Wrong Perceptions

So, currently I'm in the middle of no where in Syria and can't wait to get back to Damascus tomorrow. Don't get me wrong this place is amazing. Its a hilly place with lots of green, you can see the bedouins and their tents every now and then, and then spot a shepherd with his herd of sheep, feeding on the new grown grass. The sunrise is magical I must say. But I think I found out today that staying for a prolonged period of time away from civilization is not really my thing, especially when the closest shawarma place is 130 Km away (just kidding restaurants selling shawarma are not that important to me...or are they?). I will post a photo of this place and let you people judge for yourself; why not encourage tourism to this country, ey?

So the point of this post is that, yesterday morning I was driving back to the place we are staying with this english guy Im working with and he tells me about this incident that happened to him when he was working in Algeria. So the Story goes,

"I used to work in Algeria in this facility in a remote place in the deserts. The facility was close by a small village, and although we (i.e. the English gentleman and the people working with him) wanted to go check out that village; we were advised not to and were told it was not safe. When my work was done I left and went back to England. On the same day I get a phone call and was told that two of my colleagues were killed by men from that village"

So I asked,"really??!! how come? what's the reason, why did they do it??"

He replies hesitantly," well they were fundamental islamists and thought that anyone who is not muslim should be killed. They beheaded a French guy and a swiss guy but the third one managed to convince them that he was Muslim so they let him go."

All I could say then was,"what a shame."

The story and any discussion ended there, simply because we reached our camp and had parked, so that is an automatic end to any discussion that anyone would have been having in a car (right?).

Anyways, I felt like I had to ask him what he thought about Islam and what not but didn't get the chance to. I wanted to argue that he shouldn't get any wrong perceptions about Islam because of that incident, and wanted to tell him that just like extremists exist in any country and in any time/culture/religion, for example the KKK,extremism and extremists would always be a minority in a minority, because I'm sure that even when racism in the US was at its worst levels, many people at that time would not go around killing people with darker skin colour on a regular basis otherwise there won't be any African-Americans left in America. I am not sure if he has the wrong perception about Islam, he is living in Syria where the majority population are Muslim, but I just find it frustrating having to go around telling people with wrong perceptions about Islam that "we (as muslims) are not evil". It is a tedious job trying to get people to know what something is really about. I could only imagine how tough it was for messengers and prophets or even revolutionary figures of our time had to go through. To continuously be guiding people requires a person with such strong commitment and endurance to keep on going.

Stuff that Whirl in my head

Has the world gone mad? or are there only a few people who think that it has? Relative and perspective are the words here that we need to look at. For some this age denotes the time of great technological advances, of human intellectuality reaching its highest potentials and still pressing on, of human affluence and comfortable lives; others view this age as the age of moral corruptness, greed and injustice, the individual over the masses, of subjugation of the weak and the Earth to the desires of the powerful and strong.

And in all that mess we even fail to understand each other as humans due to culture and religious differences. To be honest this is not uncommon or unheard of, history is filled with events where the powerful and rich places an iron fist on the weak and helpless, where massacres have happened because one person believes in the Cross and the other believes in fire. But having reached a level where as I stated earlier of such high intellectual thought why we as humans still act in such ways, and why does it seem that sometimes we live in two different worlds?

In reality we don't live in two different worlds, but we make sure that we believe that we do sometimes due to our own prejudices. Walter Lippmann puts it this way,“When full allowance has been made for deliberate fraud, political science has still to account for such facts as two nations attacking one another, each convinced that it is acting in self-defense. . . . They live, we are likely to say, in different worlds. More accurately, they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones.”

We all know that today we live in a village rather than a World, yet we still see how primitive people become when two different people are faced against each other. I guess its as simple as human nature, that we humans still behave in a tribal fashion; we stick to those we share similarities with and fight against those who are different, whether wrong or right. Its also got to do with the fact that we as humans would rather belong than not to belong; would rather fight with the wrong-doers than being a renegade, an outcast. I don't think that we as humans, have reached a level where we are aware that we are not mature enough yet.

Into Conspiracy Theories?

Are you? well, this might be new for you, if you don't already know this, that is!

In the past couple of years the conspiracy theory (or for those who believe in conspiracy theories I should call this evidence) of a new world order headed by freemasons and illuminati members that control most of the worlds' governments and mainly America, has been spreading like wildfire especially on the internet. Now this all new theory (new because I just found out about it) will really twist your brains and shock you.

Apparently, there is this new "weapon" called Chemtrail where chemical or biological agents are sprayed into the atmospere inducing different climatic changes including rain, snow, drought, heat, cold, storms and even Earthquakes depending on the chemicals being sprayed and electromagnetic radiation being emitted in the case of Earthquakes or something like that. You can google it and you will get a wikipedia page that will give you further information.

Accordingly, some doctors in universities in Egypt and other parts of the world have stated that some climatic changes and events that took part over the past couple of years have actually been part of this Chemtrail project which has been first developed by the Soviets and then later after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the technology was further developed by the US, Israel, China and Japan and maybe India according to the e-mail I received regarding this matter. In an article in Al Ahram newspaper dated 7th July 2007 an Egyptian University of Cairo Doctor named Munir Muhammad Al-Husaini who lectures at the faculty of Agriculture lecturing in Biological control and environmental protection, stated that the Chemtrail has been used in North Korea to induce a drought which destroyed the country's rice source; in Tora-Bora Afghanistan to induce drought and force its inhabitants to migrate; in Iraq in 1991, etc. He also said that the reason for the rise in temperatures especially in the North Africa and Middle East region has been due to experiements carried out by the US and Israel using this weapon giving an example of the swarms of rats that came through Egypt and other parts of the Middle East in 2004.

Its a hefty e-mail with lots of information which I'm not going to go through all right now. It is an interesting conspiracy theory, very much different to what we are used to and could be the next 2012 or The Da Vinci code type of movie. Just to point out that this technology will be completely developed in 2025 and that by then the US will be able to control the weather in any part of the world. Hmmm, isn't that in some movie? I'm sure that I've seen something like this..?

Anyways, Chemtrail, next big thing guys.. watch out!! :)

Celebrating my return

You heard what Hosni my good friend said the other day? No..? he said that El Baradei is not the national hero of Egypt; the Egyptian people are.

Your damn right! They are the ones that had to put up with your bullshit for the past 30 years!