fed the information he/she is interested in and the rest is filtered out, but just like any experiment the long-term results tend to vary from immediate ones. In this case the negative effects have surpassed those of the initial problem for by altering the way we consume information we have altered the way we differentiate, analyse and digest it.

Bewildered by the sheer amount of information we have devised a way that has made us the most sorted culture we have ever been, categorised by apps and search engines we are no longer hiding from the other, we are blind to it. We have the choice to follow the news that is important to us, categorised into subjects of interest of course, we choose the images we would like to see and the people we have conversations with based on criteria that appeal to us, we have unconsciously placed ourselves in the information comfort zone. It is common knowledge that surrendering to the comfort zone limits one’s experiences and keeps them from mental and emotional growth yet people have found a way to sort themselves into these comfortable ideological bunkers in which only the familiar is available. 

Many of us no longer expose or surround ourselves with people who disagree with us politically or ideologically, we have the ability through a click of a button to silence those whose beliefs we find culturally offensive or merely different, and while this might be both convenient and comfortable it is also dangerous. 

The walls we build around us to keep the noise out only reverberate the same ideas, notions and beliefs we enforce, leaving no room for debate. When we opt out of an argument we are choosing to ignore opposing views thereby failing to understand the other. Humans are social creatures that thrive through connections, ones that cannot be made if we willingly close our minds henceforth closing our hearts to that which is different. As we seek out our preferred social settings we are contributing to the segregation of nations. There is great benefit in the variety of opinions and the outcomes of intellectual debates, a fostering of a more tolerant society one that is all the more enlightened for it. 

It is fear that reinforces the walls we build, people are afraid to be swayed from their convictions, afraid to question their moral instincts and expose themselves to ideas that may challenge the fabric of their entire existence, but what are we if we are not seeking to better ourselves? 

Change is nothing to be afraid of and if one’s curiosity changes them then they will be all the wiser for it. So read outside your preferred genre, expose your eyes to art that provokes you and engage in conversations with people who hail from worlds alien to your own, only then will you pave intellectual roads, build emotional bridges, ride diverse journeys, and fly among ideas that liberate. Aim for that which you fear and touch it for the closer we get to that which scares us the less afraid we become.

This article was first published in The Gulf Today newspaper 20 February, 2018  http://bit.ly/2BEkfh3

Arabic version of the article appeared on the same day  in Al Khaleej newspaper http://bit.ly/2ocPrwD

2017, The Year of Female Reckoning

As a year comes to a close we tend to look back in reflection at its most memorable moments and although this year had many it remains distinguishable from the rest, for it is not often that we witness a tangible shift in perspective happen in the span of 12 months. 2017 has been the year of female reckoning whose path was paved by the electing of a man with sexual harassment cases filed against him and who was filmed speaking abhorrently about what ‘powerful men’ are allowed to do to women. The election of the 45th President to the land of the free ignited all kinds of protests but none as massive as the Women’s March that took place on January 21st, a day after the presidential oath was sworn, it was the largest single-day protest recorded in US history. 

Like it or not, Trump was the best thing to happen to women’s solidarity since the Suffragettes.

From that moment onwards the world got a sense of something stirring within the female community, suddenly more women began identifying with feminism a word that until recently was viewed as derogatory, and more men were finally recognising that gender-equality is not a demand to be made solely by women, it was a human right everyone should be advocating. The news during 2017 was peppered with issues such as gender-pay gap, violence against women, and sex discrimination in the workplace, terminology that has been deemed unfashionable and lost its potency in the US since the explosion of feminism in the 1970s. We saw the year end with two words and a hashtag placed in front of them that have been retweeted, shared and worn as a badge of honour by women around the world, the hashtag #MeToo, used by women to indicate their exposure to sexual harassment, was in the millions only a few days after the actress Alyssa Milano used it as a call for action against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. No one could predict the number of personal stories from all around the world that came pouring in via this hashtag and all of a sudden it was clear that sexual harassment is a worldwide pandemic that no woman or girl is immune to. The sheer magnitude of the #MeToo hashtag did not allow for any more excuses to be made, no longer was shaming the victim a possibility and brushing off sexual harassment as anything other than the predatory behaviour that it really is, was not a viable option anymore. 

This year saw great names fall and a lifetime of careers extinguished. Power, the one aspiration such men dream of, no longer legitimised their bullying and unwelcome advances. 2017 is the year that redefined what it means to be a ‘man of power’. Time magazine has chosen its person of the year for 2017 to be the ‘Silence Breakers’, the women who spoke out about their abusers, it listed women from different races, professions and age-groups whose voices helped push a stagnant female movement to a point of no return. 

The age-old patriarchy that has enforced its power on women since the dawn of time never changed, it had just assimilated into the new age and camouflaged its way into civil society creeping through the alleyways all the way up to the boardrooms of international conglomerates. It wears many masks and hides behind so many reasons but women recognise it wherever it appears. Girls feel it when they walk to school every day; women are haunted by it in places that are meant to be safe havens. For years women believed that because a man can never truly understand that icky feeling one gets as she is paid an unsolicited compliment or told a sexist joke or worse, that there was no use of trying to explain, that this was just how the world went. But even if it did, it shouldn’t, and there is no better time to change it. The shaming culture that has kept women’s mouths shut for so long is on its way towards extinction for the door to proclamation has been kicked open with the force of a thousand years of restraint and the injustices have been shouted out with the shrill of a thousand years of shamed silence. 

2017 was the year of female reckoning and women have everything to look forward to.

This article was first published in The Gulf Today newspaper 26 December, 2017 http://bit.ly/2C36OFD

Arabic version of the article appeared on the same day in Al Khaleej newspaper http://bit.ly/2C4E9jw

Society between Fake News and WhatsApp knowledge

Donald Trump’s inauguration brought with it the term most used by this president and his office yet. The term ‘Fake News’ has been used by Trump and his team to oppose, debunk or slam any question they do not wish to answer. For the sake of clarification, this term means the spreading of false information that is manipulated to look like credible journalism mostly made possible and aided by social media. We have witnessed the leader of the Free World accuse prominent news agencies of falsifying information yet while viewers gawked at Trump’s administration the truth remains that most people around the world cannot distinguish between what is real news and what is fake. 

Recent studies have shown that people tend to deem a piece of news false if its content stands in opposition to their ideological views and beliefs. Today the line between what is real and what is fake in the world of news has been well and truly blurred. The rapidity with which great quantities of information are dumped on people has created a silent infectious disease of mass confusion. This bombardment has left consumers of information exhausted, no longer having the energy to sift through the murk to discover the truth in a world of falsity and this is where the ailment of our society lies. People worldwide are receiving millions of fragmented stories, headlines and manipulated images on an hourly basis ranging from politics to health and even religion. 

Message applications such as WhatsApp allow for the circulation of such information to the masses relying on a snowball effect starting from a single person’s contact list. The forwarding hysteria knows no time constraints for one could receive said message at any time of the day or night as if the fate of humanity depended on it. These ‘news/informative’ pieces whose origins are unknown and writers almost always anonymous are taken as truths thereby making their way into day to day conversations and even used as advice for self-medication remedies. The result is a culture that is guided by questionable information offering a shallow and debatable knowledge of the world.  

As a direct consequence of this ‘surface-scratching’ culture we are witnessing the professional journalistic, scientific and educational institutions suffer for if readers no longer care about fact-checking, credibility or references where does that leave the entities that dedicate their entire resources towards their procurement? 

It is indeed a sorrowful state that even in highly educated societies this affliction seems to be taking hold, a state that demands the valuing and aiding of credible sources. People must refuse to be a cog in the ‘Fake News’ churning machine by putting a halt to their instinctive forwarding habits for it is one thing to learn something false and another thing entirely to aid in teaching it as truth. 

If a topic intrigues you, learn more about it, if a news piece moves you then find out the details and when approaching a conversation please do not make WhatsApp knowledge your only point of reference. 

A society is but a sum of its parts and if its most crucial one, its knowledge, is although not lacking but has become tainted then a society’s future will be too. The stream of information that cuts through a society is ever-flowing; at times even flooding the world, much of it needs to be filtered because just like the rest of our planet we have managed to dump our waste in that too.

This article was first published in The Gulf Today newspaper on 26 Feb, 2017  http://bit.ly/2mqGcX7

Arabic version of this article was published in Al Khaleej newspaper http://bit.ly/2mj0ogS