Media Games

This morning, I woke at 4.30am and very foolishly reached habitually for my iPhone so I could check twitter for the latest news before going back to sleep.

I was jerked awake by what I read- helicopters circling Damascus, armed vehicles escorting the President and his family to the airport, the Revolutionary flag being raised over the Syrian State TV building, bloody clashes between loyalists and revolutionaries. It was almost like I had awoken into a nightmare.

In a frenzy of fear and agitation, I trawled the web for some more reliable references to the 'fall of Damascus' but was unable to find anything on any mainstream media site including al-Jazeera.

I continued to follow the increasingly alarming messages on twitter until I judged it a reasonable time to call Damascus and start screeching down the phone....scenarios of my friends and loved ones being strung up, dragged out of their beds an beaten flooded my mind but I knew I was simply scaring myself. N answered my call, sleep very evident in his voice, wondering why I was calling so early and I explained what I had been reading, he laughed and assured me all was well but would call me later when he'd found out more.

When he hung up, I was able to go back to sleep for a while but was still plagued with nightmares.

Later, I switched on al-Jazeera to see reports on what was 'happening' on Damascus- albeit they were not as sensationalist as those reports I'd seen on twitter but disturbing enough to cause family and friends from all over the world to call N to find out if all was well. He later called me and confirmed all was quiet- even in the supposed epicenter of Kafr Souseh.

But that led me to ask: who would be circulating such alarming and utterly untrue reports? What is the aim?

It would seem that the forces of the Arab Spring have employed the use of the media (particularly social media) to promote the cause and also to spread what can only be called propaganda- when Syrians claim that their president is beating a retreat to the airport or Libyans announce that they captured Saif el Islam Gaddafi and family then this represents a kind of propaganda which actually we are not strangers to- take the reports from the front in the 1967 Arab Israeli war which promised the Egyptian people that advances were being made and victory at hand. In Europe one only need look to the first and second world wars to see both the Allies and the Germans used false reporting via radio to boost morale.

Perhaps we are naive to assume that just because we live in a more technologically advanced age, where news can be transmitted instantly and media organizations have set 'standards' that people will report objectively an not use the media for their own purposes.

Unfortunately, due to increased technology and multiplied media resources it is invariably hard for the individual to sift through all the information we are bombarded with minute by minute but it is also hard for media professionals to decide on which 'eyewitness' reports to believe and which to discount- and therein lies the problem.

- and so we conquer our fear

Wake up UN Security Council?

Syrian activists on Twitter are starting a campaign today with the hashtag #WakeUpUNSC. I have been invited, along with others, to create my own tweets with this tag, in an attempt to make this trend worldwide and presumably this is intended to catch the eye of those with influence enough to get the UNSC to wake up.

Now, asides from questioning whether this will actually achieve anything, there is a more important aspect to consider and those are the implications of foreign intervention. This is a sore point, especially in the Middle East, where foreign intervention has led to a reinstatement of de facto colonialism. Iraq represents an extremely valid case in point. The Washington Post estimated the true cost of the war with Iraq to have been $3 trillion, a number which seems inconceivable but when you look at what it has achieved, one can only lament at whether it was worth the human life and suffering that ensued.

Even sanctions on Iraq in the 90s, had disastrous consequences on the development of the country as John Pilger reported:

"The change in 10 years is unparalleled, in my experience," Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef's senior representative in Iraq, told me. "In 1989, the literacy rate was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern health facilities. Parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest."

One could argue that by effectively disabling a country in such a way, this is serving certain interests which seek to render the region completely impotent, starting with those rich in natural resources and finishing with those of strategic importance.

This post is simply a jumble of my own personal thoughts and reactions but I can only end on the fact that inside Syria itself, though, there has been no call for external military intervention – the people are opposed to any foreign meddling. The very thought of being showered from the sky with bombs and watching your home explode around you seems to me the darkest nightmare anyone can envisage so why are those on the outside wishing it on their brothers and sisters within?

Some Thoughts on Marriage

Arab culture may well have failed by not updating it's beliefs and cultural practices to suit the times we live in. One excellent example of this hypothesis is marriage.
In many Arab countries it is deemed better to marry someone from the same family or clan- often a cousin or other indirect relative, this is done under the premise that a family or clan member will have more in common, their upbringing and attitude to life will be more similar and they are guaranteed to be a 'good' person.

But does this thesis stand in a world where pre-marital relations no longer suffer the stigma they one had? Surely living with someone and intimately aquatinting yourself with their habits, ideas and beliefs is more reliable than taking the word of some distant relative that happens to share the same name?

The traditional retort to that is not all religious persuasions support the idea of premarital relations but that too should be put into it's context: before a time of contraception, families needed some way of assuring that the product of those close encounters would not end up unprovided for. And so the institution or legal agreement of marriage took place. One may go further as to day that it harnessed men's carnal urges into a more pragmatic alliance of families and interests- sex on the proviso that you brought something to the family and the girl. Surely we've moved on from that?

Bohemianism

To take the world as one finds it, the bad with the good, making the best of the present moment—to laugh at Fortune alike whether she be generous or unkind—to spend freely when one has money, and to hope gaily when one has none—to fleet the time carelessly, living for love and art—this is the temper and spirit of the modern Bohemian in his outward and visible aspect. It is a light and graceful philosophy, but it is the Gospel of the Moment, this exoteric phase of the Bohemian religion; and if, in some noble natures, it rises to a bold simplicity and naturalness, it may also lend its butterfly precepts to some very pretty vices and lovable faults, for in Bohemia one may find almost every sin save that of Hypocrisy. ...
His faults are more commonly those of self-indulgence, thoughtlessness, vanity and procrastination, and these usually go hand-in-hand with generosity, love and charity; for it is not enough to be one’s self in Bohemia, one must allow others to be themselves, as well. ...

What, then, is it that makes this mystical empire of Bohemia unique, and what is the charm of its mental fairyland? It is this: there are no roads in all Bohemia! One must choose and find one’s own path, be one’s own self, live one’s own life.

~Gelett Burgess