Jordan’s Rainbow Street Living

Somewhere Over On Rainbow

Published in Living Well Magazine

By Rana F. Sweis

November, 2009

Decades after it first opened, customers still flock to Awni supermarket on Rainbow Street in Jabal Amman. The shop owner, Mohammad Swenda, says for many years the neighborhood was quiet, his customers familiar, and every day was predictable. But, in the past few years, change arrived drastically for this relatively historic and calm part of the capital.  In 2005, the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) identified Jabal Amman as a “heritage attraction point.” The major transformation for Rainbow Street began with the JD2 million renovation of the 1,500 meter-long pathway. “Rainbow Street is a distinguished neighborhood that includes prominent historic homes,” says Fawzi Masad, deputy director of Public Works at the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM). “Due to the historical significance of the area, it was our duty to create a strategy in order to revive the neighborhood.” For some businesses in the area, the revival has generated more income. “We have had our ups and downs through the years, but we’ve been doing well lately,” says Median Al Jazerah, owner of Books@Cafe, who explains that when the café first opened on Omar Bin Al Khatab street in 1997, the narrow one-way road was dark and empty. “This place has become a haven because deep down, everyone yearns for their own history.”

Due to the area’s historical significance and identity, any permits submitted to GAM have to receive approval from the archeological division. “The important aspect we have to remember about Rainbow Street is it has always been diverse both socially and architecturally,” explains Firas Al Rabady, head of the archeological division committee at GAM. “At the end of the day, we cannot accept development that will only result in destroying the identity and soul of this place.”

Rainbow Street, named after the now demolished Rainbow Cinema, was one of the first settled areas in Amman. As the capital continues to expand, the avenue remains a connecting line between East and West Amman. Today several families sit down eating sandwiches on a newly built park with benches on the first circle. Young men gather with friends. After the sun sets, people sit in café’s, some prefer to sit on the sidewalks along Rainbow Street. Old Arabic music blares from inside an old café’, while a whiff of loud American hip-hop music can be heard from a car passing by. Along the road, young people on the left drink tea with mint in old shaped vintage glasses, others drink lattes and frappes they bought from a new café’ nearby. Cars zoom by, some honk while waiting for traffic to move; the sound of loud firecrackers startles some passersby.

For some residents, the development in the area, including the opening of several new cafés, restaurants, shops and an all-day Friday souk is presenting a host of problems they never faced before. Parking congests the area, visitors park their cars in front of homes – privacy has become a concern. Noises from pedestrians strolling by and honking cars leave some residents sleepless at night. “We are suffering because this has become a noisy neighborhood. People peek into our gardens and at some point in the day we cannot leave our homes because it takes us hours to return due to traffic,” explains Ghassan Talhouni, who has lived in this area for 56 years.

Two years ago, Al Jazerah says he was forced to resort to providing valet service for customers. Store owners are required to pay parking fees as a prerequisite for opening, even if there are no specific designated parking spots in front of their premises. Two parking lots, including one at the beginning of first circle, provide space for less than 60 cars. Both residents and visitors say there are simply not enough parking spots in comparison to the number of places springing up. “We have complained,” says Talhouni. “I am not against development, but when you want to create a strategy and decide to implement it, you present it as a whole package – including where people are going to park their cars.” Fawzi notes that GAM converted the only empty land in the locality into a parking lot. “There is simply no more empty land in the neighborhood that can be converted into space for cars,” he adds. “The goal of the renovated plan for Rainbow Street is to make it pedestrian-friendly, and the use of private cars is discouraged, while public transportation is promoted.”

A group of local residents with a common aim of making a difference established the Jabal Amman Resident Association (JARA) in 2004. They endeavor to conserve the identity of Jabal Amman and manage the souk every Friday during the summer. “Over the years, some old homes were sold, others were abandoned and so, we wanted to preserve these buildings, and at the same time bring life back to this neighborhood,” says Khader Qawas, board member and treasurer of JARA. Parking, he explains, is a general problem in Amman, but more specifically in Jabal Amman. The souk opened in 2005, and each year more tables have been added. “Today, almost 5,000 people visit the market on Fridays, and on some days it can reach up to 8,000, so, we have an obvious problem with traffic and parking.” This summer, JARA received permission to use several school parking lots in the area. “I admit even that is not enough, we are trying to ease the problem at this stage,” Qawas explains.

Talhouni says one of the solutions to traffic jams and parking is to transfer the souk to downtown where a long street would be closed for pedestrians, “There would be ample space for even more people to sell products, not to mention additional parking spaces,” he explains. “You will still be reviving the area because downtown is so close, but at the same time you solve a problem and give people from all over Jordan the opportunity to sell their items and showcase their talents.”

Andrea Atalla moved to Jabal Amman a year ago and lives parallel to Souk Jara. Like Talhouni, she would prefer that souk Jara be moved to a non-residential area. “The music is loud in the evening, we don’t invite any guests on Friday nights in the summer, the traffic jam is horrible, it’s too loud and we can’t sit in the garden.” Some residents, she says, have complained for years. “In the evening, what you basically get are hooligans who are not allowed to go into the souk and instead sit on my car, yell, make problems and wander aimlessly in the street.” Her husband grew up in this area and says she fears what lies ahead for Rainbow Street. “I know the neighborhood is being revived and is appealing to investors,” she explains. “However, it is doing so precisely because of its identity, character and simplicity and it’s a big fear for me that the place will lose its charm.”

###

Chimanda Adichie on the danger of a single story

Click here to watch this TED video:

In Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun has helped inspire new, cross-generational communication about the Biafran war. In this and in her other works, she seeks to instill dignity into the finest details of each character, whether poor, middle class or rich, exposing along the way the deep scars of colonialism in the African landscape.

Adichie’s newest book, The Thing Around Your Neck, is a brilliant collection of stories about Nigerians struggling to cope with a corrupted context in their home country, and about the Nigerian immigrant experience.

NPR: Foreign Dispatch Podcast

 

Foreign Dispatch is a weekly podcast of the biggest news and best stories as covered by National Public Radio’s Foreign correspondents from around the world.

Visit this podcast’s Web site

Charity: Water a simple yet brilliant idea

Click to watch how one idea changed hundreds of lives

Peace and Prosperity in Jenin, West Bank?

PBS Episode: Peace and Prosperity in the West Bank?

Once one of the most dangerous cities in the West Bank, Jenin. Today, however, there’s been a huge turnaround. Jenin is now the center of an international effort to build a safe and economically prosperous Palestinian state.

Watch the Video

Cheat Sheet: Must Reads From All Over

Daily Beast’s cheat sheet is a must read.

Stories to Listen to on NPR

1) Is Hamas Support in Gaza Waning?

2) What  J Street May Mean for America and…the Middle East?

3) Naguib Mahfouz Book of Dreams

4) Afghanistan: A Woman Among Women

Torture songs spur a protest most vocal

Musicians call for release of records on Guantanamo detainee treatment

By Joe Heim
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 22, 2009

Was the theme to “Sesame Street” really played to torture prisoners held at Guantanamo and other detention camps? What about Don McLean’s “American Pie”? Or the Meow Mix jingle? Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”?

A high-profile coalition of artists — including the members of Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and the Roots — demanded Thursday that the government release the names of all the songs that were blasted since 2002 at prisoners for hours, even days, on end, to try to coerce cooperation or as a method of punishment.

Read more

Is This the Device That Will Revolutionize Reading? – The Daily Beast

Yesterday, Barnes and Noble unveiled its e-book reader, the Nook, but despite modern bells and whistles, it’s one of the most low-technology concepts that may challenge the primacy of the mighty Kindle.

Posted using ShareThis

Ben Gunn, the blogging prisoner locked in a struggle

 

Ben Gunn was 14 when he killed a friend. Almost 30 years on, his blogging and protests about prison regime injustices ensure that he is still no nearer release. By Eric Allison

The government is expected to grant the vote to prisoners at the next election – and it will be due to the efforts of two men, both lifers. One of them, John “Ben” Gunn, has been locked up since the age of 14. Now, almost 30 years later, he is the general secretary of the Association of Prisoners (AoP).

Read the story

Impressive Amman Website

Read more about Amman’s story on this impressive new site:

Journalists Use Social Networks to Assist in Reporting

According to a new survey from Middleberg Communications and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), as reported in PRWeek , 70 percent of journalists said they use social networks to assist in reporting (compared to 41 percent last year). This is a huge spike in one year, though it shouldn’t surprise any of us with all the lists of journalists using Twitter and other social networks.

Read more…

Brutal Destruction Of Iraq’s Archaeological Sites Continues

Buried in Iraq’s clay and dirt is the history of Western civilization. Great empires once thrived here, cultures that produced the world’s first wheel, first cities, first agriculture, first code of law, first base-sixty number system, and very possibly the first writing. A brutal plundering of this rich cultural heritage has been taking place in broad daylight ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These days Ancient Mesopotamia looks more like a scene from the movie Holes.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-tucker/brutal-destruction-of-ira_b_290667.html

View slideshow and Read more at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-tucker/brutal-destruction-of-ira_b_290667.html

NYRB: The Afghanistan Impasse

There were hundreds of foreign observers to watch Afghans go to the polls on August 20. Both UN officials and a European Union delegation were assigned months ago to make sure it would be a creditable election. In fact, for the US and its NATO partners, most of this year has been taken up with preparing for the elections and trying to ensure sufficient security for them. Yet the entire Western community in Afghanistan was caught napping by the widespread fraud. How could the rigging have happened?

Read the article in NYRB

Daily Beast: One Company, 23 Suicides

Since early 2008, nearly two-dozen employees at France Telecom have taken their own lives. Is the communications giant’s corporate culture to blame? Eric Pape investigates.

Read this investigative piece

The Nation: Women Trafficking

A feature published in The Nation magazine:

“A lock on a brothel, for me, represents this element of violence and force,” says Haugen. “The lock is on the outside of the door, not inside.”

For Haugen, the locks are reminders of his calling: to break the chain of human rights abuses, one person at a time. He argues that the main problem facing the disenfranchised is not one of hunger, homelessness, lack of education or disease. Rather, the root cause of much of the suffering in the developing world is the failure of the criminal justice system to protect the poor from violence–the brutality that robs them of food, home, liberty and dignity.

Read the feature article in The Nation

Video: The Girl Effect

Clean Water

By Scott Harrison

Founder and president, charity: water

Nonprofits like ours that are addressing enormous problems (a billion people without clean water) are told to make sure we don’t scare people off by communicating how big the whole problem is.

Author Seth Godin recently wrote that the problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn’t work. He said “Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down. Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies and you won’t get a bigger donation, you’ll just get averted eyes.”

While all this may be true, it just seems rather boring. Visionless. I have to believe people want to sign up for something bigger than just one. I did.

There’s a proverb in the Bible that says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” People are certainly dying all around us, but could that be because we’re terrified to tackle the enormous? Because we don’t have the faith to see the entire problem solved?

I can’t quite see to a billion people yet, but I’m getting closer. Your generosity has helped us do that. In only three years, 60,000 people around the world have donated $11 million. That means 750,000 lives will change. 750,000 people will get clean water to drink.

So in the spirit of solving enormous problems, we want to step it up this September, and serve our first million people. Then keep going until every single person on the planet has clean and safe drinking water.

McDonalds served a billion people, didn’t they?

We made a video that explains how we want to do that. Please watch it, and share it.

We’ve also built a new website that allows everyone to use birthdays, anniversaries, weddings… to run marathons, swim and dance — do just about anything to help. Every dollar given is tracked to the project it funded, and GPS coordinates and photos are posted on Google Earth when complete. Like always, 100% goes directly to the field.

In only eight days, individuals already raised $80,000 towards our goal.

Read it in the Huffington Post

Amelia Earhart

Researchers are still trying to figure out what happened to aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared while flying over the South Pacific in 1937.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery — that’s TIGHAR for short — is run out of a converted garage in Rick Gillespie’s split level home in suburban Wilmington, Del. Gillespie’s khaki shirt has epaulets and the words “Search Crew” stitched on the front.

The TIGHAR office is crammed with documents and artifacts from downed aircraft found all over the world. The most precious artifact is wrapped in plastic in a blue tub that might ordinarily hold laundry.

Listen to this story on NPR

Also check the movie trailer for Amelia coming out in October

Opposing the death penalty is not about innocence

By Lee Kovarsky

Fighting the death penalty should not hinge on proving that innocent people have been sentenced to die.

As the attention paid to systemic failure grows, so too does the apparent need to posthumously exonerate a capital convict. It is now fair to say that a posthumous exoneration is the pièce de résistance of death penalty opposition. But ardent defenders of capital punishment appear comfortable to defend on this territory. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 2005 Supreme Court opinion that there is not “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.” For at least two reasons I discuss below, we must be careful not to overstate the importance of posthumous exoneration.

Read this article published in salon.com

Is Happiness Catching?

FOR DECADES, SOCIOLOGISTS and philosophers have suspected that behaviors can be “contagious.” In the 1930s, the Austrian sociologist Jacob Moreno began to draw sociograms, little maps of who knew whom in friendship or workplace circles, and he discovered that the shape of social connection varied widely from person to person. Some were sociometric “stars,” picked by many others as a friend, while others were “isolates,” virtually friendless. In the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists began to analyze how the shape of a social network could affect people’s behavior; others examined the way information, gossip and opinion flowed through that network. One pioneer was Paul Lazarsfeld, a sociologist at Columbia University, who analyzed how a commercial product became popular; he argued it was a two-step process, in which highly connected people first absorbed the mass-media ads for a product and then mentioned the product to their many friends. (This concept later bloomed in the 1990s and in this decade with the rage for “buzz marketing” — the attempt to identify thought-leaders who would spread the word about a new product virally.) Lazarsfeld also studied how political opinions flowed through friendship circles; he would ask a group of friends to identify the most influential members of their group, then map out how a political view or support for a candidate spread through and around those individuals.

Read the article…

Artist pushing limits teaching in the Middle East

“I went over there with a lot of fear, not knowing anything about the culture,” she says.

The longtime Lawrence-area artist, a 56-year-old journeywoman lecturer at area universities, finally landed a full-time position — teaching at the New York Institute of Technology campus in Amman, Jordan. She started a year ago this week.

After a year of frustrations, triumphs and plenty of education — both students’ and her own — Doner-Hedrick is headed back to the Middle East this week with a renewed sense of purpose both as an educator and an artist.

“I really found my place in life,” she says.

Read more…

For ‘Amreeka’ Director, Life As Inspiration For Art

Writer and director Cherien Dabis drew upon her own childhood experiences as a first-generation Arab immigrant growing up in the Midwest for her feature film Amreeka. The film explores the journey of a single mom and her teenage son as they emigrate from the West Bank to America during the first Gulf War. Amreeka has garnered high praise from both critics and audiences alike.

Listen to this Story

Congo’s ‘Hidden’ War

Although it has been strangely ignored in the Western press, one of the most destructive wars in modern history has been going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s third-largest country. During the past eleven years millions of people have died, while armies from as many as nine different African countries fought with Congolese government forces and various rebel groups for control of land and natural resources. Much of the fighting has taken place in regions of northeastern and eastern Congo that are rich in minerals such as gold, diamonds, tin, and coltan, which is used in manufacturing electronics.

Few realize that a main force driving this conflict has been the largely Tutsi army of neighboring Rwanda, along with several Congolese groups supported by Rwanda.

Read the article

Powerful Photo: US Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Her family is facing eviction, but Charity Crowell, 9, and her younger brother are enrolled in elementary school in Asheville, N.C

Read the article

Israel, Jordan Find Accord in Finding New Water Supplies

Jordan loses perhaps half of its water supply to leakage and illegal wells

Controversial Projects Include Network Linking the Dead Sea and the Red Sea

Washington Post:

Water is a major source of contention in the Middle East, whether it is tension over Egypt’s concerns about Sudan’s management of the southern Nile or disputes between Israel and the Palestinian Authority over shortages in the occupied West Bank. The water shortage is severe enough to upend some of the region’s traditional dynamics. Jordan and Israel are often pressured by Western nations and international organizations to cooperate in the name of Arab-Israeli peace. Water is one area in which pressure is running in the other direction, with the two pushing quickly on the Red Sea-Dead Sea connection while outside observers urge restraint.

Jordan now views the connection as central to the long-term stability of its water supply. Upset over the years spent discussing the project without concrete action, the country in the spring announced plans to proceed on its own. Israel has since said it would join its neighbor in an initial phase, even as the World Bank and environmental groups foresee perhaps two more years for studies to be completed before deciding whether the project should be built at all.

Read the article in the Washington Post

My Photos of Jordan (Random)

Social Scientists Deployed to Afghanistan?

Why are social scientists being deployed to Afghanistan?

As the White House turns its focus to the war in Afghanistan, President Obama has stressed the need to win over “the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people. That’s the goal of teams of anthropologists and social scientists who are currently embedded with troops in Afghanistan. Washington Post Reporter Vanessa Gezari, who’s writing a book about the ‘Human Terrain System’, explains how it works. And Dr. Karl Slaikeu, a psychologist and conflict resolution specialist currently along side troops in Afghanistan, offers a first hand perspective.

Listen to this story on NPR

Creative Jordanian Website

One of the more creative websites around in the Arab world.

Enjoy browsing:

Where is the Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance Program going?

After meeting with World Bank President, Robert Zoellick, Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister of Regional Development, Silvan Shalom, stated that the World Bank had agreed to fund the Red-Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance Program that involves Jordan, Palestine and Israel. However, Bank officials say that they have made no promises and that the project is still in the feasibility study phase.

The studies are slated to be completed in early 2011. According Lintner, the Bank has still not determined how much financial (or other) involvement it will have in the project’s future, but Lintner stated that by 2011, the three governments involved in the project will have decided what the Bank’s role will be if any, but that it is the governments’ decision to make. At this point the Bank’s only involvement is in the feasibility and the environmental impacts studies, which the governments of France, Greece, Italy, South Korea, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden and USA have jointly put in the allocated $16.2 million for.

Read more

The News About the Internet

The News About the Internet – The New York Review of Books

46 Million Uninsured Americans: A Look Behind The Number

“We are not a nation that accepts nearly 46 million uninsured men, women and children,” President Obama told doctors in a speech before the American Medical Association in Chicago in June. “We are not a nation that lets hardworking families go without coverage, or turns its back on those in need. We’re a nation that cares for its citizens. We look out for one another. That’s what makes us the United States of America. We need to get this done.”

And the White House Council of Economic Advisers pressed the number in its number-crunching case for a health overhaul: “Perhaps the most visible sign of the need for health care reform is the 46 million Americans currently without health insurance,” according to the report, also issued in June.

The 46 million number is a handy one — large and round — but who are the people it represents, and what does it mean for the rest of us that they don’t have insurance?

LISTEN TO THIS STORY on NPR

Daily Beast: Can USAID Survive Without a Leader?

Until last week, Farmer was rumored to be Hillary Clinton’s choice to head USAID, an organization that has languished without a leader for almost seven months. Then he bowed out, and Wednesday came news that he’s going to be the U.N. Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti under Bill Clinton. It’s probably a much better position for him—Farmer isn’t a bureaucrat, and Haiti, where he founded the pioneering Zanmi Lasante hospital, is by all accounts where his heart is. But it raises a question that’s being asked with increasing urgency within development circles—why can’t the Obama administration fill the void at the top of USAID?

Read more….

A very important topic since Jordan is very dependent on USAID…

Iraqi Refugees Struggle to Adjust to Life in U.S.

By KIRK SEMPLE

Not long after the Iraq War began in 2003, Uday al-Ghanimi was accosted by several men outside the American military base where he managed a convenience store. They accused him of abetting the Americans, and one fired a pistol at his head.

Now, after 24 operations, Mr. Ghanimi has a reconstructed face as well as political asylum in the United States. On July 4, his wife and three youngest children joined him in New York after a three-year separation.

But the euphoria of their reunion quickly dissipated as the family began to reckon with the colder realities of their new life. Mr. Ghanimi, 50, who has not been able to work because of lingering pain, is supporting his family on a monthly disability check of $761, food stamps and handouts from friends. They are crammed into one room they rent in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a city whose small Iraqi population is scattered. And Mr. Ghanimi’s wife and children do not speak English, deepening their sense of isolation.

A report released in June by the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement organization in New York, said that many Iraqi immigrants have been unable to find jobs, are exhausting government and other benefits and are spiraling toward poverty and homelessness.

“They say, ‘Let’s go back,’ ” Mr. Ghanimi said glumly. “It’s not what they were thinking. I told them, ‘Just be patient.’ ”

For years after the American invasion of Iraq, thousands of Iraqis clamored for admission to the United States and found the door all but closed — until the government reacted to widespread criticism in 2007 by making it easier for more to enter with special visas or as refugees.

But now that Iraqis are arriving in larger numbers, many are discovering that life in the United States is much harder than they expected.

Read the article

Amelia- Official Theatrical Trailer

Click here to watch the official trailor of Amelia, which will be out in theatres in October.

A look at the life of legendary American pilot Amelia Earhart, who disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 in an attempt to make a flight around the world. |

Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System

As cash-starved states slash mental health programs in communities and schools, they are increasingly relying on the juvenile corrections system to handle a generation of young offenders with psychiatric disorders. About two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates — who numbered 92,854 in 2006, down from 107,000 in 1999 — have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment.

“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intensive enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Youth Commission. “Jails and juvenile justice facilities are the new asylums.”

At least 32 states cut their community mental health programs by an average of 5 percent this year and plan to double those budget reductions by 2010, according to a recent survey of state mental health offices.

Read the article

The talented cartoonist: Brian Stone

Here are some cartoons by my friend Brian Stone

Jordan attracts major international productions

Two major international film productions and a popular South-American TV series recently wrapped shoots in Jordan.

Scorched, a Canadian production, directed by Denis Villeneuve concluded a five-week shoot in several locations across Jordan including Amman, Jarash, Irbid and Salt. Scorched is a feature film set in the Middle East and is due to be released next year. Villeneuve is well known for this previous film, Polytechnique, which was screened this year at the Cannes Film Festival.

Read more…

Councilman Tony Avella

By DAVID W. CHEN

It wasn’t a good moment to be the only member of the City Council who turned down an official parking pass, which allows members to park virtually anywhere.

Councilman Tony Avella was racing to Kopperfields restaurant in Bay Ridge, where one of the few groups supporting his insurgent mayoral campaign was gathering.

He circled the block in his Toyota Corolla looking for parking. Then he circled again. Finally he found a metered spot about six blocks from the bar.

“The moment that you don’t do what the ordinary person does in their daily lives, and you start acting like you’re above it, then you become a politician, and I hate politics,” Mr. Avella explained, as he clamped the steering wheel with the Club. “Hate it.”

Read the article…

Rise in suicide among American Soldiers

By ERICA GOODE

Sgt. Jacob Blaylock flipped on the video camera he had set up in a trailer at the Tallil military base, southeast of Baghdad.

He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke upward.

“Hey, it’s Jackie,” he said. “It’s the 20th of April. We go home in six days. I lost two good friends on the 14th. I’m having a hard time dealing with it.”

For almost a year, the soldiers of the 1451st Transportation Company had been escorting trucks full of gasoline, building materials and other supplies along Iraq’s dark, dangerous highways. There had been injuries, but no one had died.

Their luck evaporated less than two weeks before they were to return home, in the spring of 2007. A scout truck driving at the front of a convoy late at night hit a homemade bomb buried in the asphalt. Two soldiers, Sgt. Brandon Wallace and Sgt. Joshua Schmit, were killed.

The deaths stunned the unit, part of the North Carolina National Guard. The two men were popular and respected — “big personalities,” as one soldier put it. Sergeant Blaylock, who was close to both men, seemed especially shaken. Sometime earlier, feeling the strain of riding the gunner position in the exposed front truck, he had switched places with Sergeant Wallace, moving to a Humvee at the rear.

“It was supposed to be me,” he would tell people later.

The losses followed the men and women of the 1451st home as they dispersed to North Carolina and Tennessee, New York and Oklahoma, reuniting with their families and returning to their jobs.

Sergeant Blaylock went back to Houston, where he tried to pick up the pieces of his life and shape them into a whole. But grief and guilt trailed him, combining with other stresses: financial troubles, disputes with his estranged wife over their young daughter, the absence of the tight group of friends who had helped him make it through 12 months of war.

On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26.

“I have failed myself,” he wrote in a note found later in his car. “I have let those around me down.”

Over the next year, three more soldiers from the 1451st — Sgt. Jeffrey Wilson, Sgt. Roger Parker and Specialist Skip Brinkley — would take their own lives. The four suicides, in a unit of roughly 175 soldiers, make the company an extreme example of what experts see as an alarming trend in the years since the invasion of Iraq.

The number of suicides reported by the Army has risen to the highest level since record-keeping began three decades ago. Last year, there were 192 among active-duty soldiers and soldiers on inactive reserve status, twice as many as in 2003, when the war began. (Five more suspected suicides are still being investigated.) This year’s figure is likely to be even higher: from January to mid-July, 129 suicides were confirmed or suspected, more than the number of American soldiers who died in combat during the same period.

Those statistics, of course, do not offer a full picture. Suicide counts tend to be undercounts, and the trend is less marked in other branches of the military. Nor are there reliable figures for veterans who have left the service; the Department of Veterans Affairs can only systematically track suicides among its hospitalized patients, and it does not issue regular suicide reports.

Even so, stung by criticism from veterans groups and mental health advocates, the Pentagon and the veterans agency have increased efforts to understand and address the problem. They have bolstered suicide-prevention programs, hiring hundreds more mental health providers. At Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, where at least 14 soldiers have killed themselves this year alone, normal activities were suspended for three days in May and replaced with suicide-prevention training. Late last year, the Army commissioned a five-year, $50 million study of the causes of suicide among soldiers, turning to four outside experts to lead the research.

“The ‘business as usual’ attitudes of the past are no longer appropriate,” said George Wright, an Army spokesman. “It’s clear we have not found full solutions yet, but we are trying every remedy.”

Read more…

Read Ending It All

US: 12 and in Prison

An important editorial published in the NYT today:

The Supreme Court sent an important message when it ruled in Roper v. Simmons in 2005 that children under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed were not eligible for the death penalty. Justice Anthony Kennedy drew on compassion, common sense and the science of the youthful brain when he wrote that it was morally wrong to equate the offenses of emotionally undeveloped adolescents with the offenses of fully formed adults.

The states have followed this logic in death penalty cases. But they have continued to mete out barbaric treatment — including life sentences — to children whose cases should rightly be handled through the juvenile courts.

Congress can help to correct these practices by amending the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, which is up for Congressional reauthorization this year. To get a share of delinquency prevention money, the law requires the states and localities to meet minimum federal protections for youths in the justice system. These protections are intended to keep as many youths as possible out of adult jails and prisons, and to segregate those that are sent to those places from the adult criminal population.

The case for tougher legislative action is laid out in an alarming new study of children 13 and under in the adult criminal justice system, the lead author of which is the juvenile justice scholar, Michele Deitch, of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. According to the study, every state allows juveniles to be tried as adults, and more than 20 states permit preadolescent children as young as 7 to be tried in adult courts.

This is terrible public policy. Children who are convicted and sentenced as adults are much more likely to become violent offenders — and to return to an adult jail later on — than children tried in the juvenile justice system.

Despite these well-known risks, policy makers across the country do not have reliable data on just how many children are being shunted into the adult system by state statutes or prosecutors, who have the discretion to file cases in the adult courts.

But there is reasonably reliable data showing juvenile court judges send about 80 children ages 13 and under into the adult courts each year. These statistics explode the myth that those children have committed especially heinous acts.

The data suggest, for example, that children 13 and under who commit crimes like burglary and theft are just as likely to be sent to adult courts as children who commit serious acts of violence against people. As has been shown in previous studies, minority defendants are more likely to get adult treatment than their white counterparts who commit comparable offenses.

The study’s authors rightly call on lawmakers to enact laws that discourage harsh sentencing for preadolescent children and that enable them to be transferred back into the juvenile system. Beyond that, Congress should amend the juvenile justice act to require the states to simply end these inhumane practices to be eligible for federal juvenile justice funds.

Read more on Jordan’s attempt to reform its prison system.

Notable Mystery Writers

Notable Mystry Writers

Spotlight on World Mysteries, shines a spotlight on a selection of notable mystery writers from around the globe and their locations. Select an author to begin your own investigation into their work and world:

Click here…

Jordan: The Societies Law

Murad writes about the notion of one step forward, several steps backwards when it comes to progress in Jordan. We must examine the Societies law, which hinders progress for Jordan’s civil society and NGO’s that play a vital role in this country. This is an attack even on the notion of democratization. What is needed in the Arab world–in Jordan as well–is more of an understanding of the importance of volunteerism and a deeper understanding of citizenship. Democracy is not only about elections, it’s about increasing critical thinking and analysis in our education system, it’s instilling tools to empower men and women, it’s about increasing knowledge of what an individual can achieve. I believe that reaching individuals, giving them the tools and the opportunity is very powerful. Instead, non-profits will be too busy getting buried in bureaucracy and favoritism. This is a disgraceful move by the Parliament.

And that’s my two cents.

Read Murad’s excellent column in today’s Jordan Times

What other motive could be behind the passing of a Societies Law that has evolved to become one of the most debilitating legislations, hindering the progress of civil society, social responsibility, volunteer work, corporate social responsibility and all the other terminologies we bandy about to indicate that Jordan is living in an era of citizen-for-citizen action and government-people partnership? We thought that the society was finally waking up to its role in building the country and that government supported and encouraged that role, but this law is now telling it to revert to its previous apathetic state where it was not an active participant in the plans for the country.

Let me retrace and explain. The Societies Law, which enforces government scrutiny of the fundraising activities of NGOs in Jordan, had been amended by the government after lengthy discussions with NGOs in Jordan to reach a workable formula – for the time being – that would allow the government to have its control, but would also allow the NGOs to function.

This is really one of those situations where that favourite saying “the world has reached Mars but look at where we are” is really very apt.

Iraq’s National Symphony Orchestra

I haven’t heard about Iraq’s National Symphony Orchestra for two years now, so it’s good to get an update. Here’s more about it in a New York Times blog:

By Steven Lee Myers

BAGHDAD – It was achievement enough that the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra managed to survive the darkest days of the war, when it struggled for supplies and electricity, when its members fled for safety abroad and those who remained practiced in secret for fear of offending militants who considered music un-Islamic.

“We were fighting against the impending doom simply by functioning,” the orchestra’s charismatic director and chief conductor, Karim Wasfi, said the other day.

Now the orchestra finds itself “out of the bottleneck,” as Mr. Wasfi put it, facing challenges in a post-conflict society that are no less daunting for being less immediately life-threatening.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times Tuqa Saad Al Waeli warms up prior to rehearsal.

The orchestra is fighting for its budget, only now beginning to solicit corporate sponsorship in a country where the state once controlled all (and still does, if chaotically). Mr. Wasfi is lobbying to build an opera house in a country where electricity, clean water and garbage removal remain scarce services.

Hardest of all, the orchestra is trying to recreate a shared cultural life – “the concept of Iraq,” he said – that decades of isolation, international sanctions, war and sectarianism have thoroughly shattered.

“Iraq has achieved a lot, but it’s not yet on a solid, concrete foundation,” Mr. Wasfi said. “Stability is not related just to people not killing each other.”

The New York Times’s Edward Wong wrote movingly about the orchestra nearly three years ago , a time when sectarian bloodshed seemed to threaten its very mission: to give a troubled nation succor through music.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times Students and teachers practicing.

Even with today’s vastly improved security, the orchestra’s home in a former royal concert hall near the edge of the Old City still feels like an oasis of civility and cosmopolitanism – something evident from a lone trumpeter practicing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” to the full orchestra rehearsing Dvorak’s “New World” symphony.

At the height of the sectarian bloodshed in 2006 and 2007 the orchestra dwindled to just 43 members; violence and checkpoints meant as few as 17 made it to some rehearsals.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times Dua’a Majid Hussien Al Azawi, a young oboe player in the orchestra, prior to rehearsal.

There are 85 members now, including 13 who recently returned from self-exile in Syria and the United Arab Emirates. (During rehearsal Mr. Wasfi chided one whose playing was off, “Are you thinking of Syria?”) The dearth of musicians also forced the orchestra to find and train aspiring young people; the youngest member is only 15. Mr. Wasfi dreams of building a full philharmonic orchestra with 120 players.

Its foundation seems firm at last. The Ministry of Culture pays the members’ salaries, the equivalent of roughly $1,000 a month. Members carry their instruments openly into the concert hall. The orchestra has 14 concerts planned in the coming year, as well as 10 chamber performances, around the country.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times Nubar Bashtikian prepares for rehearsal.

The most recent was July 16 in Sulaimaniya, in the northern Kurdish region, sponsored by Asiacell, a mobile telephone company, which will cover its travel costs. The playlist included Verdi, Liszt, Strauss, Webber, Gershwin and Dvorak, as well as Iraqi classical music.

For the first time, Mr. Wasfi has even negotiated performances in the next year in the holy Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf, where conservative religious values still dominate. “There’s no indecent music,” he said, explaining his delicate negotiations with religious leaders there.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times The Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra rehearses under the direction of Karim Wasfi.

Iraq remains a troubled place, but the orchestra should be a bridge to a better future, as he explained, “when we have an opera house, when attending a performance and opening a gallery is part of your normal life, when political leaders fight in the parliament and not in the streets, when they set aside their differences and attend a concert.”

Lopez Wanders, and Waits for Dynamite Trial

Watch the video here

Great NYTblog by Damiano Beltrami

You remember Robert Lopez, the man arrested more than two years ago on St. Felix Street for having fake dynamite that he wanted to turn into a piggy bank?

“I hope this silliness will be laid to rest soon,” he said. “It’s much ado about nothing.”

His trial was postponed again, this time to July 31. The police officers who arrested him were not available because of summer staffing shortages, and a new assistant district attorney, Tim Gearon, has been assigned to the case because the previous one, Raymond Gazer, recently changed jobs.

Mr. Lopez, 38, who faces up to four years in prison if convicted of violating state law 240.62, “placing a false bomb or hazardous substance,” is tackling a difficult economic situation.

Homeless since mid-May, he recently lost his job as a maintenance person at McDonald’s.

“I haven’t talked to him in the last few days because he has no minutes on his phone,” said his sister Angela Lopez, who lives in Fresno, Calif., in a telephone interview. “I don’t know why they are taking him on a string for so long. He is obviously not a terrorist. This is a waste of money for the taxpayers.”

To meet Mr. Lopez, you need only to walk the streets of Fort Greene at night. He wanders around the Brooklyn Academy of Music, stops for small snack in a corner shop, waits for the dawn on a bench on Atlantic Avenue.

“One of my uncles survived outside for years, and he is old,” Mr. Lopez said. “If he can do it, I can do it.”

Mr. Lopez’s lawyer, Joshua Horowitz, said he hopes the case gets through some pre-trial hearings in August and finally goes to trial in September.

UNDP: Insecurity due to unemployment, environmental degradation, lack of healthcare and legal rights is hindering progress in MidEast

Jordan Times

By Taylor Luck

According to the UNDP Arab Human Development Report 2009: Challenges to Human Security in the Arab Countries, which was launched yesterday in Beirut, insecurity due to unemployment, environmental degradation, lack of healthcare and legal rights is hindering progress in the region.

“The security of people themselves is threatened not just by conflict and civil unrest, but also by environmental degradation, discrimination, unemployment, poverty and hunger,” Director of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Arab States and UN Assistant Secretary General Amat Al Alim Alsoswa said in a statement received by The Jordan Times.

“Only if these sources of insecurity are addressed in a holistic manner will the people of the Arab region be able to make progress in human development,” he added.

According to the study, the region’s economic progress is tied to the fluctuations of the demand for oil, which accounts for more than 70 per cent of Arab exports, with Arab countries home to the highest regional unemployment rate in the world, some 14.4 per cent, compared to a world average of 6.3 per cent.

One in five people in the region live under the international poverty level of $2 a day, and many more live in nationally determined conditions of poverty, leading to undernourishment, it said.

Jordan along with Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Yemen witnessed increases in the number of undernourished citizens, according to the report, as the number of undernourished persons across the region rose by 5.7 million between 1992 and 2004.

Read more

Read more about the report and download it…

Jordanians changing consumption behaviour

Published in the Jordan Times today:

The global economic downturn has forced 28 per cent of Jordanians to cut down on their household expenditures, according to the latest study by the Middle East’s leading job website: Bayt.com.

The study, carried out in conjunction with research specialists YouGov, found that 30 per cent of professionals across the rest of the surveyed countries have cut down on their household spending.

“The region’s consumers are cutting back considerably on their spending. Now, despite some signs of optimism at the grassroots level in the global economy, it seems the trend of being more price-conscious looks set to continue, at least in the short term,” said Nassim Ghrayeb, regional CEO of YouGov.

Asked to name their main reason for cutting down on spending, recession was the most common answer among respondents, followed by job losses suffered by either the respondent or a family member.

Around 36 per cent of professionals in Jordan and Bahrain said they would accept reduced salary in a new job in case of redundancy, compared to 31 per cent of all respondents, while region-wide, 45 per cent said they wouldn’t settle for any less.

“There is a general consensus that the recession is having a sustained impact on the region, which of course manifests itself in the behaviour and attitudes of professionals living and working here,” explained Amer Zureikat, Bayt.com’s regional manager.

The study asked respondents about their financial health both before and during the recession to ascertain how many professionals felt their financial position had changed. In Jordan, the figures changed considerably. Before the recession, an overwhelming 42 per cent of respondents felt financially more stable than their peers, compared to only 26 per cent during the recession.

More than a third of Jordanians attributed this change in their financial status to job losses, and 17 per cent said it was due to salary cuts.

In Jordan, residents have taken a number of steps to deal with the recession. The study found that 31 per cent of respondents have moved to a different country as a result of the recession, while 5 per cent have moved to a less expensive part of the country.

However, according to a report issued by the Central Bank of Jordan, the inflation rate during the first five months of this year fell sharply to 1 per cent compared with 11.6 per cent during the same period last year.

The report also indicated that the real gross domestic product grew by 3.2 per cent during the first quarter of this year compared with 8.6 per cent during the first quarter of 2008.

According to the Bayt.com survey, physical health was also found to be an issue during the recession, with 27 per cent saying financial problems had caused them health concerns or issues including stress, and 13 per cent saying that a family member’s health had been affected. In Jordan, 28 per cent of those surveyed suffered with bad health as a result of the recession – slightly higher than the regional average.

“These findings send a clear message to employers that many professionals across the region are suffering at the moment,” concluded Zureikat.

Data for the Surviving the Recession study was collected online between the period of May 26 and June 28, 2009 with 12,908 respondents from across the region. Males and females over age 18 were included in the study.

The Shuffle President

By MATT BAI

Like romantic comedies and superhero blockbusters, the modern presidency has evolved into a reliable form of dramatic narrative. A candidate comes into office brandishing a broad theme — a vow to clean up government, perhaps, orto fearlessly prune it back — and then lays out one or two big proposals to make it real. In time, of course, a presidency tends to sprawl as events intrude. Bill Clinton couldn’t have imagined he would spend so much of his two terms fending off resurgent Republicans, just as George W. Bush didn’t envision going to war. But at least for those first several months, while the White House controls its own fate, the presidency is supposed to unfold in discrete chapters, each building atop the last. Both Ronald Reagan and Bush began with an almost single-minded push for tax cuts during their opening months, while Clinton opened with an economic program and then a monthslong drive for health care reform. The simple premise here is that every new presidency is a story; the more muddled and erratic the storyline, the harder it is for the public to follow along and the less likely the chances of reaching a satisfying end.

Barack Obama is a born storyteller, which makes it all the more confounding that as president he refuses to inhabit a neat political narrative. Obama’s themes are clear enough (salvaging the American economy, reversing the Bush years), but his legislative priorities seem to rotate in and out like so many suitcases on a conveyor belt. One day his presidency hinges on health care, then he’s lobbying for a cap-and-trade plan to reduce carbon emissions and then he’s out there trying to re-regulate the financial world or sell a new treaty with the Russians. “An administration about everything is an administration about nothing” is the way the conservative columnist Peggy Noonan put it in The Wall Street Journal. Colin Powell made a similar point, telling John King of CNN, “I think one of the cautions that has to be given to the president — and I’ve talked to some of his people about this — is that you can’t have so many things on the table that you can’t absorb it all.”

Some of this itinerancy must be attributed to the sheer scope of the wreckage Obama inherited. When you’ve got failing banks and corporate giants, two ongoing wars, melting icecaps and mountainous health care costs, it’s hard to see what gets pushed to the margins. It’s also true, though, that Obama’s style reflects, whether he means it to or not, a cultural shift on the importance of narrative. Americans acclimated to clicking around hundreds of cable channels or Web pages experience the world less chronologically than their parents did. The most popular books now — business guides like “Good to Great” or social explorations like “The Tipping Point” — allow the casual reader to absorb their insights in random order or while skimming whole chapters.

Once we listened to cohesive albums like, say, Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” which kicked off with the snare hit of “Like a Rolling Stone,” almost like a starter pistol, and worked its way toward the melancholy postscript of “Desolation Row.” Now your iPod might jump mindlessly from “Desolation Row” to “Tombstone Blues,” or from Dylan to Rihanna. The shrink-wrapped record has given way to the downloaded single. Wasn’t this one reason for all the tributes to Michael Jackson? It’s not that “Thriller” was really as singularly awesome as so many of us thought it was in high school. It’s more that we know there may never be an album that epic again.

Obama is the nation’s first shuffle president. He’s telling lots of stories at once, and in no particular order. His agenda is fully downloadable. If what you care most about is health care, then you can jump right to that. If global warming gets you going, then click over there. It’s not especially realistic to imagine that politics could cling to a linear way of rendering stories while the rest of American culture adapts to a more customized form of consumption. Obama’s ethos may disconcert the older guard in Washington, but it’s probably comforting to a lot of younger voters who could never be expected to listen to successive tracks, in the same order, over and over again.

Such an approach does, however, invite significant peril. Random play may popularize your music in the aggregate, but it doesn’t foster the same kind of investment in the songs themselves. U2 may have more fans than ever, but that doesn’t mean these listeners can name half the tracks on the band’s latest release.

Similarly, Obama retains higher favorability ratings than any of his recent predecessors — about 60 percent, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted last month. But only 46 percent in the same poll were either “quite” or “extremely” confident that Obama had the right policies to revive the economy, and only 33 percent volunteered support for his health care plan. That last number grew to 55 percent when the broad plan was explained to voters, which means that even the outlines of what is arguably Obama’s most important proposal haven’t been absorbed by the public. In other words, most Americans seem to like the president, but they’re not engaged with the specific arguments he’s making.

And should the president prevail on one or another of his proposals, he might find that acclaim, in this digital moment, can be ephemeral. Landmark legislative proposals, like hit singles, can come to seem interchangeable and dispensable. Creating a new health care framework, after more than a half-century of talking about it, would be a monumental achievement for any president, but even that might seem somehow small when viewed as only one in a series of competing storylines. What about carbon emissions? How about reining in Wall Street? Too much comes at us now, too devoid of context, for any one thing to matter as much as it probably should. In a society on shuffle, we’re always left to wonder what’s next.

Expose’: Prison Reform in Jordan. Is it Possible?

Published in Living Well Magazine. June 2009.

Despite negative perceptions about Jordan’s penitentiary system, officials say they want all prisons in Jordan to eventually become centers for vocational training and rehabilitation. Is change possible?

By Rana F. Sweis

When Um Dia’a speaks, her eyes squint and her voice is barely audible. Upon recalling the story that landed her in Jordan’s Juweideh Correctional and Rehabilitation Center, she regurgitates it quickly. “It is a story of theft that turned deadly,” she announces. “Poverty and debt pushed my brother and I to steal from a farm, but things went wrong and my brother killed a man.” Um Dia’a and her brother, also in prison, confessed to murdering a farm owner in Madaba.

Today, Um Dia’a spends her days in confinement – knitting, attending lectures, learning to bake pastries, and watching television. Though their first aim is to take away freedoms enjoyed within society, prisons are looking to new ways of development. Juweideh prison for women underwent renovation in 2000 to see it turn into a correctional and rehabilitation center (CRC) aimed at reforming character through exercise, work, training, and social care. “Change and reform continue to take place because we feel there is a need for it,” says Khaled AlMajali, director of CRC Training and Development. “We are not apart from the Public Security Directorate, but at the same time we are not only focusing on law enforcement, but rather on training individuals whose mentality is more aligned with rehabilitating.”

The white stone building of Juweideh’s CRC for women looks more like a two-story apartment building with a balcony and small rectangular-shaped windows. Guards stand inside and outside a large black gate. Cellular phones are not permitted. The parking lot is empty with only an ambulance on standby, while from a distance, a guard leaning on his rifle can be seen from the high-rise compound of Juweideh prison for men, which hosts almost 1,300 persons. Accommodating up to 450 inmates, the CRC for women  boasts 14 rooms, 450 beds, and 300 security officers. At present, the total number of prisoners held in Jordan is 7,834, of which 235 are women, this according to a May 7, 2009 daily report distributed by the Administration of the CRC.
“My main concern is to provide the best possible services to the women here and make sure they are safe,” explains Fatima Al Badarein, director of Juweideh CRC for women. “We think the reform that is taking place is a good step forward but much more needs to be done,” says Nisreen Zerikat, an advocate at the National Center for Human Rights (NCHR) in Jordan. “Yes, there are activities that are being provided like baking and sewing, but we need to really focus on the rehabilitation process in the sense of psychological care, and to help individuals integrate back into society once they are out.” Prison is a part of any society and the way prisoners do time may also affect their lives after incarceration. “The truth is, nothing compensates for freedom, but while they are here we try to offer good services and protection,” says Al Badarein.

Finding a way to integrate back into society after being in a CRC or prison facility remains an obstacle for these men and women in Jordan, especially since some even face internment by their own families and society at large. “The perception of prisoners among Jordanians is they are deviant, criminals, and dangerous,” says Musa Sheitwi, a sociologist and director of the Jordan Center for Social Research. “It is even more so for women, and the stigma against them is greater,” he adds. “The perception is that she has done wrong morally and accepting her in society is very difficult.”

For many institutions and ministries, including the Ministry of Social Development (MoSD) who work on rehabilitation and reintegration into society, it remains a new and challenging concept. It is usually difficult for prisoners to become reacquainted with freedom, and at least a quarter of those who are released will commit an act that will lead them back to the prison or center. “Around 25 to 30 percent of those who are released from prison will return,” says AlMajali. “That is why we need to work on all fronts to make sure that they don’t commit a crime again.”

The most popular activity these days at the Juweideh CRC for women is learning how to make and bake desserts, which Um Dia’a participates in. “Prior to coming to the center, I didn’t know how to make anything,” says Um Dia’a, wearing a navy blue robe over her jeans. “I was illiterate, but now I am learning how to read.” She also admits to feeling anxious about returning to her poverty-ridden neighborhood and providing her five children with food and shelter. “At the CRC, there are many services,” she explains. “I want to be free, but I would be lying to you if I said I was not nervous about my future.”

Security and government officials all agree that if Jordanian society does not begin to change their attitude towards prisoners, giving them a second chance, their efforts will not completely succeed. “In cooperation with the Police Security Directorate we are trying to change the concept of prison as being a place solely for punishment to one that rehabilitates,” says Mohammad Khasawneh, secretary general of the MoSD. “On our part, we are accepting that concept more rapidly than the average Jordanian citizen, who perhaps still struggles to recognize that a prison can actually be a place for rehabilitation.”

The burden to step up the training process (including providing teachers and doctors) seems to be placed mainly on government agencies and the Police Security Directorate. “We do a lot of training, and we are trying our best to do our part, but there needs to be more effort on the part of civil society,” says AlMajali. A recent study conducted by the Higher Council for Science and Technology revealed that Jordan suffers from a shortage in mental health services, and finding mental health professionals who are willing to work with prisoners is even more difficult, admits Hatem Al-Azraai, spokesperson for the Ministry of Health. “It is a nationwide problem, but we are working on encouraging more Jordanians to specialize in this field and we are offering residency programs twice a year,” he points out.

When Um Dia’a talks about feeling guilty about participating in a crime, she also mentions her five children and begins to cry. “I rarely see my children,” she complains, having been at the center for five months now. “It’s not easy for my mother to come here, as she is an old lady and is the only one taking care of my children.” Things are progressing though; the MoSD opened a nursery inside the facility for women only recently, with Khasawneh remarking that, “After examining cases inside the prison, the idea of opening a nursery became something that we needed to do. By depriving the mother from her children, we would be depriving the child from healthy development, and in the end, the children are not to blame for their mother’s wrong-doing.”

Currently, five social workers take care of infants at the nursery, along with five security officers assigned with them as a precaution. There are women requesting to be reunited with their infants, and the only psychologist assigned to the CRC will assess whether they are mentally stable to be with their children. Indeed, sometimes children under three years old may find themselves in prison or CRC with a parent, especially when there are no extended family members to help. And, although some have lauded the creation of the nursery in Juweideh’s CRC, for others it raises concern. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) advises that infants should be accommodated with their mothers where possible, although, the environment is a totally unnatural one for a child. “The truth is even if it’s a rehabilitation center, it is not an environment for an infant or a child to be in,” says Yazan Abdo, an expert in development and education. “I would prefer to see the child or infant in an adjacent or nearby place where the mothers would spend time with them, but it would not be at the CRC.”

Worldwide, the goal of the first modern prisons was to enforce strict regulations, confinement, and forced and deliberate labor. It was not until the late 19th Century that rehabilitation through education and vocational training became the standard goal of prisons. Muwaqar 1, a prison in Jordan for men, was turned into a CRC only two years ago. The implementation of programs such as The Twinning Project at this facility, which includes the implementation of human rights principles and international standards, may determine the direction of reform elsewhere, with one of the main articles in this project including developing classification for prisoners. “Right now classification is implemented according to the crime,” proclaims AlMajali. “This is incorrect because not all who are convicted of theft or murder should be together,” he adds. “The personality of the prisoner, his integration into the center or prison, and overall behavior should be the determining factors.”

At the police training and development center on the outskirts of Amman, women in uniforms were attending a several day workshop on human rights and safeguarding prisoners. Not far from this training room, another workshop is taking place for higher-ranking male officers; Krista Schipper, a prison director in Austria and Irene Kock, a lead prosecutor at the Ministry of Justice in Austria, discuss short and long-term goals with them. They exchange ideas on procedures to release prisoners earlier, a change in the visit system, as well as infrastructure. Large flip-chart notes hang in front of the room, filled with answers and suggestions by the Jordanian high-ranking officers. In a parking lot outside the training center, police officers dressed in blue uniforms, helmets, and carrying clear shields with black rims, move in unison from left to right.

Back in the female training workshop, Abdullat is demonstrating the new technique of handcuffing from the front instead of the back of the body due to health reasons; the women are enthusiastic to learn the procedure. “Watch each step and tell your colleague if she is doing something wrong,” explains Abdullat. “Look at the angle she is standing – did she insert her finger between the handcuffs and the prisoner’s wrist to make sure there is enough blood circulation?” The women, mostly in their twenties and thirties nod enthusiastically. Suddenly the officer holding the handcuffs realizes she is standing too close to the woman she is handcuffing, causing her harm if the prisoner should become violent. “This is my first time at this,” she says looking at the other women sitting. “This is all new – I need more time and I will get it right.” The other officers encourage her to repeat the process from the beginning, and she succeeds the second time around. “Every time there is change, there is struggle and resistance,” says AlMajali. “Otherwise it is not really change.”

May 7, 2009

Facility Holding Most Prisoners (Sawqa)     2059 Individuals

Correctional and Rehabilitation Centers and Prisons (Total)    12 Facilities

Total  Men:  7834   Women: 235

Source: Jordan Correctional and Rehabilitation Centers (Administration)

Clean, Sexy Water

More on one of my favorite non-profits: Charity:Water

By Nicolas Kristof

New York Times

Armed with nothing but a natural gift for promotion, and for wheedling donations from people, Mr. Harrison started his group, called charity: water — and it has been stunningly successful. In three years, he says, his group has raised $10 million (most of that last year alone) from 50,000 individual donors, providing clean water to nearly one million people in Africa and Asia.

The organization now has 11 full-time employees, almost twice as many unpaid interns, and more than half a million followers on Twitter (the United Nations has 3,000). New York City buses were plastered with free banners promoting his message, and Saks Fifth Avenue gave up its store windows to spread Mr. Harrison’s gospel about the need for clean water in Africa. American schools are signing up to raise money to build wells for schools in poor countries.

“Scott is an important marketing machine, lifting one of the most critical issues of our time in a way that is sexy and incredibly compelling — that’s his gift,” said Jacqueline Novogratz, head of the Acumen Fund, which invests in poor countries to overcome poverty.

Mr. Harrison doesn’t actually do the tough aid work in the field. He partners with humanitarian organizations and pays them to dig wells. In effect, he’s a fund-raiser and marketer — but that’s often the most difficult piece of the aid puzzle.

So what’s his secret? Mr. Harrison’s success seems to depend on three precepts:

First, ensure that every penny from new donors will go to projects in the field. He accomplishes this by cajoling his 500 most committed donors to cover all administrative costs.

Second, show donors the specific impact of their contributions. Mr. Harrison grants naming rights to wells. He posts photos and G.P.S. coordinates so donors can look up their wells on Google Earth. And in September, Mr. Harrison is going to roll out a new Web site that will match even the smallest donation to a particular project that can be tracked online.

Third, leap into new media and social networks. This spring, charity: water raised $250,000 through a “Twestival” — a series of meetings among followers on Twitter. Last year, it raised $965,000 by asking people with September birthdays to forgo presents and instead solicit cash to build wells in Ethiopia. The campaign went viral on the Web, partly because Mr. Harrison invests in clever, often sassy videos.

Read the op-ed…

Nermeen Murad on Governance

This paragraph says it all on the recent debocale between the Jordanian Parliament and the press:

Having said that, Parliament had it coming. Not only had most of its members shrunk into oblivion since being elected to their post, but when called to assume their duties more responsibly, they somehow found the energy to fight back. The depressing thing is that they chose to fight with vindictiveness, using their powers to influence the country’s laws and legislation to score points and settle their personal conflicts with writers and columnists.

Read Nermeen’s column today in the Jordan Times.

Israeli Settlements: Fictions on the Ground

June 22, 2009

New York Times

There are about 120 official Israeli settlements in the occupied territories of the West Bank. In addition, there are “unofficial” settlements whose number is estimated variously from 80 to 100. Under international law, there is no difference between these two categories; both are contraventions of Article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which explicitly prohibits the annexation of land consequent to the use of force, a principle re-stated in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter.

The blatant cynicism of the present Israeli government should not blind us to the responsibility of its more respectable-looking predecessors. The settler population has grown consistently at a rate of 5 percent annually over the past two decades, three times the rate of increase of the Israeli population as a whole. Together with the Jewish population of East Jerusalem (itself illegally annexed to Israel), the settlers today number more than half a million people: just over 10 percent of the Jewish population of so-called Greater Israel. This is one reason why settlers count for so much in Israeli elections, where proportional representation gives undue political leverage to even the smallest constituency.

Thus the distinction so often made in Israeli pronouncements between “authorized” and “unauthorized” settlements is specious — all are illegal, whether or not they have been officially approved and whether or not their expansion has been “frozen” or continues apace. (It is a matter of note that Israel’s new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, belongs to the West Bank settlement of Nokdim, established in 1982 and illegally expanded since.)

Read the op-ed in today’s New York Times

Music: Ensemble Ambitions in a World Divided

Despite the cohesion implied by the word “ensemble,” these four men are rarely in the same city, much less the same room. The politics of the Middle East confine them to four separate spheres and have turned them into a living metaphor for inescapable division

“It’s our story,” said Suhail Khoury, who plays the traditional flute, or ney, and clarinet in the group. “It’s like summing up Palestine.”

Read this feature in the New York Times

Honoring World Refugee Day

By Queen Noor of Jordan

For 35 years, my home has been one of the world’s major conflict regions, home also to over 10 million refugees and displaced inhabitants. World Refugee Day (June 20) is a time to honor and support these individuals and families who persevere through devastating tragedies.

I have lived and worked with the nearly 6 million Palestinian refugees and now nearly 5 million displaced Iraqis, many from each group now making their homes in Jordan. I have also worked with displaced people from Afghanistan, Colombia, Somalia, and those seeking safe haven during the first Gulf War. I have witnessed first-hand the anguish of those uprooted from their homes — people who have had their lives threatened, homes bombed, and family members kidnapped or murdered.

The global displacement crisis is both a humanitarian and a security issue. History shows that mass migrations pose a serious threat to regional stability, as we have seen in Palestine, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and West Africa. The Middle East is particularly vulnerable as ongoing tensions are further strained by such large scale displacement.

Read more on this June 20, 2009 World Refugee Day

Jordan: Water crisis looms, urgent measures needed reveals study

Insufficient access and availability of quality water and high poverty levels in Jordan are inextricably linked, found a rapid water assessment commissioned by World Vision in six of the kingdom’s governorates in May 2009.

Programmes addressing water scarcity and increasing its availability at the household and community level can assist in poverty alleviation, the assessment by the Interdisciplinary Research Consultants (IdRC) of Jordan revealed.

Ranked among the 10 most water deficient countries in the world, scarce water resources and other natural resources have been contributing factors to debt, poverty, and unemployment in Jordan, according to the assessment. It also cited that poverty amongst children is higher than poverty amongst the overall population, according to the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (April 2007).

Read more…

Charity: Water

One billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean drinking water. That’s one in six of us. Charity: Water is a non-profit organization bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing national. 100 percent of public donations directly fund water projects.

Learn more

Cinema of Justice

Human Rights International Film Festival

Lessons in how the world works and portraits of the never-ending struggles in places around the globe where power is challenged by populist resistance: such matters are a concern of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which this year celebrates its 20th anniversary.

Read more

Obama’s Address in Cairo

Watch the Obama Speech in Cairo and read the transcript here.

King Abdullah: Peace Now or it’s War Next Year

America is putting the final touches to a hugely ambitious peace plan for the Middle East, aimed at ending more than 60 years of conflict between Israel and the Arabs, according to Jordan’s King Abdullah, who is helping to bring the parties together.

The Obama Administration is pushing for a comprehensive peace agreement that would include settling Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and its territorial disputes with Syria and Lebanon, King Abdullah II told The Times. Failure to reach agreement at this critical juncture would draw the world into a new Middle East war next year. “If we delay our peace negotiations, then there is going to be another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next 12-18 months,” the King said.

Details of the plan are likely to be thrashed out in a series of diplomatic moves this month. Chief among them is President Obama’s meeting with Binyamin Netanyahu, the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, in Washington a week today. The initiative could form the centrepiece for Mr Obama’s much-anticipated address to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4. A peace conference could then take place involving all the parties as early as July or August. Such an ambitious project has not been attempted since 1991, when George Bush senior’s Administration assembled all the parties for a peace conference in Madrid.

Read more

Dowd: Put Aside Logic

By Maureen Dowd

New York Times

THE FINAL FRONTIER

I dreamed that Spock saved our planet, The Daily Planet of journalism.

Instead of swooping in to figure out the dimensionality and logarithms to rescue the world from red matter, as Spock does in J. J. Abrams’s dazzling new “Star Trek,” I imagined Spock rescuing read matter for the world.

Newspapers are an “endangered species,” as John Kerry called us in a Senate hearing last week, just as the Vulcans are in the new prequel.

I know Barack Spock likes newspapers. An aide told me during the campaign that Mr. Obama would get cranky if he didn’t have some time set aside during the day to read The New York Times.

Read more…

Poll: Mideast Arabs think very highly of Obama

Popular in the Arab World. What Next?

 

 

The poll of six Arab nations found that residents think Obama will have a positive impact on the Middle East – a region marked by war, religious disputes, ethnic and sectarian violence – as well as on the United States and the rest of the world.

Obama scored highest in Jordan, where 58 percent of its citizens have a favorable opinion of him, 29 percent have an unfavorable view, 6 percent had no opinion and 7 percent didn’t know.

Saudi Arabians have a 53 percent favorable opinion of Obama, followed by 52 percent in the United Arab Emirates. From there, Obama’s popularity dips with a 47 percent favorability rating in Kuwait, 43 percent in Lebanon and 35 percent in Egypt. In none of these countries, however, was Obama’s unfavorable rating higher than his favorable one.

In contrast, only 38 percent of Saudis have a favorable view of the United States, followed by 36 percent of Jordanians, 34 percent of UAE residents, 31 percent of Lebanese and 22 percent of Egyptians.

JT: Majority of Jordanian Journalists Self-Censorship

Ninety-four per cent of journalists in Jordan practise self-censorship, according to a survey conducted by the Centre for Defending the Freedom of Journalists (CDFJ) to mark World Press Freedom Day.

This year’s survey, conducted between February 23 and March 13, covered a sample of 1,200 journalists, members of the Jordan Press Association as well as those registered with the CDFJ, he noted.

Read more…

Asked which issues they voluntarily avoid discussing, 98 per cent of the polled journalists said everything related to the Armed Forces, while 81 per cent cited religious issues. Meanwhile, 78 and 77 per cent respectively said they avoid criticising tribal and Arab leaders; 74 per cent said they don’t discuss sex issues, and 54 per cent said they keep away from criticising the government.

News2you: Best of the best in Jordanian Media

News2you's Best of the Best in Jordanian Media

Here is News2you’s best of the best in Jordanian Media:

1) Best journalism writing and analysis: Al Sijill Newspaper

2) Best columnist in Arabic: Jamil Al Nimri (Al Ghad newspaper)

3) Best columnist in English: Nermeen Murad (Jordan Times)

4) Best cartoonist: Emad Hajjaj (Al Ghad Newspaper) 

5) Best Arab Twitterer:  The Arab Observer

6) Most user-friendly and in-depth newspaper website: Al Sijill Newspaper (View the newspaper in PDF)

7) Best investigative Arab journalism website: ARIJ

For Journalists:

1) Best Sociologist in Jordan to interview: Dr. Musa Sheitwei

2) Most cooperative in visits and interviews: Jordan Police and Security Department (Media Office)

3) Best Human Rights Advocate to interview: Nisreen Zerikat (National Center for Human Rights)

4) Smartest journalism students in Jordan : Yarmouk University (Media Department)

5) Best Blogger: Naseem Tarawneh (Get the news and the scoop)

JT: Yazan’s rights in Parliament

 

Published in today’s Jordan Times:

By Nermeen Murad

A national newspaper recently published pictures of the “home” of five-year-old Yazan who died last week at the end of a short life replete with torture, domestic abuse and neglect.

His story has won the hearts of Jordanians and captured the imagination of many writers who took to their columns demanding punishment for the perpetrators, investigation into social services, investigation into the crime. etc. Most also cried over this young boy’s wasted life and miserable stab at enjoying life even if it was a few stolen moments on an old plastic toy horse.

I took a walk with my husband a couple of nights ago and saw a man beating his son back into a building with a wooden stick. The boy only wanted to follow his father out of the house, but he was cruelly snubbed and sent crying back “home”.

We, the parents, forget that we are not the owners of these children. This is not slavery. They have been given to us on loan so that we may care for them and protect them until they grow up and can look after themselves and in turn have children and protect those. That is the cycle of nature.

The state is in place with its laws to ensure that we fulfill our duties towards the next generation and is expected to step in to safeguard them if we fail.

Accepting, as we seem to have done, that parents can and should slap their kids around a bit to discipline them, does and has led to many cases of child abuse in our families, on our streets and in our communities, which have remained unchecked and untreated.

What are we going to do to make sure that there isn’t another Yazan on every street in our cities and villages?

The simple answer is that we can’t remove all possibility that this type of incident would recur, but we can certainly try to first create legal deterrents to such crime.

I have always tried to argue in my writing that the first step is always, absolutely always, to protect the weak and fragile in our society through our legal system. The first step is always the law and then a concerted effort to educate and change the mindset that allows for the abuse of the weak in our society.

In a meeting of activists seeking to change laws that pertain to women, a well-known activist retold the story of how parliamentarians vehemently argued against amendments in the law aimed at protecting child rights because they felt those interfered with the socially acceptable norms that allow parents to physically discipline their children. She was telling the story to show how difficult it was to convince parliamentarians to accept protection even for their children, let alone their women.

When I consider the performance of Parliament, I don’t worry about the privileges they grant themselves in travel allowances, salary hikes and all other monetary benefits. Those “weaknesses” are ones I can live with. I worry about the intransigence and in many cases the carelessness with which most parliamentarians handle the laws that come to them and which deal with women and children.

Yazan is not only a victim of his dysfunctional and poor family. He is also the victim of a society that is ignorant of his rights, a state that had turned a blind eye to the excesses by some parents in society and certainly a Parliament that has been busy with the “number” of allowances and reelection votes instead of the number of victims of the laws it failed to update and upgrade to protect the weaker and more fragile citizens.

NermeenMurad@gmail.com

The 2009 Pulitzer Picks

 

A Pultizer pick: Cartoonist Steve Breen

 

The Daily Beast’s who’s who guide to this year’s winners in Fiction, Drama, and other categories:

Read Pulitzer picks for best public service article, breaking news report, investigative reporting, fiction, drama, local, national and international reporting.

There are also links to the actual articles.

Facebook Group: World Leaders

This is hilarious. From the The Atlantic magazine by Sage Stossel.

Kim Jong Il changed his profile picture.

 

Kim Jong Il

 

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad joined the group People Who Always 
Have To Spell Their Names For Other People.

Muammar Qaddafi is excited to nationalize Libyan oil assets.

 

 Hugo Chávez 
Bad idea.

 

Hugo Chávez and Hu Jintao are now friends.

Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are now friends via the 
People You May Know tool.

Vladimir Putin is getting Russia’s budget in order.

 

 Dmitry Medvedev 
Hey, where are you? Can I be in on this??

 

Elian Gonzalez was tagged in a photo.

 

Havana reunion party weekend, New Year’s ’09! by Raúl Castro

 

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just posted an ad for enriched uranium on Craigslist.

Nicolas Sarkozy requests that David Cameron please remove the nude pictures of Carla Bruni from his photo album.

Kim Jong Il sent Lee Myung-bak and Ban Ki-moon an invitation using Smarty Pants:

 I challenge you to a game of Smarty Pants trivia! I just scored 6,400 points in the game “The Smartest Pants.” 
Think you can beat me?

 

Nicolas Sarkozy requests that Muammar Qaddafi please remove the nude photos of Carla Bruni from his photo album.

Vladimir Putin became a fan of ABBA.

Hosni Mubarak is working on a Gaza truce proposal.

Hosni Mubarak is wondering, How do you spell “intransagent”?

 

 Barack Obama 
The second “a” should be an “i” 
Hamid Karzai 
Barack—can you call me?

 

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad changed his profile picture.

 

Mahmoud

 

Hu Jintao joined the group I Bet I Can Find a Million People Who Don’t Care Michael Phelps Smoked Weed.

Muammar Qaddafi is off to see He’s Just Not That Into You.

 

 Hamid Karzai
saw this on Saturday. Very funny!

 

Vladimir Putin added the Booze Mail application. 

Vladimir Putin sent Nicolas Sarkozy a Vodka Stinger.

Pervez Musharraf joined the group Deposed World Leaders Against the Deposition 
of World Leaders.

Vladimir Putin sent Shoichi Nakagawa a Sake Bomb.

Angela Merkel is attending G8 summit, Wednesday, July 8.

 

 Bill Clinton 
See you there
Hillary Clinton 
I don’t think so.

Kim Jong Il has just launched a Taepodong missile.

Drug Addiction Increases in Afghanistan

 

Turning to Drugs in Afghanistan (NPR.org)

Listen to this story on NPR…

A growing number of Afghans — including children — are escaping the pain of war and poverty by using opium or heroin, for as little as a dollar a day.

A United Nations survey begun this month is widely expected to show that at least 1 in 12 people in Afghanistan abuses drugs — double the number in the last survey four years ago.

Experts say that the alarming trend is not being addressed by the Afghan government and its international partners, even though most officials acknowledge that the drug scourge threatens lasting stability in Afghanistan.

The Wall: A Monologue

 

Here’s a piece written by David Hare in the New York Review of Books on the West Bank wall:

It’s a dusty spot, featureless, in the middle of nowhere—or would be featureless if it weren’t for the series of high concrete slabs on our left-hand side. The wall. Although the road doesn’t run through the wall, we are forced to stop. We join a long line of cars which we are told has been here for fifteen minutes. The drivers have turned their engines off, and they sit on the roofs or the hoods, smoking cigarettes and talking. Yes, this is what happens every day. A daily event. For those who go back and forth between towns in the West Bank more than once daily, a more-than-once daily event. The soldiers are letting only one side go through at a time. So we sit for a further twenty minutes, cars coming at us from the opposite direction, and then very slowly, insolently, the Israelis, carrying machine guns, move to our side of the road, and for no reason, begin to let us through.

I say “for no reason” but probably there is a reason. And nobody imagines it has anything to do with security—since the road doesn’t go to Israel itself, and no one shows any interest in the cars themselves. After all, the road stretches empty in either direction, and the checkpoint is not short-staffed. Why, then, are Israeli soldiers wasting time by holding back one line of traffic which they could perfectly well let through, while they permit the flow of another? Why are they doing this? The answer seems clear. They are doing it because they can. To those waiting in line the implicit message is: “If we choose to delay you, we shall. We have the right to delay you. We have the right to render your life meaningless.”

Read it all…

The Perils of Intervening in Somalia

What a military intervention in Somalia might mean for the US, here’s Nicole Stremlau writing in the Huffington Post:

The current attention on Somalia’s pirates and thereports of youth from Minnesota traveling to Somalia to fight in the jihad forces us to focus on a country that the US often ignores. The challenge is that no one really knows what to do to help foster peace or how to do it. And while there are plenty of ideas, there is little consensus from Somalis.

Americans may remember Black Hawk Down, but for Somalis the events that brought further violence in 2006 and 2007 are fresher. In 2006, America backed warlords on surprisingly uninformed intelligence. And as this strategy appeared to be failing, the US helped Somalia’s long-time nemesis, Ethiopia, to oust the popular leader of the Islamic Courts Union, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, accusing him of being too radical. The same Sheikh Sharif is now president of Somalia after his predecessor, Abdullahi Yusuf, proved unable to create a viable government.

Read more…

Obama Lifting Cuba Travel Restrictions

 

Some promising news: 

President Barack Obamadirected his administration Monday to allow unlimited travel and money transfers by Cuban Americans to family in Cuba, and to take other steps to ease U.S. restrictions on the island, asenior administration official told The Associated Press.

Read more

Economy in Shambles, Movie Business is Booming?

 

While the economy is in shambles, Americans are flocking to the movies….

Business is booming at the nation’s movie theaters. Revenue and ticket sales are each up about 10 percent over the first quarter of last year. Box office records have been smashed. Why are movies doing so well while so many people are doing so poorly?

Hear this story…

NPR’s Obama Tracker

NPR’s Obama Tracker charts significant events and developments in the new administration, and actions the president takes as he settles into the job.

Guardian: Iraqi Children for Sale

 

And so, what happens after the storm? Here’s an article published in the Guardian newspaper:

Corruption, weak law enforcement and porous borders are compounding a growing child trafficking crisis in Iraq, according to officials and aid agencies, with scores of children abducted each year and sold internally or abroad.

Criminal gangs are profiting from the cheap cost of buying infants and the bureaucratic muddle that makes it relatively easy to move them overseas. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain because there is no centralised counting procedure, but aid agencies and police say they believe numbers have increased by a third since 2005 to at least 150 children a year.

The Case of Khaled Mahadin

An article on the case against Khaled Mahadin, a Jordanian journalist and columnist who criticised parliament’s perks and privileges: 

A recent case brought by the lower house of parliament against a Jordanian journalist and columnist who criticised parliament’s perks and privileges has sparked a debate in Jordan about parliament’s role as a watchdog over government performance. 

Whether Mr Mahadin’s criticism, directed in particular towards a parliamentary bloc headed by the president of the lower house, Abdul Hadi Majali, was the result of past disagreements between the two, as some analysts have suggested, or MPs in general, the case has underscored public dissatisfaction with parliament. Parliament’s approval ratings have plummeted in recent years. 

Examining Teachers Attitudes in Jordanian Schools

 

This is another example that we  have a long way to go when it comes to reform in Jordan’s education system. Not long ago, I wrote another blog post about education in Jordan. 

This is an article published in today’s Jordan Times. It demonstrates two things: First  there are very talented individuals in Jordan and the second is the failure on the part of some educators to encourage and inspire students in Jordan…Reform is not only in the books…

Ragheb and Thamer Masarweh from the village of Jadaa in Karak, who worked for 10 years to prove a theory on prime numbers, are currently honing their English language skills at the British Council in Amman before heading to the UK to do their master’s in statistics and mathematics.

Numbers have long fascinated the two brothers.

When 24-year-old Thamer was 14-years-old, his favourite subject was mathematics and he used to excel in the subject and score the highest marks in class. 

However, the two brothers said they received little support from their community or at school.

“Our teachers were not supportive and used to tell us not to attempt things greater than our abilities,” Thamer noted, adding that “unfortunately, lecturers at university said the same thing, which frustrated us”.

 

Facebook, Protests, Parliament in Jordan

 

Protest in front of Parliament in Jordan. Photo Credit: 7iber.com

A protest–albeit not a very large one it seems–took place in front of Parliament yesterday in Jordan, where a journalist is on trial for criticizing the performance of Parliament, which has been a dissapointment since 2007. 

I was surprised to read that the protests were not only in support of the journalist, but the protest which was organized through Facebook was calling for more freedom of expression in Jordan.

Seymour Hersh: Syria Calling

Sy Hersh of the New Yorker

The Obama Administration’s chance to engage in a Middle East peace.

by Seymour M. Hersh

 

American and foreign government officials, intelligence officers, diplomats, and politicians said in interviews that renewed Israeli-Syrian negotiations over the Golan Heights are now highly likely, despite Gaza and the elections in Israel in February, which left the Likud Party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the head of a coalition that includes both the far right and Labor. Those talks would depend largely on America’s willingness to act as the mediator, a role that could offer Barack Obama his first—and perhaps best—chance for engagement in the Middle East peace process.

A senior Syrian official explained that Israel’s failure to unseat Hamas from power in Gaza, despite the scale of the war, gave Assad enough political room to continue the negotiations without losing credibility in the Arab world. Assad also has the support of Arab leaders who are invested in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Sheikh Hamid bin Khalifa al-Thani, the ruler of Qatar, said last month when I saw him in Doha that Assad must take any reasonable steps he can to keep the talks going. “Syria is eager to engage with the West,” he said, “an eagerness that was never perceived by the Bush White House. Anything is possible, as long as peace is being pursued.”

 

Read more

The Chicken and the Basketball Board in Amman

 

The Chicken that Crossed the Road (R.Sweis)

The Basketball Board that Makes it Impossible to Play Basketball. (R.Sweis)

 

How Twitter’s Spectacular Growth is Being Driven by Unexpected Uses

 

In the year leading up to this talk, the web tool Twitter exploded in size (up 10x during 2008 alone). Co-founder Evan Williams reveals that many of the ideas driving that growth came from unexpected uses invented by the users themselves.

Jordan’s Reformers Met with Skepticism

An article written by Suha Ma’ayah on Jordan’s reform process…

“The government is seriously considering reforms, but it is not clear how far it will go,” said Bassam Haddadin, an independent member of parliament. “Internally the situation has become ripe for reform. The internal political process is fragile and does not allow for the development of the country.”

Read more…

Controversy and the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

 

 

One of the shortlisted authors for the new but prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Egyptian Youssef Ziedan, has caused a stir with his novel “Beelzebub.” Ziedan and the other nominees — Mohammad Al-Bisatie (Egypt), Fawwaz Haddad (Syria), Inaam Kachachi (Iraq), Ibrahim Nasrallah (Jordan-Palestine) and Habib Selmi (Tunisia) — expect to hear who will take the prize on Monday.

Read more…

The Thirty Days of Barack Obama

Here’s a great analysis in the New York Review of Books… 

As carefully as Barack Obama prepared for it, the presidency has held some surprises for him—some foreseeable, some not, and some of his own making. Seeking to avoid the mistakes of the early Clinton era, Obama concluded that, unlike Clinton, he didn’t want to hold the numerous meetings that can chew up so much of the president’s time. Instead, according to his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, Obama’s style is to drop by an aide’s office—a restless man, he roams the White House corridors—or stop an aide in a hallway and ask, “How are you coming on that thing we were talking about?” Gibbs says, “The worst thing is not have an answer.” Asked what happens then, Gibbs replied, “He gets that disappointed parent look, and then you better go find an answer.”

32 Cool Websites You Don’t Hear About…

Here are 32 cool Websites that you may find useful but you don’t hear about…

This is such an extremely useful list of websites that you may ask yourself how you have done without them for so long. They will assist you in countless ways, offer you lots of all-purpose tips, and are great references for any number of interesting services.

Iraqi Surveys Start to Unveil the Mental Scars of War, Especially Among Women

 

An article in the New York Times on the mental health situation in Iraq…since the article came out more than 50 Iraqis have died this week…

Only when the guns fall silent does the extent of damage wrought by conflict become visible. So in Iraq, as security improves, only now are the full effects of the violence on the Iraqi people emerging. Two studies being released this weekend, one on mental health and the other on the status of women, paint a sobering portrait of the enormous difficulties that lie ahead as the country tries to recover from years of war and state-sponsored terrorism under Saddam Hussein and the more recent sectarian and ethnic strife that followed the American invasion.

A Global Retreat As Economies Dry Up

 

An article in the Washington Post on Singapore as a window into the reversal of the forces that

brought unprecedented global mobility to goods, services, investment and labor. 

Thousands of foreign workers, including London School of Economics graduates with six-digit salaries and desperately poor Bangladeshi factory workers, are streaming home as the economy here suffers the worst of the recessions in Southeast Asia. Singapore is an epicenter of what analysts call a new flow of reverse migration away from hard-hit, globalized economies, including Dubai and Britain, that were once beacons for foreign labor. Economists from Credit Suisse predict an exodus of 200,000 foreigners — or one in every 15 workers here — by the end of 2010.

Singapore’s exports collapsed by a stunning 35 percent in January, mirroring much of the rest of Asia. The export boom here was tied to credit-fueled buying sprees in the United States that stopped abruptly and may take years to return, if ever. Manufacturers are grasping for a Plan B. But none of the options — mining domestic markets, or trying to tap consumers in still-growing China and India — offers a truly viable solution. Adding to fears of a years-long depression for exports is a rising tide of trade protectionism in countries including neighboring Indonesia.

Samantha Power on a Complicated Hero

 

Samantha Power tells a story of a complicated hero, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

This UN diplomat walked a thin moral line, negotiating with the world’s

worst dictators to help their people survive crisis. It’s a compelling story

told with a fiery passion.

Watch Samantha Power speaking

What Are the Odds of a Financial Depression?

Here’s an op-ed from the WSJ on international evidence suggestions there is a 20 % chance the American stock market will get much worse.

The most serious concern is that the downturn will become something worse than the largest recession of the post-World War II period — 1982, when real per capita GDP fell by 3% and the unemployment rate peaked at nearly 11%. Could we even experience a depression (defined as a decline in per-person GDP or consumption by 10% or more)?

The U.S. macroeconomy has been so tame for so long that it’s impossible to get an accurate reading about depression odds just from the U.S. data. My approach uses long-term data for many countries and takes into account the historical linkages between depressions and stock-market crashes. (The research is described in “Stock-Market Crashes and Depressions,” a working paper Jose Ursua and I wrote for the National Bureau of Economic Research last month.)

The bottom line is that there is ample reason to worry about slipping into a depression. There is a roughly one-in-five chance that U.S. GDP and consumption will fall by 10% or more, something not seen since the early 1930s.

Iraqi refugees returning to danger zone to escape poverty in Utah

An article from the Salt Lake Tribune on Iraqi refugees who are leaving their life in the US due to poverty and returning to Iraq. 

As human rights organizations call for aid and resettlement for millions of Iraqi refugees, some who are exasperated by America’s refugee system are going home or attempting to return to other countries in the Middle East. They feel abandoned by federal policies that offer limited and brief financial support and leave many refugees living in poverty.

Refugees planning to leave acknowledge they may be less safe in Iraq, but believe they will be better able to afford food, pay rent and receive medical care.

Educated Iraqis eager to re-establish their middle-class lifestyle are making flaws in the U.S. resettlement system more apparent, while the troubled economy is compounding them, critics charge.

American Military Interventions In Post 9/11 World

My second HuffPost contribution:

A year after the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington and New York, former President Bush’s national security strategy was clear: US interests triumph all else and international institutions would not hinder military actions deemed necessary. Therefore, when contemplating humanitarian interventions, the US would weigh the potential benefits–in terms of foreign lives saved–against the likely costs to the United States. Even if US strategic interests intertwine with internationally accepted humanitarian criteria for humanitarian interventions, it may have consequential effects on the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect.’

Throughout the 1990s, experiences such as Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor among others built a momentum towards the idea that governments had a “responsibility to protect” people suffering in complex humanitarian emergencies. However, according to experts like Thomas Weiss, author of ‘Military-Civilian Interactions’, the September 11th attacks and subsequent US led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, led to two world organizations: “The United Nations, global in members; and the United States, global in reach and power.”

The primary purpose in a humanitarian intervention must be ‘right intention’–to halt or avert human suffering, despite other motives intervening states may have. But the debate after September 11th, shifted to the right to intervene-to protect the intervening country’s people from a threat seen to be originating from another country. The debate shifted to self-defense. Samantha Power, author of ‘A Problem From Hell’, writes that since the September 11th attacks, the “U.S. government is likely to view genocide prevention as an undertaking it cannot afford as it sets out to better protect Americans.”

Security Council resolutions have authorized the use of armed forces led by US-led coalitions, rather than under the command of the UN. In a humanitarian intervention, the intervening states have the responsibility to rebuild. Since September 11th, none of the US interventions taken were primarily called humanitarian interventions, despite clear complex humanitarian emergencies. But Weiss points out the US led invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, turned primarily humanitarian. In 2002, a planned operation against Iraq began to surface. The Bush administration called on the UN to enforce its resolutions on Iraq or risk ‘irrelevance’. But military intervention without a UN mandate raises questions over a country’s motives and capabilities to rebuild in the post-conflict period. The implication of such a reality has also posed a dilemma for the notion of ‘neutrality’ once forces are deployed on the ground and raises concern among independent aid agencies.

Read it all…

Elizabeth Gilbert on Creativity

Elizabeth Gilbert: A different way to think about creative genius

Washington Post: Poking Fun at Yourself

 

Some mistakes are so harmless that nobody is going to insist on noting or fixing them. But The Washington Post decided last week that when your ability to poke fun at yourself is in question, it’s best to say a public “oops” and correct the error.

The comic strip Doonesbury, by Garry Trudeau, follows a single story line through each week, and last week’s was a rerun of a series from 2008 about buyouts at The Post — a potentially sore subject in a newsroom that eliminated more than 100 jobs that way last year. The series of strips had the character Rick Redfern, a reporter, being forced out after 33 years with the newspaper.

Read more…

Women make waves in Jordan Valley

 

An article written by my friend and journalist Suha Ma’ayah on the need and the power of community radio in Jordan:

AMMAN//For the past year, Muneera Shatti and Asma Raja, two young women from the Jordan Valley, have broadcast a weekly radio show that tackles the issues faced by their impoverished community, from a lack of buses and the theft of water, to boys using mobile phones to take photos of schoolgirls.

The work is not without challenges as the tribal-dominated valley on which they report is staunchly conservative and one of 20 pockets of poverty where the average income is about US$1,800 (Dh6,624) per year.

“At first there were men who refused to be interviewed by us. They would say, ‘You are women’. But they got used to us. Just last week I interviewed young men in a cafe to gauge their views regarding public services,” Ms Shatti said. “Interviewing men is something I would have never imagined myself doing before I became a correspondent for the radio.”

In one programme, Ms Shatti reported on the lack of buses connecting her town with a nearby village. Within a week, the Jordan Valley Authority responded and provided the needed bus.

“That was encouraging even though later the bus was taken away as other bus drivers protested that it was affecting their business.”

In another broadcast, Ms Raja, 24, reported on water theft. 

“Farmers were stealing water from the main pipes, depriving residents of drinking water. I talked to a senior water official who promised to provide citizens with another source of water while the government closed some of the pipes to try to stop those from stealing. Since then, water theft has declined.”

Because the women do not have a licence to broadcast in their community, Radio Al Balad, an Amman-based community radio, produces and hosts their show, called the Voice of the Valley. 

The women take three buses to get to Amman to broadcast the show, but for them, the trip is worth it.

Radio Al Balad has been pushing hard to get a licence to launch the first all-women community radio in Jordan.

But last month, the government turned down the licence application without giving a reason. The country’s laws do not oblige the government to explain why it rejects applications.

Read the full article…

70 % of Jordanian Journalists believe gov’t resorts to ‘soft containment’

Some 70 percent of journalists and media personnel in Jordan believe to a “high and medium” degree that the government resorts to “soft containment” methods to win their support and avoid bad press, a study revealed Saturday.

Of those 70 percent , 32 percent of them believe that permanent or temporary appointments in governmental or semi-government organisations is a tactic the government uses to buy the allegiance of media personnel, according to the poll conducted by Al Quds Centre for Political Studies with the support of the Canada Fund.

The study indicated that 17 per cent believe the government resorts to giving financial incentives to win journalists’ support, while 7 per cent said giving information to particular journalists is a means the government uses to obtain their support.

In addition, 49 percent of opinion leaders in the media sector were subjected to soft containment methods, the study showed.

Read more…

Crisis in the US newspaper industry

 

Will it be the end for the SFC also?

 

A sad chapter in the US newspaper industry.

America’s newspaper industry has been badly hit by the downturn, and a number of titles face closure.

The latest casualty is the venerable San Francisco Chronicle, whose owners on Wednesday announced they were planning to cut a “significant” number of jobs to meet cost-cutting targets, and that if the targets are not met, then the paper would be sold or closed down.

The Chronicle, which was founded in 1865, soon after the gold-rush hit California, lost more than $50m (£35m) in 2008, and so far 2009 is looking even worse for the title.

Read more…

Musical Show of Unity Upsets Many

 

Here an article of interest published today in the New York Times:

Achinoam Nini, a singer and peace activist, has long stirred controversy here. Known abroad by her stage name, Noa, she has recorded with Arab artists, refused to perform in the occupied West Bank, condemned Israeli settlements there and had concerts canceled because of bomb threats from the extreme right.

A petition went around demanding that the duo withdraw, saying they were giving the false impression of coexistence in Israel and trying to shield the nation from the criticism it deserved. It added, “Every brick in the wall of this phony image allows the Israeli Army to throw 10 more tons of explosives and more phosphorus bombs.”

Oscars Recap

Here’s a recap of the 81st Annual Academy Awards  

Sean Penn’s speech, best actor:

For more highlights click here

Apathetic Journalists

 

This is an  article published today in the Jordan Times. Yet again it is indicative of the indifference among some journalists in Jordan.

For professional, investigative journalism in Jordan, it is worth visiting: arij.net 

More than half the journalists in the Kingdom, some 58 per cent, are aware of the Access of Information Law, according to a study released on Saturday.

Results of a field survey carried out by Al Urdun Al Jadid Research Centre (UJRC) in December 2008 also revealed that 84.7 per cent of journalists did not know they had the right to request information from public agencies through the Information Council.

A vast majority, 89 per cent of respondents, said they do not utilise the Access to Information Law, compared to 11 per cent who said they have benefited from the legislation’s provisions.

The Most Dangerous Place in the World

 

 

Somalia is a state governed only by anarchy. A graveyard of foreign-policy failures, it has known just six months of peace in the past two decades. Now, as the country’s endless chaos threatens to engulf an entire region, the world again simply watches it burn.

Read this special report…

The Media Effect

 

 

Excellent insight published in the Huffington Post…

Afghan Star is a an example of what I call the Media Effect: accomplishing something that neither the government nor the international troops has done: bringing peace and calm for a couple of hours every week in a land where violence and fear of violence is ever present; encouraging a new kind of freedom and self expression for women, and strengthening a fragile democracy by popularizing campaigns and the power of a vote.

The media effect is often debated…good or bad, overstated or underrated?

But the fact is that there is an effect, and there is plenty of evidence, getting more measurable and more powerful as media becomes more pervasive, more personal, more mobile and more global.

Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down

 

This article is very powerful. The message is:

You can’t build a country and solely rely on economic development and disregard political and social development. As a friend once told me, ” A nation has to choose, does the government want to build a mall or a country.”

No one knows how bad things have become, though it is clear that tens of thousands have left, real estate prices have crashed and scores of Dubai’s major construction projects have been suspended or canceled. But with the government unwilling to provide data, rumors are bound to flourish, damaging confidence and further undermining the economy.

 Now, many expatriates here talk about Dubai as though it were a con game all along.

Instead of moving toward greater transparency, the emirates seem to be moving in the other direction. A new draft media law would make it a crime to damage the country’s reputation or economy, punishable by fines of up to 1 million dirhams (about $272,000). Some say it is already having a chilling effect on reporting about the crisis.

 

“Before, so many of us were living a good life here,” Mr. Thiab said. “Now we cannot pay our loans. We are all just sleeping, smoking, drinking coffee and having headaches because of the situation.”

 

 

HuffPost: Worrying for America

 

This is my first published blog entry in the Huffington Post.

February 11, 2009

Recently I met with Majed, an elderly Arabic schoolteacher in Amman, Jordan. Not long ago, he taught me Arabic, and we still meet occasionally to talk about the media in Jordan. He lives in a small clay mud brick house in Amman and has 10 children. He asked me about my recent trip to the US. To my surprise, I found myself telling Majid that the confident, energetic America I had come to know during my college years in the States was almost unrecognizable. I told him that America is facing challenges–people are losing their homes, losing their jobs and millions can no longer afford health insurance. They elected a new President, I told him, to try to help them. As I spoke to the schoolteacher, President Obama’s themes of hope and change rung in my head. Images flashed through my mind of the thousands of young and old Americans lining the streets of Chicago hoping to be part of history. Majid shook his head in disbelief and said: “I will pray for them.”

During my trip to the U.S. in November, I was conscious of an uncomfortable role-reversal. In the past, I had become used to being accosted by Americans who want to talk to me about creating job opportunities for frustrated, unemployed Arabs. This time, American friends worried about losing their jobs turned to me for comfort.

I saw thousands of Americans lining the streets to attend what was ludicrously termed a “job fair” in New York. Bill, a college friend, told me job fairs are the new soup kitchens. Instead of speaking of the future, we ended up reminiscing about the ‘roaring’ 90’s. Today, Bill works at Citibank. I read that 50,000 Citibank employees will be laid off in the next few months. Everyday, I hope that Bill doesn’t lose his job.

I saw many homeless and scarred Gulf War vets sleeping on the crowded and cold corner of Columbus circle in Manhattan. I found myself comforting a store clerk at my favorite retail store because she had heard rumors that her store was closing down. The next day, I stopped to acknowledge a lonely flautist and a grungy guitarist in the subway. The open guitar case inviting donations sitting in front of him was empty. I assured an American friend, who left Jordan to study law in New York, that a new US administration will bring a sense of optimism. Then we found ourselves staring at the front page of the business section with a photo depicting young lawyers packing their bags and heading to Dubai.

At the neighborhood drug store, another American told me about his struggle to finish film school and his diminishing hope that images will make a difference in this world. The Fletcher family, who graciously invited me for Thanksgiving dinner in Long Island, gathered to gaze at a computer screen. The images were of palm-tree shaped hotels and an indoor ski resort in Dubai. Their enthusiasm reminded me of photos I saw of Disney World when I was a child in Jordan and, later when I was older, my impressions of Las Vegas.

On my visit to New York, I awakened every morning and promised the newspaper seller I would continue buying the print version of his newspaper. It hardly eased his worries as the newspaper industry continues to suffer unparalleled layoffs and diminishing revenue. I returned to an unexpected continuing boom in Jordan–a Middle Eastern country with scarce natural resources that is currently the second largest recipient of US aid in the world per capita next to Israel.

While American newspapers file for bankruptcy, a single Jordanian news website has already hit the million mark, surpassing both print and broadcast media in the country. As the American franchise restaurant Bennigan’s filed for bankruptcy this summer, Jordanian families exuberantly packed the newly built Bennigan’s in Amman. The restaurant remains open. And when Americans were Googling the address of their favorite neighborhood Starbucks to see if it was closing down, I was surprised to see three newly Starbucks springing in my Amman neighborhood.

On my last day in New York, a French-Jewish woman decided to tell me the story of her journey from France to New York before selling me a suitcase. “I work day and night here so my son can go to university,” she told me. “I don’t sleep often.” An Arab-American cab driver mentioned that in America at least he did not have to worry about access to hot and cold water or heating. “I am sure Americans will not starve. That is good, no?” Our conversation reminded me of a story I read on the debate brewing over the use of the SAT for college admissions. Only a few weeks later, I read that many young Americans will not even afford to go to college.

When I was called to speak on a panel regarding the Middle East at CUNY, a former CBS veteran correspondent told me she had traveled across the US but was convinced the best Sushi she has ever tasted was at a jazz bar in the Middle East.

I returned to Jordan a few weeks ago, and immediately noticed that local hip-hop concerts and standup comedy shows were selling out in Amman. The Mayor created the first ever standup comedy festival in the Middle East, showcasing up-and-coming comedic talent and encouraging more Jordanians to get involved in comedy. A representative from my graduate school and I met over lunch in Amman and wondered how the university might strengthen and support international alumni activities and programs. Could USAID in Jordan fund it? Then we looked at each other and laughed: American foreign aid would be returning to an American university.

If you’d like to leave any comments including your two cents on the state of the economy in Jordan or in the US, please feel free to do so in the Huffington Post under comments.

 

A New Tongue to Win Hearts and Minds

Learning English is leaving a mark on young Arabs

Here’s an article published in the New York Times on Egyptians learning English and at the same time learning about American culture and democracy. I really think this article demonstrates two things:

First, Arabs don’t hate America because of its values, culture, etc. This is an article about the power of education and how it gave so much hope to these students, something that politics could not do for them. Education is a great way to win hearts and minds. 

Secondly, the main point of the article regarding the lack of follow-up once the course and training ends raises a very important point. And I hope that it sends a message that more needs to be done for these students in order to  implement what they learned and for the program to have an impact on their own lives, communities and elsewhere. What is happening in some countries in the Middle East is what is being dubbed as training fatigue. I believe training is vital, but the implementation process must also materialize at least to a certain extent. Otherwise, people will become frustrated.

 

But what did the United States get for its investment in this young woman?

“The most important idea I learned is to respect differences,” said Ms. Yousef, with a big white smile.

She said this in English, expressing an idea considered rebellious in a society that prizes and encourages conformity. Ms. Yousef picked up her new language and thinking skills as part of Access, an after school English language program that is a small, almost invisible corner of the United States Department of State’s multibillion-dollar budget. It is a low profile, delayed-impact program that aims to promote change and understanding from the bottom up. Since its inception in 2004, it has taught 32,000 students in 50 countries.

 

Ending It All: Suicide in Jordan

 

 

 

By Rana F. Sweis

Published in Living Well Magazine

February 2009

AMMAN-Mohammad Abdul-Nabi, 23, was found hung in his home by his 14-year-old brother. The young farmer was rushed to the hospital but was pronounced dead upon arrival. He decided to end his life because of a second failed marriage, explain his relatives. His story, like others similar to it, is shrouded in mystery and recorded only in snippets. And just like their short interrupted lives, information regarding suicide victims’ acts and their aftermath is scarce in Jordan. Like so many families who prefer to deny or forget the past, a person who knows a person tells a story of pain. 

 “When it comes to suicide cases in Jordan, we only get a glimpse, like a car whooshing by,” says Fayez Al-Fayez, Editor in Chief of Arabiya magazine and a popular social columnist. “We end up never knowing the reasons, we end up never knowing the whole story and no one wants to talk about it either.” Every year, one million people worldwide die by suicide, according to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics. Moreover, in the past 45 years suicide rates increased by 60 percent and is now among the three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44 years. These figures do not include attempted suicide, which are up to 20 times more frequent than suicide.

WHO statistics reveal that suicide in Jordan and in the region remain low, but in-depth research remains inadequate. “Statistically suicide is not considered an epidemic problem in Jordan,” explains Hani Jahshan, a Forensic Pathologist. There are 35 to 40 cases of suicide in Jordan every year, and the age range is between 20-25, according to the National Center for Forensic Medicine. However, attempted suicide cases are not recorded, says Jahshan. “Research is lacking in this field, especially in terms of attempted suicide.” Emergency services in hospitals are not keeping records of suicide attempts, adds Jahshan.

Sultan, 39, stole a knife from a shop in Amman and stabbed himself in the stomach. Witnesses say the man was “desperate”. He did not die. He was taken to hospital where reports suggest he is in ‘critical’ condition. Just a few hours before he stabbed himself, family members saved Sultan. They found him wearing a noose around his neck. Suicide is ultimately an individual and often a private act. Biological, genetic, psychological, social and cultural factors may impact the risk of suicide in an individual. Domestic violence, for example, can trigger a suicide attempt. “Psychological abuse can take on different forms including humiliation, threats of divorce, blackmailing and physical abuse,” explains Walid Sarhan, a psychiatrist. “The psychological consequences will include anxiety, frustration, low self-esteem and suicidal attempts.” Other risk factors can include serious mental illness, alcohol and drug abuse, childhood abuse, loss of a loved one and unemployment. “There is a lack of awareness about suicide,” admits Mohammad Khateeb, Police Security Department Spokesperson. “The truth is we still live in a tribal and conservative society that would rather not speak of suicide, which is forbidden in religion and brings shame to the family.” 

Another short news piece on suicide was published in Ammonews, a popular electronic news website. A 20-year-old woman jumped from the top of the fifth circle tunnel, according to traffic police and witnesses. The woman whose ‘love affair’ failed recently, prompted her to attempt suicide, reports suggest. She was still alive when she was rushed to hospital and an investigation took place.

Individual cases of suicide in Jordan that were published in the media—overwhelmingly in electronic media–illustrate that shame, economic hardship, examination failure, unrequited love, family’s objection to a marriage and other family disputes were the greatest risk factors. One of the only in-depth documents that shed light on suicide in Jordan is a 2001 dissertation entitled, A Sociological View of Suicide in Jordan written by Ismeel Aqili, a former graduate student at the University of Jordan. Based on cases he examined from 1982-1999, his study reveals more males than females commit suicide but more females attempt suicide. University graduates between the ages of 18 to 37 were more likely to commit suicide in Jordan. Most of the individuals who committed suicide in this age range were unemployed.

Police were able to convince a 17-year-old from jumping off a telecommunication building in Zarqa, reported Ammon. The young man found out he failed the Tawjahi exam. Witnesses and friends said the young man was afraid he would be punished severely by his family for failing the exam. “At the end of the day, I worry about our youth because I don’t believe they want to commit suicide. It is often a cry for help” says Haifa Abu Ghazaleh, Senator and Secretary General of the National Council for Family Affairs. “If they fail the Tawjahi [high school exam] for example, they may fear the family’s reaction.”

 People at risk of suicide can be treated. Oftentimes, it is due to the inability to cope as a result of an event or series of events that the person finds overwhelmingly traumatic or distressing. Psychotherapy and continued contact with a health provider can decrease the risk of suicide. Programs that address risk and protective measures are effective. Moreover, suicide has a profound effect on family, friends, and those associated with the victim. “I reported on a story of a mentally ill woman whose husband eventually divorced her,” explains Al-Fayez. One day her parents and daughter found her on the roof of their house, says Al-Fayez. She poured gasoline on herself very calmly and she lit herself on fire. She didn’t die. The victim was rushed to the hospital and died two days later. “What I saw is the effect it had on the family, the devastation,” he adds. “The siblings and her daughter were devastated.” While those who are under the age of 18 and attempt suicide have access to rehabilitation programs from the Family Protection Department, those who are over 18 have no institutional support, according to Khateeb. 

In Jordanian society, there is a great deal of social and religious stigma surrounding mental illness. Islam views suicide as a sin. The prohibition of suicide has also been recorded: “He who commits suicide by throttling shall keep on throttling himself in the Hell-fire, and he who commits suicide by stabbing himself, he shall keep stabbing himself in the Hell-fire.” In the sixth century, suicide became a Christian religious sin and secular crime. In 533, those who committed suicide while accused of a crime were denied a Christian burial.

Talking about feelings surrounding suicide promotes understanding and can greatly reduce the immediate distress of a suicidal person. “Is suicide a really big problem in Jordan? Are the numbers alarming? The answer is no,” says Khateeb, “However, I understand the concern among individuals and members of society at large regarding individuals who attempt suicide, where can they turn to for help?”

People who feel suicidal may fear expressing themselves, and may be reluctant to reach out for help. “The stigma of psychiatric illnesses is still very prevalent,” explains Sarhan. “A women, for example, who dares to consult with a psychiatrist could face the threat of divorce and deprivation from her children, although it is not legal, but women believe that.”

People often deal with stressful or traumatic events and experiences reasonably well, but sometimes an accumulation of such events, over an extended period, can push normal coping strategies to the limit.  Jahshan, like many others working with victims of violence and abuse, says that Jordan continues to lack skilled professionals in this field. “Those who provide counseling to victims of violence and abuse should consider cases of attempted suicide and provide them services as well,” says Abu Ghazaleh. “At the end of the day everyone has a role to play including all sectors of civil society.”

Jordan could go a long way by reducing the suicide rate by discussing ways to decrease suicidal tendencies. Providing protection programs is important. Shedding light on the issue can even prevent suicide cases. “Protection programs begin in our schools. There needs to be awareness campaigns, group therapy and individual counseling in schools,” says Abu Ghazaleh. “I believe there should be a more clear strategy on how to tackle this issue from different angles and address it in schools,” explains Abu Ghazaleh.

When forensic experts, doctors and members of various organizations wanted to begin combating family violence in Jordan, they turned to the media. In 2004, two forensic doctors presented statistics showing a dramatic increase in the number of abused children. “If this issue is not covered enough by the media, the children will not know there are people who are here to help them, and places they can turn to for help,” said Rabab al Qubaj, a specialist in the Jordan River Foundation. During that time, journalists present at the workshop asked members of organizations and others to play a role in giving them easier access to information. The journalists also pointed out hidden fears, about raising such taboo and sensitive issues, fearing repercussions.

Today, electronic media news websites such as Ammon (www.ammonnews.net) and Saraya (www.sarayanews.com) have taken a lead in shedding light on suicide in Jordan. Although suicide news segments in both news agencies are not covered in-depth, they do report individual cases. Ammon publishes statistics on the number of suicide cases per year in Jordan. They examine the reasons for each case, although there is little follow-up on the cases. Print and broadcast media in Jordan lags behind in both reporting and shedding light on suicide in Jordan. “Electronic media in Jordan is lifting the lid on many issues like suicide, and domestic violence,” explains Rana Sabbagh, a journalist and media expert.

In February 2004, the first ever conference on child abuse in the Middle East took place in Amman. Representatives from across the world, local government and NGO’s took part. Dozens of media outlets from the Arab world were present. During the conference Jahshan attributed the increase in the number of reported child abuse cases in Jordan to the increased coverage of the issue in the local press.

This successful and ongoing campaign to combat child abuse in Jordan can also be implemented to debunk misconceptions and reduce suicide rates in Jordan. “The more we deny as a society that there are cases of suicide in Jordan, the more we’ll have to look within and say, how could we not help these individuals from killing themselves?” says Al-Fayez. “That is shameful.”

Fact Box

By Age	2007
Age Group	Cases
Under 18	1
18-27	13
28-37	9
38-47	7
47-Over	8
By Gender
Gender	Cases
Male	26
Female	12
By Nationality
Nationality	Cases
Jordanian	35
Non-Jordanian (Arab)	2
Non-Jordanian	1
Method of Suicide
Method	Cases
Firearms	13
Other	25
Burning
Falling from Heights
Knife
Hanging
	2008
Total Suicides	34

 

Source: Jordan Police Security Department

Azar Nafisi’s Memoirs.

From the author of Lolita in Tehran

A book I’m looking forward to reading. Read more of this book review in the Washington Post. Also read an excerpt from Chapter 1. 

Nafisi’s sensory descriptions of Tehran life — the “enticing cacophony” of its streets, the daily forays her mother makes to the market, where she appears to be “so much at home in this world of chocolates, leather, and spices” — are as vivid as the portraits of her exotically dysfunctional family. My one grievance concerning Things I’ve Been Silent About is that, like many a Near Eastern family reunion, the book is excessively crowded. Chatty cousin after chatty cousin, friend after friend, ponderous wise man after ponderous wise man barge into Nafisi’s pages, too briefly described to warrant our interest, crowding and often muddling her narrative. But this is a modest complaint to make about an utterly memorable (pardon the alliteration) memoir.

Slumdog Controversy in India

Slumdog Controversy

 

 

Slumdog Millionaire has made it big, but the story is a little different in India, where the film was shot.

The film hit a sensitive nerve in India, launching soul-searching debates over the actors’ compensation, the movie’s portrait of the country’s vast poor and the title’s use of the word “dog,” which some slum dwellers consider so offensive that they ransacked a theater in Bihar’s state capital of Patna, where the film was being shown in India for the first time.

Read more in the Washington Post.

Samantha Power Returns

Power gets a White House job

 

Some good news for Samantha Power, author and expert on genocide and humanitarian intervention. She will be an Obama aide.

Power, a noted human rights expert who won the Pulitzer for her 2008 book “Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World” about the late U.N. diplomat, made headlines last March during the height of the fierce fight for the Democratic presidential nomination when she called Clinton “a monster” in an interview with a Scottish newspaper. Her remarks set off angry exchanges about the tenor of Obama’s campaign. 

A few hours after her comments were published, Power announced her resignation, saying the remarks were inexcusable and contradictory to her admiration for Clinton.

Check my other posts on Power:

1. American Military Interventions
2. A Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy
3. A Good Pick by Obama: Samantha Power

On John Updike

A very well-written op-ed on John Updike and the number of authors we have recently lost.

IT has been a hard year or so for writers. The world seems to grow emptier and emptier, depletion without replenishment, and now with the passing of John Updike at the age of 76, death has taken perhaps its biggest prize.

Literature, of course, is not a contest. Still, that Stockholm did not ultimately embrace Mr. Updike — a Nobel, why not? — seems too bad, as it probably would have meant a lot to him, and to us as well to have his erudition and hard work and enthusiastic witnessing of postwar America honored on such a stage. The news that he died in a hospice not far from his house, and the new ordinariness of this current manner of death, made me wonder what he would have noticed and written about it —“I’m sure it will be discovered he was taking notes,” a friend said, hopefully — for he was gifted at describing everything.

Read more about John Updike and his poem Requiem.

You can also read my book review regarding his recent novel The Terrorist.

Charlie Rose Interview with Bob Simon

 

Charlie Rose interview wtih Bob Simon on the West Bank. Check out also other Charlie Rose interviews including a tribute to author John Updike.

TIME: How al-Arabiya Got the Obama Interview

The story behind the interview in TIME magazine:

How did a journalist for an Arab-language broadcaster score the first television interview granted by President Barack Obama? Well, at first, Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief for al-Arabiya, a Saudi-backed news channel headquartered in Dubai, thought he was getting someone else. Not that he hadn’t tried — like everyone else in Washington — to snag the historic first.

Melhem says there apparently was an internal debate at the White House about whether it was the right time for Obama to grant an interview to the Arab media, but that when the decision was made, several advisers recommended it be granted to al-Arabiya. The channel is seen as a prominent voice of moderation in the Middle East, preferring calm analysis to what many see as rival al-Jazeera’s more sensational coverage. The Obama scoop came at a good moment for al-Arabiya, which had seen ratings falter as al-Jazeera provided blanket coverage of Palestinian suffering during the recent Israeli war in Gaza

‘Buying’ Journalists in Iraq

Land for Favorable Media Coverage?

Mr. Maliki has pledged to give plots of land to journalists.From an article in the New York Times. Be careful what you read in the Iraqi press:

BAGHDAD — At a recent meeting with the Iraqi journalists’ union, Prime MinisterNuri Kamal al-Maliki made a pledge that would have scandalized the Iraqis’ American counterparts: the government would give plots of land to thousands of journalists, for a nominal price or possibly even free.

A campaign sign for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq. Mr. Maliki has pledged to give plots of land to journalists.

His timing, a month before provincial elections, as well as his admonition to journalists to focus on stories of progress and reconstruction, might be seen as an attempt to buy favorable news coverage.

Video [CBS] 60 Minutes: Is Peace Possible

Has peace in the Middle East become nothing more than a pipe dream? As Bob Simon reports, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians feel that a two-state solution is no longer possible.

The Rise of the Self-Publishing Industry and the Decline of Publishing Companies

An interesting article in the New York Times on the rise of the self-publishing industry and the decline of publishing companies in the midst of the financial crisis.

As traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster best sellers, self-publishing companies are ramping up their title counts and making money on books that sell as few as five copies, in part because the author, rather than the publisher, pays for things like cover design and printing costs.

The self-publishing companies generally make their money either by charging author fees — which can range from $99 to $100,000 for a variety of services, including custom cover design and marketing and distribution to online retailers, or by taking a portion of book sales, or both.

Some, like Lulu Enterprises and CreateSpace from Amazon.com, allow the author to create the book free, but then make their money on a small printing markup and a profit split with the author.

For some authors, the appeal of self-publishing is that they can put their books on the market much faster than through traditional publishers.

In 2008, Author Solutions, which is based in Bloomington, Ind., and operates iUniverse as well as other print-on-demand imprints including AuthorHouse and Wordclay, published 13,000 titles, up 12 percent from the previous year.

Top Sites in Jordan

Yahoo, Google and Facebook topped the list of most visited sites in Jordan but there are also interesting ones that made it in the top 100. Ad Dustour newspaper took a dive while Al Ghad is steadily improving, making it the second most read newspaper. Community sites like Jeeran (26) and Maktoob (eight) are up there as well.

Check the top 100 visited sites in Jordan…

Video: Obama Interview with Al Arabiya Television

Obama speaking to the Arab world.

My Two Cents on Jordan’s Educational System

From today’s Jordan Times on Jordanian students:

Habashneh said one can hardly find a school or a college student who is interested in reading a book or attending cultural seminars, calling for finding a new approach to encourage dialogue and communication with young people in order to enrich their cultural knowledge.

“We need to adopt a comprehensive national and cultural approach, away from the political dimension and regional problems. The government should focus on a new mechanism capable of making the younger generation more interested in culture rather than being involved in tribal or regional affiliations,” he added, suggesting more cooperation between the ministries of education, culture and higher education to introduce extracurricular activities in schools and universities where students can interact.

Actually that is not the solution to the problem. The problem is the system of education that hardly encourages participation, critical thinking and analysis but is more focused on memorization and tests. At the end of the day we have to deal with the core of the problem which is the education system especially in public schools. Yes, Jordan has one of the highest literacy rates in the Middle East but we need to examine the quality of education. The problem with the system is that many Jordanian children grow up, go to college and once they are in college they are surprised when they have to analyze or are asked to think critically. I have heard this not only from students but a Sociology professor at one of Jordan’s most prestigious universities. When he asked the students to write what they think during an exam, many of the students had memorized what the professor had said in class and the professor was surprised to find that almost all the exam papers looked the same. He thought the students had cheated but in fact they did not. He realized that those were his own exact words. 

I feel strongly about this subject. Sometimes you have to change a system that is broken and decayed. The system itself becomes the elephant in the room and you cannot continue washing the elephant, brushing the elephant and putting hair clips on its ears to make it look pretty.  The bottom line is there’s an elephant in the room.

Obama’s Mideast Policy Examined

 

Listen to Rami Khouri on NPR.

 

Richard Holbrooke has been named special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and George Mitchell has been picked to be special envoy for Middle East affairs. Rami Khouri, editor at large of the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon, and director for the Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs, weighs in.

NPR: Freedom Of Information Isn’t Just For Journalists

The Freedom of Information act is one of the vital lessons I learned about in college and the fact the Obama so Wednesday’s announcement at the White House was great. NPR reported on this story. 

President Obama told the nation, “every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.”

But the real glory of the Freedom of Information law is how it gives ordinary people, all of us, ownership over the information.Every military veteran, every senior citizen, every private business ought to be cheering the president on because those are the folks who really use the Freedom of Information Act.

I know what you’re thinking — the Freedom of Information Act, that’s just for journalists, isn’t it?

No. Reporters and researchers like me file only a small percentage of the information requests to the federal government.

Friedman on the Two-State Solution

 

 

 

 

Here’s Tom Friedman’s column in the New York Times. He mentions one thing that is vital for any peacemaker: “a peacemaker has to be both a nation-builder and a negotiator.” But as far as his conclusion goes ‘freezing settlements’ is not the only thing required from the Israelis–there’s a lot more that needs to be done. 

What makes it so challenging for the new Obama team is that Mideast diplomacy has been transformed as a result of the regional disintegration since Oslo — in three key ways.

First, in the old days, Henry Kissinger could fly to three capitals, meet three kings, presidents or prime ministers and strike a deal that could hold. No more. Today a peacemaker has to be both a nation-builder and a negotiator.

Oped: Lesson of a Bloody War

A very well written op-ed in the Washington Post By David Grossman on the aftermath of the war on Gaza.

Like the pairs of foxes in the biblical story of Samson, tied together by the tail with a flaming torch between them, we and the Palestinians are dragging each other into disaster — despite our disparate strength, and even when we try very hard to separate. And as we do, we burn the one who is bound to us, our double, our nemesis, ourselves.

So, a month after the war began, in the midst of the wave of nationalist invective now sweeping Israel, it would not hurt to keep in mind that this latest military operation in Gaza was, when all is said and done, just one more way-station on a road paved with fire, violence and hatred. On this road, you sometimes win and you sometimes lose, but in the end it leads to ruin.

Iraq Election Highlights Ascendancy of Tribes

An article from the Washington Post by the great journalist and author Anthony Shadid on Iraqi elections and tribes.

How sad it is to know that nothing has changed in the Arab world, as the article clearly illustrates, when it comes to political participation and elections:

Here, the new Iraq looks like the old one, imbued with politics that might be familiar to Gertrude Bell, the British diplomat and adventurer who drew the country’s borders after World War I.

There is a saying heard these days in Anbar: “Everyone claims they have the love of Laila, but Laila loves none of them.” In other words, Laila gets to choose. The same might be said of the tribes, whose mantle everyone claims and which often demand a tidy sum for their support. Coddled and cultivated, the tribes are kingmakers.

“The center of power in Anbar,” Hais called them as he sat in the guesthouse, decorated with purple, red and yellow plastic flowers, with 25 tribal leaders gathered over a sprawling, artery-clogging dish of chicken, lamb and a slab of fat, mixed with rice.

NYT Magazine: Mideast Revolution, Facebook-Style

Facebook, a platform for democracy?

A great article in the New York Times Magazine  written by Samantha Shapiro on the power of building civil society organizations in the Mideast (Egypt) and moving towards the path of democratization through the use of a powerful tool like Facebook. 

When I spoke to Wael Nawara, a 47-year-old Ghad activist who is a co-founder of the party, he explained why, for him, getting on Facebook was such a big eye-opener. If you look at Egyptian politics on the surface, he said, you might think that the Muslim Brotherhood is the only alternative to the Mubarak regime. But “Facebook revealed a liberal undercurrent in Egyptian society,” Nawara said. “In general, there’s this kind of apathy, a sense that there is nothing we can do to change the situation. But with Facebook you realize there are others who think alike and share the same ideals. You can find Islamists there, but it is really dominated by liberal voices.”

In Washington, there is increasing interest in the April 6 Youth Movement. James Glassman, the outgoing under secretary of state for public diplomacy, told me he followed the group closely. “It’s not easy in Egypt, and in other countries in the Middle East, to form robust civil-society organizations,” he said. “And in a way that’s what these groups are doing, although they’re certainly unconventional.”

Other State Department officials told me they believe that social-networking software like Facebook’s has the potential to become a powerful pro-democracy tool. They pointed to recent developments in Saudi Arabia, where in November a Facebook group helped organize a national hunger strike against the kingdom’s imprisonment of political opponents, and in Colombia, where activists last February used Facebook to organize one of the largest protests ever held in that country, a nationwide series of demonstrations against the FARCinsurgency. Not long ago, the State Department created its own group on Facebook called “Alliance of Youth Movements,” a coalition of groups from a dozen countries who use Facebook for political organizing. Last month, they brought an international collection of young online political activists, including one from the April 6 group, as well as Facebook executives and representatives from Google and MTV, to New York for a three-day conference.

NYTIMES: The Bullets in My In-Box

A great New York Times article written by By Ethan Bronner:

It turns out that both narration and mediation require common ground. But trying to tell the story so that both sides can hear it in the same way feels more and more to me like a Greek tragedy in which I play the despised chorus. It feels like I am only fanning the flames, adding to the misunderstandings and mutual antagonism with every word I write because the fervent inner voice of each side is so loud that it drowns everything else out.

George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader who is Mr. Obama’s new special envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, could find something similar when he arrives here.

Favorite Films and TV Series

Here are my top favorite films so far:

The Visitor-Richard Jenkins

 

Slumdog Millionaire

Milk--Sean Penn

Dark Knight

Mamma Mia

Recycle - Set in Zarqa, Jordan.

Persepolis

 

Here are my favorite TV series so far: 

Brothers and Sisters (Great Cast)

Ugly Betty

Headcases (Hilarious)

Without a Trace

Criminal Minds

The Mentalist

Monk

Eleventh Hour

 

Video: Oprah Effect in the Middle East

Satellite television has reached even conservative parts of the Arab world, where hundreds of programs are now available. The Middle East’s MBC-4 began airing “The Oprah Winfrey Show” more than four years ago, and the program now reaches about 6 million viewers in the Arab world each day.

Worldfocus correspondent Kristen Gillespie reports from Jordan on the “Oprah effect” in the Middle East.

Frontline Video: Dreams of Obama

 

 

On the eve of Barack Obama’s historic inauguration, FRONTLINE examines the rich personal and political biography of America’s 44th president, offering insight into the key moments and experiences that have shaped him and formed his political vision. 

Watch online the full program

The story begins at the Democratic Convention in 2004 when Barack Obama, a little-known candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, stepped forward to tell his personal story and to call for a move beyond partisan politics.

FRONTLINE reviews the critical life experiences that made Obama uniquely suited to launch his successful campaign to become the country’s first African American president: his community organizing days in Chicago, his presidency of the Harvard Law Review, and his rise to the top of Illinois politics, in the course of which he learned how to navigate America’s complicated racial and political divides.

Books I’d Like to Read

Books I’d like to read

 

‘

Dowd: Exit the Boy King

Maureen Dowd’s op-ed in the New York Times beautifully written a day after Obama’s inauguration:

I’ve seen many presidents come and go, but I’ve never watched a tableau like the one Tuesday, when four million eyes turned heavenward, following the helicopter’s path out of town. Everyone, it seemed, was waving goodbye, with one or two hands, a wave that moved westward down the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial, and keeping their eyes fixed unwaveringly on that green bird.

It was a morning of such enormous emotion and portent — jaw-dropping, Dow-dropping and barrier-dropping — that even the cool new president had to feel daunted to see his blocks-long motorcade and two million hope-besotted faces beaming up at him, dreaming that he can save their shirts.

The Journey is Long for Jordanians

While the world ponders the meaning of change, hope and unity after Obama’s inauguration, Jordanians seem to have a long way to go.

Members of two party-affiliated groups clashed on Tuesday evening at a demonstration to “bid farewell” to former US president George W. Bush.

Youth members of the Jordanian Democratic Popular Unity Party (Wihda) and the Arab Baath Socialist Party fought over who would lead the chanting at the event, organised by Wihda’s Move campaign at the Professional Associations Complex in Shmeisani.

More than 30 activists from both parties took part in the fight, which led to the cancellation of a theatrical performance and poetry recital organised on the sidelines of the event, according to Move.

 

Video: President Obama’s Inaugural Address

An Open Letter to President Obama

 

Here’s a very thoughtful letter to President Obama written by Faisal Abbas.

Here’s an excerpt:

I utilized my stay in the US to learn more about Edward Murrow and the history and achievements of American journalism; and while there were many arguments made about the role the American media is playing today, especially with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I found it quite comforting to know that at least under the first amendment, one could really say anything one likes.

Based on all of that, Sir, I find myself at ease in writing this letter to you, hoping you manage to read it before your Blackberry is taken away and you start consuming media in the form of briefings, as I clearly don’t think I am so important to make it into one of those.

All what I want to say, Mr. President, is that you bring a lot of hope to my region, and that people are counting on you to make a change for the better and to once and for all bring peace and prosperity to this very troubled part of the world.

We know that we shouldn’t be expecting miracles, and that there are more pressing issues on your agenda, especially the economy which the whole world expects you to focus on for everyone’s sake.

However, Sir, unlike myself… you are in no way, shape or form an ‘average Joe’, as of today you are leading the world’s number 1 super-power, and you are doing this after winning a battle with preconceived ideas and racial barriers that you have managed to overcome.

Transcript of Obama Inaugural Speech

Obama makes history

 

 

Full transcript as prepared for delivery of President Barack Obama’s inaugural remarks on Jan. 20, 2009, at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

Obama: A Team of Expatriates

 

Here’s an article in Newsweek on how many of Obama’s top advisers have learned and lived abroad.

It’s a common point among Obama’s top aides, a surprising number of whom grew up in other countries—the insight they developed by seeing America from the outside in. 

Workshop in Amman demonstrates power of filmmaking

Yasir Khan conducted the filmmaking workshop in Amman

 

 

January 19, 2009

By Rana Sweis

AMMONNEWS – During a 10 day workshop, members of non-governmental organizations as well as university students in Jordan got a glimpse into the power of filmmaking. The workshop focused on the use of film in shedding light on social issues in Jordan. The first few days were spent discussing theoretical aspects of filmmaking and exchanging ideas. The young NGO members spent almost four days shooting and then began writing, editing and mixing. This week, all four short documentaries were shown at the Royal Film Commission. Topics covered by NGO members included adult literacy, autism, student rights and a day in the life of a social worker in Jordan.

The workshop conducted by Yasir Khan, Professor at the American University of Cairo and a multimedia journalist and documentary filmmaker, says he hopes the participants will continue to use what they learned to create documentaries. On the first day of the workshop, Khan made sure the various ideas pointed out by the students remained focused. “Craft a focus statement and come back tomorrow,” he told the participants. “Every shot has to have meaning.”

As the students sat mixing and editing, many say they were pleased with this opportunity, the first of its kind in the kingdom. “It was a great opportunity for me and it is a way to convey to the public severe social problems in Jordan,” says Abdullah Momani, a journalism student at Yarmouk University.

New Yorker: Death of Newspapers

Here’s an article in The New Yorker on the so-called ‘death’ of print newspapers. Interesting read.

The newspaper is dead. You can read all about it online, blog by blog, where the digital gloom over the death of an industry often veils, if thinly, a pallid glee. The Newspaper Death Watch, a Web site, even has a column titled “R.I.P.” Or, hold on, maybe the newspaper isn’t quite dead yet. At its funeral, wild-eyed mourners spy signs of life. The newspaper stirs!

The last time the American newspaper business got this gothic was 1765, just after the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto,” was published, in London, and, in an unrelated development, Parliament decided to levy on the colonies a new tax, requiring government-issued stamps on pages of printed paper—everything from indenture agreements to bills of credit to playing cards. The tax hit printers hard, at a time when printers were also the editors of newspapers, and sometimes their chief writers, too. The Stamp Act—the “fatal Black-Act,” one printer called it—was set to go into effect on November 1, 1765. Beginning that day, printers were to affix stamps to their pages and to pay tax collectors a halfpenny for every half sheet—amounting, ordinarily, to a penny for every copy of every issue of every newspaper—and a two-shilling tax on every advertisement. Printers insisted that they could not bear this cost. It would spell the death of the newspaper.

Video: Dave Letterman and Bush Montage

 

Great Moments in Presidential Speeches.

On Friday, January 16, Dave Letterman aired the segment’s final installment.

America’s Pre-Inauguration Mood

 

Here’s an-depth survey conducted by the pew research centre on the mood in America.

Public confidence in Barack Obama to deal with the nation’s most pressing problems is quite high, with about seven-in-ten saying they have at least a fair amount of confidence that he will do the right thing when it comes to mending the economy, preventing terrorism, and dealing with Iraq. Notably, many Americans not only see the president-elect as a problem-solver, but as a “uniter” as well.

Read more and  view polling charts on many issues

Bill Moyers on Gaza

Bill Moyers reflects on the Middle East.

Watch this thoughtful essay.

 

 

Watch the reaction to this essay

 

Queen Noor on Gaza-MSNBC

More of Queen Noor on Gaza

Aspiring Saudi Filmmakers Offer a Different Take

 

Here’s an important article in the Washington Post on the power filmmaking which is beginning to take hold on the Arab world–on a grassroots level. 

 

Khalif is part of a new group of young Saudi movie buffs who are making films that question their country’s strict, puritanical mores and customs and its ban on movie theaters. The group, called Talashi, which means Fade Out, includes a pharmacist, a teacher, a lawyer and five film reviewers, mostly secular Saudis who say their worldviews were influenced by their love of film and the worlds to which it has exposed them.

But in pursuing their passion, the group is confronting the kingdom’s powerful clerics and going up against decades of culture that branded movies a Western evil that would strip the country of its conservative Muslim nature.

Filmmakers sometimes arrange for private screenings at their homes or at the homes of friends. Over the past couple of years, short films have been shown sporadically in auditoriums and literary clubs. To circumvent the wrath of powerful anti-film groups, the showings are advertised in the local media as “educational films” or “visual shows.”

Al Sijill: Great Jordanian Media Outlet

I have found Al Sijill to be one of the few media outlets in Jordan that present in-depth, professional and investigative news reports and analysis. I know also two people that contribute regularly to the newspaper that are very professional in their field. 

I am glad that we have this weekly newspaper online as well. I hope Jordanians and others will begin to give it the attention it deserves. You can also read the whole issue in PDF form and view archived issues. 

 

The Brave Dennis Kucinich

From Congressman Kucinich

As Congress begins, I have been leading the way towards addressing the humanitarian plight of the people of Gaza whose desperate conditions must be addressed if there is to be any chance for peace in the Middle East. I have also begun a campaign to work on the reform of our monetary system in order to bring about equity, prosperity and environmental sustainability.    

I had to spend the resources you provided me with in order to retain my seat in Congress. I need your generous help again to fund our ongoing political operations including media outreach, web communications, office administration and issues campaigning.

I know these are hard times, but your contribution is essential to strengthening our efforts. Please contribute as generously as you can. Your support assures a true independent voice in Congress.

With hope and in peace,

Dennis

Please contribute at http://www.Kucinich.us/contribute

Photos of Jordanians Protesting

Photos of a peaceful protest in Amman to end the bloodshed in Gaza. The protest included mostly young university students representing different political ideologies. A week later, protests in Amman and elsewhere in the country turned somewhat violent and the number of people protesting increased dramatically. 

 

 

Kennedy’s Inauguration Speech

 

Barack Obama’s inauguration is January 20. In commemorating this occasion, here is John F. Kennedy’s speech from 1961. You can find an archive of inaugural speech transcripts here.

 

Part II

GlobalPost offers world news to ailing U.S. papers

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Overseas reporting was one of the first areas curtailed by U.S. newspapers stung by deep budget cuts in recent years. GlobalPost, an online news outlet that launches on Monday, wants to restore that coverage.

With 65 correspondents in 46 countries, GlobalPost will have its own website and sell news to papers whose readers want in-depth, analytical stories that supplement what they get from news wires such as The Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg.

“There is an enormous appetite for knowing what’s happening in the world,” said Philip Balboni, GlobalPost’s president and chief executive. “It’s just not being met by traditional media.”

Read more…

Noteworthy Film Performances this Year

 

One of the best performances this year: Sean Penn in Milk. A runner up for best foreign film is Waltz with Bashir, which I have not seen. I saw the trailer and it looks really good. Another great movie this year is Grand Torino. Clint Eastwood is another brilliant actor.

Sean Penn tops the list of my favorite actors. He really studies and researches his characters and his passion for acting is impressive, whether it is in I Am Sam or 21 Grams or The Interpreter. 

Here’s an article in the New York Times on award ceremonies this year:

AS Hollywood heads into the heart of its awards season, America’s annual orgy of pop-culture glamour, movie stars and their handlers have a decision to make: to preen or not to preen.

Creating Change Through Art

 

I’m very proud of my cousin, Tara Hanna (10th grade), who not only created an impressive website to showcase the art work of  the mentally challenged in Jordan, but used creative methods to shed light on this issue in Jordan.

This is Tara’s story:

Wecjordan2.com was inspired by a need to raise awareness for an invisible community within our society-the mentally challenged. It is the aim of this site to promote integration and to highlight the positive contribution that this group can have on humanity.

This website is a display case to show our society in Jordan and in the global community that the mentally challenged have equality and dignity and a right to be fulfilled and to lead productive lives. As things stand in Jordan, and in the wider Middle East, the mentally challenged are concealed from the public. This underscores feelings of inadequacy and shame among the families of this group. Our aim is to boost their profile, raise awareness and to remove stigma through awareness.

7 Jordanian citizens were trained in basic Art techniques. They were then invited to 3 world renowned places of historical, cultural and touristic interest in Jordan. They experienced the splendor and interacted with their surroundings. They returned to their centre and translated what they saw into pieces of art. This art can be seen on the site with a description of the places and a response and criticism of each piece of work by each artist. The message of this site is that the mentally challenged are a gift that should be cherished and not hidden away. Their art demonstrates that there is a world of possibilities to be explored when interacting with them and that they have a right to express how they see their world.

For information on how to make a donation please feel free to email Tara Hanna at wecjordan2@gmail.com 

What Google Can Do for Journalism

 

From the Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin:

Via Romenesko, I see Google CEO Eric Schmidt telling Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky that he wants to help newspapers survive – he just doesn’t know how.

“What if the newspaper industry does go down?” Lashinsky asks.

Schmidt replies: “To me this presents a real tragedy in the sense that journalism is a central part of democracy. And if it can’t be funded because of these business problems, then that’s a real loss in terms of voices and diversity. And I don’t think bloggers make up the difference. The historic model of investigative journalists in any industry is something that is very fundamental. So the question is, What can you do about this? I think it is a fair statement to say we’re still looking for the right answer.”

Read more…

Peace and War in the Middle East

Queen Noor on Gaza