How much do I hate being right. Didn't I write only days ago that there are "signs that Turkey is finally succumbing to Islamism" (http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=25206081&postID=115880625016674991)?
Eh well, yesterday Netinfo's Web news started with a report about Pinocchio converting to Islam in Turkey. I cannot give this link (Bulgarian Web pages for news have short life span), but it was easy to find the same information in English. It will also spare me the need to translate. Below, I'm pasting from Telegraph's report Pinocchio and friends converted to Islam (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/31/wpino31.xml) by Malcolm Moore. It is in fact nearly a month old.
"Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer and other characters have been converted to Islam in new versions of 100 classic stories on the Turkish school curriculum.
"Give me some bread, for Allah's sake," Pinocchio says to Geppetto, his maker, in a book stamped with the crest of the ministry of education...
In The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan is told that he cannot visit Aramis. The reason would surprise the author, Alexandre Dumas. An old woman explains: "He is surrounded by men of religion. He converted to Islam after his illness."
Tom Sawyer may always have shirked his homework, but he is more conscientious in learning his Islamic prayers. He is given a "special treat" for learning the Arabic words."
What would you say if you open a new edition of the Arabian Nights and read how Ali Baba, while hiding from the forty thieves, prays to Jesus Christ his Savior?
I wonder, has the copyright protection of all these classics expired? And once a text is in the public domain, does it mean that every idiot can prey on it and do with it whatever he wishes? Somebody must have the mandate to do something in such a situation.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Saturday, September 23, 2006
The HIV trial in Libya, part 2: The victims
(This is coutinued from Part 1, which is at http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/09/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-1-infection.html.)
From now on, the story may be wrong in some details because it will rely only on occasional official and unofficial Bulgarian and Libyan sources, which are not very trustworthy (esp. the official ones). Corrections are welcome. However, I believe the picture as a whole is fairly accurate.
An author of detective stories once said that the victim of a crime usually has some characheristics that have led to him/her becoming a victim. In this story, we have two groups of victims: the infected little patients of Benghazi and the accused medics. Let's consider them, the children first.
Why Benghazi
In a recent comment, I called the Iranian opposition "better and stronger" than the Libyan one, implying that the latter, apart from being weak (no wonder - Qaddafi is not the ruler to tolerate alive opposition), doesn't appeal very much to me. It is because, while Iranian opposition is generally pro-Western, opposition-minded Libyans (those who live in Libya and still make their voices heard) are Islamists. In other words, they rebel against the Q-man not because he is an incompetent ruler, liar, oppressor, terrorist and mass murderer, but because they think he isn't Islamist enough. And the center of this opposition is the city of Benghazi. Here, I expect the reader to remember that exactly this city was the center of Libyan February cartoon riots, when at least 11 people laid down their lives (at the same time, residents of Tripoli were reluctant to take part even in an official peaceful demonstration - testimony of Khadija-Teri). Hanu thought that the Benghazi protests were orchestrated by government. I would rather suppose they were provoked by government agents but the ordinary participants were quite sincere. So, the residents of Benghazi must have (on average) more courage than any other group of Libyans but, unfortunately, the same cannot be said about their intellect. The Q-man knows this, understands their way of thinking very well and although they hate him, he can most of the time manipulate them as he wishes.
In 1986, a group of Benghazi residents killed a high-ranking Libyan official. Nine were sentenced and hanged (http://www.libyanet.com/feb1987.htm; warning: graphic photos). I've read (though can't give a link) that the plot was not just secret work of a few people but had wide popular support. Some Bulgarian journalists wrote that, after crushing the rebels, Qaddafi decided to punish the entire city by sharply reducing its funds. Such measures are used in many countries by the central governments against regions expressing dissent (in dictatorships) or just voting for the other party (in semi-democracies). Of course most severely affected are the industries most dependent on subsidies, such as health care.
In the following years, as admitted by a former Libyan health care minister, hospitals throughout Libya were poorly supplied with even the most basic consumatives and medications. This was conveniently blamed on the sanctions and may indeed have been partly due to them. However, in Benghazi the situation was worse than in other places. A Bulgarian nurse who worked for some time at the El Fateh Children's hospital later said, "The senior nurse every morning distributed syringes - 5 for each nurse. No more, no matter how many patients would come."
Another Bulgarian nurse, when beginning work at the same hospital in early 1998, said, "Upon arrival, I was immediately warned by an Egyptian doctor to be very careful, because there was an ongoing AIDS epidemic in the hospital." But nobody warned the patients and the community of Benghazi. Parents continued to bring their little ones to the hospital, thinking they were doing the best for them.
Later in 1998, another Bulgarian nurse - Nasya Nenova, was assigned to work at the same hospital, at a department newly formed especially for the children with AIDS. She wrote to her family: "I am of course very afraid that I may get infected, I work with two pairs of rubber gloves... Some of the children are already in very grave condition. One died last night. At least I hadn't to watch him die, a Philippino nurse was on duty then."
In the following years, dozens more children would die.
Why Bulgarians
As anger accumulated in Benghazi, the regime had to find a way out of the crisis. Of course the truth - that the epidemics was due to the punitive starvation funding of the city, plus shocking incompetence of the hospital's most responsible people - would do little to calm down the spirits. But if the virus was distributed intentionally, then the Q-man and his officials would deserve no blame. So scapegoats were needed. And because the goal was to pacify the Libyans, foreigners would make the best scapegoats.
The regime had plenty of them. Highlander once wrote, "in Libya we have thousands of foreign guest workers in the health sector for whom I am grateful as they make up the deficit." As I wrote before, I'm not sure she should be grateful. Even when they are good and caring professionals, they take positions that would otherwise be occupied by Libyans. To keep the status quo, "they enjoy an enormously better salary than the locals" (same Highlander's post). So they, together with the numerous guest workers in other industries, allow the regime to minimize the number of educated and skilled workers-citizens who are the brain and backbone of any society and in dictatorships often form dangerous opposition. Ottoman Turks made their best to keep the Libyans uneducated and unqualified, and I think Qaddafi today is following their example. Of course the guest workers themselves don't realize this (I haven't seen such a discussion in Bulgarian media, and what isn't in the media doesn't exist for the public). Nor do they realize that one of the reason they are hired is to serve as scapegoats if something goes wrong.
The first scapegoat was Ashraf al Hajuj, a doctor of Palestinian origin. I know little about him; he had lived in Libya since early childhood (probably born there) but, according to the good Arab tradition, was regarded as a Palestinian and not a naturalized Libyan. He was engaged to a Libyan girl who supported him during the following 5 years, but then left him, exhausted to be a fiance of an inmate on death row. After the arrest, al Hajuj was tortured until he was ready to confess anything that was wanted from him.
It is easy to figure out why he was taken. Much later, he said, "The interrogators were telling me that there was nobody to entreat for me because I (as a Palestinian) had no state. I am sure that, hadn't Bulgaria taken me under its protection together with the nurses, I would be now rotting in some mass grave." (I think that if Palestinians had common sense, the name and fate of al Hajuj would be known in every Palestinian house as an illustration of how much their Arab "allies" care for them. If I had such friends, I'd try to strike an immediate deal with my enemy! But of course if Palestinians had common sense, the world would be another and much better place. Mention also that he said "mass grave", not just "grave".)
However, al Hajuj alone was not enough. Non-Arab infidels would make far better villains in the eyes of Benghazeeans, so numerous guest workers were arrested - not only from Bulgaria but also from the Philippines, Poland and other countries. At this stage, there were only two Bulgarian detainees - nurses Snezhana Dimitrova and Sevda Yablanska.
I believe that Libyan authorities made these wide and apparently random arrests to probe which country was least able and willing to protect its nationals. (This protection, I think, contradicts to the very idea of justice, but unfortunately seems needed in today's imperfect world where so many countries are eager to put foreigners to cangaroo courts.) The guest worker communities of Poles and Philippinos, but NOT Bulgarians, swiftly organized and threatened that they would all abandon their contracts and leave Libya immediately if their fellow countrymen were not released. Also, the diplomatic missions of these countries made some unknown to me but apparently effective moves. The Bulgarian embassy also took measures, if you read the official Bulgarian site. However, the unofficial story is different. When a nurse informed the Embassy that two her colleagues were arrested, she obtained the answer, "Let the whores save themselves". So the Bulgarian tradition to fill the diplomatic missions with arrogant, incompetent and lazy people who care neither for the Bulgarian state nor for its nationals brought disastrous results.
There were also other reasons making Bulgaria a good target. It was a small poor coutry outside the mighty Western alliances: we were only applying for NATO, and the EU membership was behind mountains. At the same time, the Bulgarian government in 1992 had condemned Libya as a atate sponsor of terror. Significantly, this government "forgot" to inform its people about this, so Bulgarians going to Libya didn't know that Qaddafi had a reason to regard them as citizens of a hostile state. Next door in Serbia, the next Yugoslavian war was about to burst out (it would be the last one, but nobody knew it at the time). And finally, Libya had a debt to Bulgaria and Qaddafi hoped, with good reason, to get rid of that debt and even to extort additional money.
So the first group of arrested foreign nationals were released, but then 17 Bulgarians were detained. Nurse Nelia Zhdereva said, "They had come for me also, but I didn't open the door. I just stayed quiet, pretending not to be at the quarter." After this, she returned to Bulgaria within days and nobody tried to apprehend her. Those who have read Gulag Archipelago will remember quite similar cases in Stalin's Soviet Union when the security forces, unable to find immediately their intended targets, arrested other people instead. This is to be expected when a certain number of detainees is planned, but their personalities are not very important because they have actually done no crime and the police know this better than anyone else.
Most of the arrested Bulgarians were soon released (some after being tortured), but six were kept. Of the original two detainees, Snezhana Dimitrova was rearrested. Three other nurses working at the El Fateh hospital were also arrested: Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka and the above mentioned Nasya Nenova. Another arrested nurse, Kristiana Valcheva, had never been in the hospital in question. She was working at another hospital hundreds of kilometers away from Benghazi, so she couldn't be accused of infecting kids. Her alleged crime was that she collaborated with Hajuj and obtained the virus from the CIA/Mossad agents "John the Englishman" and "Adel the Egyptian" and handed it to the other nurses to inject the children. Kristiana's husband, Dr. Zdravko Georgiev, was working away from both Benghazi and his wife's workplace. Hearing that his wife had disappeared, he tried to find out what had happened and how to help her. He was arrested also, finishing the list of the accused.
The six Bulgarians were tortured in order to confess. Some of them showed remarkable courage. Valya Chervenyashka later said, "I never considered it possible to help them, to confess the nonsense they wanted from me. I was just awaiting my death." However, she was middle-aged and with kidney and heart problems (her heart stopped twice during the interrogations), so her torturers were aware she could die if they pushed her too hard - and this was not what they wanted.
Kristiana Valcheva and Nasya Nenova were younger and healthier and were pushed harder. Kristiana confessed, but this was not found enough. The investigation brought also evidence - blood banks with HIV found in her quarter. Just don't ask why the banks were found during the 4th search of the quarter, how the virus remained detectable in dried droplets after weeks at room temperature and what methods were used to detect it.
Nasya Nenova, when threatened to be injected with HIV, said, "Well, inject me, so please don't beat me more!" (This is the same nurse who had worked with double rubber gloves to avoid HIV infection.) The worst torturer was Juma Misheri. At one point, he left the city for a couple of days; when Nasya heard he had returned, she attempted suicide. Finally, she was so broken that she confessed three times and now is in a worse situation that even Kristiana.
Juma Misheri was later accused of having used torture but of course was acquitted. He is hailed as a popular hero because he has made the "witches" confess. Oh sancta simplicitas! Don't the people of Benghazi ever ask how many of THEM have been tortured by him?
UPDATE: Today (Sept. 26) I received an e-mail from Dr. Declan Butler, a senior reporter at the top science journal Nature. He is currently trying to use the opportunities of the blogosphere to help the accused medics in Libya. Here is a citation from his Sept. 20 post "Can the blogosphere help free the Tripoli six? — innocent medics risking execution in Libya" (http://declanbutler.info/blog/?p=59):
"“Imagine that five American nurses and a British doctor have been detained and tortured in a Libyan prison since 1999, and that a Libyan prosecutor called at the end of August for their execution… on trumped-up charges of deliberately contaminating more than 400 children with HIV in 1998. Meanwhile, the international community and its leaders sit by, spectators of a farce of a trial, leaving a handful of dedicated volunteer humanitarian lawyers and scientists to try to secure their release.
Implausible? That scenario, with the medics enduring prison conditions reminiscent of the film Midnight Express, is currently playing out in a Tripoli court, except that the nationalities of the medics are different. The nurses are from Bulgaria and the doctor is Palestinian.”
These are the opening paragraphs of an unusually strongly-worded editorial — ‘Libya’s travesty‘ – published in tomorrow’s issue of Nature. It is accompanied by a news story over two pages — ‘Lawyers call for science to clear AIDS nurses in Libya‘ — explaining the case. (Both articles are on free access; to access free articles on Nature you just need to register once, and it is free.)"
At http://www.connotea.org/user/Declan/tag/tripoli%20six?num=100, Dr. Butler has listed the blog posts since on the Libya HIV affair.
From now on, the story may be wrong in some details because it will rely only on occasional official and unofficial Bulgarian and Libyan sources, which are not very trustworthy (esp. the official ones). Corrections are welcome. However, I believe the picture as a whole is fairly accurate.
An author of detective stories once said that the victim of a crime usually has some characheristics that have led to him/her becoming a victim. In this story, we have two groups of victims: the infected little patients of Benghazi and the accused medics. Let's consider them, the children first.
Why Benghazi
In a recent comment, I called the Iranian opposition "better and stronger" than the Libyan one, implying that the latter, apart from being weak (no wonder - Qaddafi is not the ruler to tolerate alive opposition), doesn't appeal very much to me. It is because, while Iranian opposition is generally pro-Western, opposition-minded Libyans (those who live in Libya and still make their voices heard) are Islamists. In other words, they rebel against the Q-man not because he is an incompetent ruler, liar, oppressor, terrorist and mass murderer, but because they think he isn't Islamist enough. And the center of this opposition is the city of Benghazi. Here, I expect the reader to remember that exactly this city was the center of Libyan February cartoon riots, when at least 11 people laid down their lives (at the same time, residents of Tripoli were reluctant to take part even in an official peaceful demonstration - testimony of Khadija-Teri). Hanu thought that the Benghazi protests were orchestrated by government. I would rather suppose they were provoked by government agents but the ordinary participants were quite sincere. So, the residents of Benghazi must have (on average) more courage than any other group of Libyans but, unfortunately, the same cannot be said about their intellect. The Q-man knows this, understands their way of thinking very well and although they hate him, he can most of the time manipulate them as he wishes.
In 1986, a group of Benghazi residents killed a high-ranking Libyan official. Nine were sentenced and hanged (http://www.libyanet.com/feb1987.htm; warning: graphic photos). I've read (though can't give a link) that the plot was not just secret work of a few people but had wide popular support. Some Bulgarian journalists wrote that, after crushing the rebels, Qaddafi decided to punish the entire city by sharply reducing its funds. Such measures are used in many countries by the central governments against regions expressing dissent (in dictatorships) or just voting for the other party (in semi-democracies). Of course most severely affected are the industries most dependent on subsidies, such as health care.
In the following years, as admitted by a former Libyan health care minister, hospitals throughout Libya were poorly supplied with even the most basic consumatives and medications. This was conveniently blamed on the sanctions and may indeed have been partly due to them. However, in Benghazi the situation was worse than in other places. A Bulgarian nurse who worked for some time at the El Fateh Children's hospital later said, "The senior nurse every morning distributed syringes - 5 for each nurse. No more, no matter how many patients would come."
Another Bulgarian nurse, when beginning work at the same hospital in early 1998, said, "Upon arrival, I was immediately warned by an Egyptian doctor to be very careful, because there was an ongoing AIDS epidemic in the hospital." But nobody warned the patients and the community of Benghazi. Parents continued to bring their little ones to the hospital, thinking they were doing the best for them.
Later in 1998, another Bulgarian nurse - Nasya Nenova, was assigned to work at the same hospital, at a department newly formed especially for the children with AIDS. She wrote to her family: "I am of course very afraid that I may get infected, I work with two pairs of rubber gloves... Some of the children are already in very grave condition. One died last night. At least I hadn't to watch him die, a Philippino nurse was on duty then."
In the following years, dozens more children would die.
Why Bulgarians
As anger accumulated in Benghazi, the regime had to find a way out of the crisis. Of course the truth - that the epidemics was due to the punitive starvation funding of the city, plus shocking incompetence of the hospital's most responsible people - would do little to calm down the spirits. But if the virus was distributed intentionally, then the Q-man and his officials would deserve no blame. So scapegoats were needed. And because the goal was to pacify the Libyans, foreigners would make the best scapegoats.
The regime had plenty of them. Highlander once wrote, "in Libya we have thousands of foreign guest workers in the health sector for whom I am grateful as they make up the deficit." As I wrote before, I'm not sure she should be grateful. Even when they are good and caring professionals, they take positions that would otherwise be occupied by Libyans. To keep the status quo, "they enjoy an enormously better salary than the locals" (same Highlander's post). So they, together with the numerous guest workers in other industries, allow the regime to minimize the number of educated and skilled workers-citizens who are the brain and backbone of any society and in dictatorships often form dangerous opposition. Ottoman Turks made their best to keep the Libyans uneducated and unqualified, and I think Qaddafi today is following their example. Of course the guest workers themselves don't realize this (I haven't seen such a discussion in Bulgarian media, and what isn't in the media doesn't exist for the public). Nor do they realize that one of the reason they are hired is to serve as scapegoats if something goes wrong.
The first scapegoat was Ashraf al Hajuj, a doctor of Palestinian origin. I know little about him; he had lived in Libya since early childhood (probably born there) but, according to the good Arab tradition, was regarded as a Palestinian and not a naturalized Libyan. He was engaged to a Libyan girl who supported him during the following 5 years, but then left him, exhausted to be a fiance of an inmate on death row. After the arrest, al Hajuj was tortured until he was ready to confess anything that was wanted from him.
It is easy to figure out why he was taken. Much later, he said, "The interrogators were telling me that there was nobody to entreat for me because I (as a Palestinian) had no state. I am sure that, hadn't Bulgaria taken me under its protection together with the nurses, I would be now rotting in some mass grave." (I think that if Palestinians had common sense, the name and fate of al Hajuj would be known in every Palestinian house as an illustration of how much their Arab "allies" care for them. If I had such friends, I'd try to strike an immediate deal with my enemy! But of course if Palestinians had common sense, the world would be another and much better place. Mention also that he said "mass grave", not just "grave".)
However, al Hajuj alone was not enough. Non-Arab infidels would make far better villains in the eyes of Benghazeeans, so numerous guest workers were arrested - not only from Bulgaria but also from the Philippines, Poland and other countries. At this stage, there were only two Bulgarian detainees - nurses Snezhana Dimitrova and Sevda Yablanska.
I believe that Libyan authorities made these wide and apparently random arrests to probe which country was least able and willing to protect its nationals. (This protection, I think, contradicts to the very idea of justice, but unfortunately seems needed in today's imperfect world where so many countries are eager to put foreigners to cangaroo courts.) The guest worker communities of Poles and Philippinos, but NOT Bulgarians, swiftly organized and threatened that they would all abandon their contracts and leave Libya immediately if their fellow countrymen were not released. Also, the diplomatic missions of these countries made some unknown to me but apparently effective moves. The Bulgarian embassy also took measures, if you read the official Bulgarian site. However, the unofficial story is different. When a nurse informed the Embassy that two her colleagues were arrested, she obtained the answer, "Let the whores save themselves". So the Bulgarian tradition to fill the diplomatic missions with arrogant, incompetent and lazy people who care neither for the Bulgarian state nor for its nationals brought disastrous results.
There were also other reasons making Bulgaria a good target. It was a small poor coutry outside the mighty Western alliances: we were only applying for NATO, and the EU membership was behind mountains. At the same time, the Bulgarian government in 1992 had condemned Libya as a atate sponsor of terror. Significantly, this government "forgot" to inform its people about this, so Bulgarians going to Libya didn't know that Qaddafi had a reason to regard them as citizens of a hostile state. Next door in Serbia, the next Yugoslavian war was about to burst out (it would be the last one, but nobody knew it at the time). And finally, Libya had a debt to Bulgaria and Qaddafi hoped, with good reason, to get rid of that debt and even to extort additional money.
So the first group of arrested foreign nationals were released, but then 17 Bulgarians were detained. Nurse Nelia Zhdereva said, "They had come for me also, but I didn't open the door. I just stayed quiet, pretending not to be at the quarter." After this, she returned to Bulgaria within days and nobody tried to apprehend her. Those who have read Gulag Archipelago will remember quite similar cases in Stalin's Soviet Union when the security forces, unable to find immediately their intended targets, arrested other people instead. This is to be expected when a certain number of detainees is planned, but their personalities are not very important because they have actually done no crime and the police know this better than anyone else.
Most of the arrested Bulgarians were soon released (some after being tortured), but six were kept. Of the original two detainees, Snezhana Dimitrova was rearrested. Three other nurses working at the El Fateh hospital were also arrested: Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka and the above mentioned Nasya Nenova. Another arrested nurse, Kristiana Valcheva, had never been in the hospital in question. She was working at another hospital hundreds of kilometers away from Benghazi, so she couldn't be accused of infecting kids. Her alleged crime was that she collaborated with Hajuj and obtained the virus from the CIA/Mossad agents "John the Englishman" and "Adel the Egyptian" and handed it to the other nurses to inject the children. Kristiana's husband, Dr. Zdravko Georgiev, was working away from both Benghazi and his wife's workplace. Hearing that his wife had disappeared, he tried to find out what had happened and how to help her. He was arrested also, finishing the list of the accused.
The six Bulgarians were tortured in order to confess. Some of them showed remarkable courage. Valya Chervenyashka later said, "I never considered it possible to help them, to confess the nonsense they wanted from me. I was just awaiting my death." However, she was middle-aged and with kidney and heart problems (her heart stopped twice during the interrogations), so her torturers were aware she could die if they pushed her too hard - and this was not what they wanted.
Kristiana Valcheva and Nasya Nenova were younger and healthier and were pushed harder. Kristiana confessed, but this was not found enough. The investigation brought also evidence - blood banks with HIV found in her quarter. Just don't ask why the banks were found during the 4th search of the quarter, how the virus remained detectable in dried droplets after weeks at room temperature and what methods were used to detect it.
Nasya Nenova, when threatened to be injected with HIV, said, "Well, inject me, so please don't beat me more!" (This is the same nurse who had worked with double rubber gloves to avoid HIV infection.) The worst torturer was Juma Misheri. At one point, he left the city for a couple of days; when Nasya heard he had returned, she attempted suicide. Finally, she was so broken that she confessed three times and now is in a worse situation that even Kristiana.
Juma Misheri was later accused of having used torture but of course was acquitted. He is hailed as a popular hero because he has made the "witches" confess. Oh sancta simplicitas! Don't the people of Benghazi ever ask how many of THEM have been tortured by him?
UPDATE: Today (Sept. 26) I received an e-mail from Dr. Declan Butler, a senior reporter at the top science journal Nature. He is currently trying to use the opportunities of the blogosphere to help the accused medics in Libya. Here is a citation from his Sept. 20 post "Can the blogosphere help free the Tripoli six? — innocent medics risking execution in Libya" (http://declanbutler.info/blog/?p=59):
"“Imagine that five American nurses and a British doctor have been detained and tortured in a Libyan prison since 1999, and that a Libyan prosecutor called at the end of August for their execution… on trumped-up charges of deliberately contaminating more than 400 children with HIV in 1998. Meanwhile, the international community and its leaders sit by, spectators of a farce of a trial, leaving a handful of dedicated volunteer humanitarian lawyers and scientists to try to secure their release.
Implausible? That scenario, with the medics enduring prison conditions reminiscent of the film Midnight Express, is currently playing out in a Tripoli court, except that the nationalities of the medics are different. The nurses are from Bulgaria and the doctor is Palestinian.”
These are the opening paragraphs of an unusually strongly-worded editorial — ‘Libya’s travesty‘ – published in tomorrow’s issue of Nature. It is accompanied by a news story over two pages — ‘Lawyers call for science to clear AIDS nurses in Libya‘ — explaining the case. (Both articles are on free access; to access free articles on Nature you just need to register once, and it is free.)"
At http://www.connotea.org/user/Declan/tag/tripoli%20six?num=100, Dr. Butler has listed the blog posts since on the Libya HIV affair.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
An update on our Islamist students, or how to study medicine without a brain
I’ve posted earlier about our Islamist students from Turkey who were outraged by Darwinism and kept missing classes on Fridays in order to attend prayers in the mosque (http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/08/my-turkish-student-eva-islamist.html). At that time, they were in their preparatory year, learning Bulgarian and some secondary-school-level biology. To become full-right freshmen, they had to do a multiple choice test of biology in Bulgarian in the summer. This test is a joke; it serves just to fulfill the requirement of our law that nobody becomes a university student without an entry exam. However, the Islamist girls failed it. Is it surprising? Even from purely physiological point of view, such a result could be expected. A huge and hard-working brain generates a lot of heat which could easily damage it. The need to efficiently cool the brain has shaped the evolution of head circulation (see e.g. http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~reffland/anthropology/anthro2003/origins/bipedality.html.) What could you expect if you wrap your head in a piece of cloth and stay so all day at Celsium 30? I think that the brain will either be damaged by overheating or, to prevent damage, will switch off from intensive work and stay in a kind of safe mode, showing just a little of what it originally could do.
Yesterday, a colleague came to me to complain. She was furious, and for a good reason.
“The headscarves have come to one of my groups,” she said. “What are they doing there? As far as I know, they failed the examination. However, one of them gave her faculty number, this means she is a student, doesn’t it? It will be a scandal if the administration has enlisted them as 1st year students anyway. I gave them student files to fill. (The files are sheets where students write their names and faculty numbers and then the teacher marks their attendance and performance – M.M.) They couldn’t write their names, asked their Bulgarian colleagues to help. I am here to teach medical students, not mentally retarded people! Our University administration is making fools of us, forcing us to teach such retards!”
I think she is right. Bulgarian language is written in a Cyrillic alphabet with 30 letters, some of which are the same as in Latin and all have a fixed way of pronunciation. I think that every adult with average IQ and familiar with the Latin alphabet needs 2 to 3 days to learn our alphabet so that to be able to write his (her) name with the Cyrillic letters. If the person’s intellect is clearly sub-average but still in the normal range, the task could take a week or two. What should we think if a young person has spent a year learning Bulgarian and still cannot write her name in Bulgarian letters? Mental retardation seems a good explanation. So Turks should be careful when their fellow countrymen come from Bulgaria with a doctor’s diploma and want to treat them, because we here teach medicine to anybody who walks through the door.
Yesterday, a colleague came to me to complain. She was furious, and for a good reason.
“The headscarves have come to one of my groups,” she said. “What are they doing there? As far as I know, they failed the examination. However, one of them gave her faculty number, this means she is a student, doesn’t it? It will be a scandal if the administration has enlisted them as 1st year students anyway. I gave them student files to fill. (The files are sheets where students write their names and faculty numbers and then the teacher marks their attendance and performance – M.M.) They couldn’t write their names, asked their Bulgarian colleagues to help. I am here to teach medical students, not mentally retarded people! Our University administration is making fools of us, forcing us to teach such retards!”
I think she is right. Bulgarian language is written in a Cyrillic alphabet with 30 letters, some of which are the same as in Latin and all have a fixed way of pronunciation. I think that every adult with average IQ and familiar with the Latin alphabet needs 2 to 3 days to learn our alphabet so that to be able to write his (her) name with the Cyrillic letters. If the person’s intellect is clearly sub-average but still in the normal range, the task could take a week or two. What should we think if a young person has spent a year learning Bulgarian and still cannot write her name in Bulgarian letters? Mental retardation seems a good explanation. So Turks should be careful when their fellow countrymen come from Bulgaria with a doctor’s diploma and want to treat them, because we here teach medicine to anybody who walks through the door.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Muslims outraged, again
When I started this blog, I didn't mean it to be a war blog. It happened spontaneously. Time and again, something appears that I feel I cannot simply let pass with dignified silence.
Now, pious Muslims are outraged again, this time by the Pope. Last week, he delivered a speech criticizing Islam. It contained a citation from a 14th century Byzantine emperor: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
Predictably, Muslim anger accumulated and bursted out. Protests mounted in various Muslim countries, the Web was filled with threats. A representative photo is shown by Leilouta at http://leilouta.blogspot.com/2006/09/recipe-for-muslim-anger.html. In her post, she gives a recipe for Muslim anger and adds: "This delicious dish will give the eater the strength and courage to burn flags, destroy property, and kill 70 year old women who spend their life in the service of God."
The murdered old lady was an Italian Catholic nun in Mogadishu, Somalia. She and her bodyguard were shot dead inside a children's hospital. Tell me, if the Pope and that Byzantine emperor were so wrong, why did she need in the first place a bodyguard while visiting a hospital?
Meanwhile, Benedict XVI expressed deep regrets that his words had elicited so much anger in the Muslim world and said he wanted to invite Muslims to a sincere dialogue. However, Muslim leaders don't find this regret enough, they demand a clear apology instead (http://news.netinfo.bg/?tid=40&oid=937514). I hope to be wrong, but I expect more people to be killed. As for myself, I am unhappy that the Pope expressed regret at all.
A link from Hyscience has just brought me to a blog with a delighting motto: "Civilization, in every generation, must be defended from barbarians. The barbarians outside the gate, the barbarians inside the gate, and the barbarian in the mirror." Its author Matteo gave to his post the following long title: "Are Unreasonable Bloodthirsty Savages Preparing To Rampage In Response To Pope Saying That Being An Unreasonable Bloodthirsty Savage Is Unreasonable?". Read the entire post at http://cartagodelenda.blogspot.com/2006/09/are-unreasonable-bloodthirsty-savages.html.
Iranian expatriate Winston is even sharper: "Well, idiot muslims are mad again about what Pope said about their crazy prophet. He was damn right and nailed it on point. And it is also my question: What else the crazy prophet of Islam has brought us except war, craziness, rage, torture and murder?" (http://thespiritofman.blogspot.com/2006/09/pope-nails-it.html). If you think that Winston is too insensitive to people's feelings, remember that his beloved country was brought to its current miserable state by Islam and that many of his fellow countrymen were murdered in the name of Islam.
And finally, let me quote an old Nadz's post from the time of the cartoon crisis: "Religion is fair game. It may be a sacred subject for you, but for others who don't follow your particular deity and holy man, it is a fit subject for ridicule and scrutiny. We will respect your right to follow your own religion if you respect our right to not believe and criticize it. Do these nuts fail to see the irony of their violent rampages? How dare you denounce our religion as irrational and violent? Because of this, I'll go on an irrational and violent rampage! Hand me the molotov!" (http://nadz101.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_nadz101_archive.html)
UPDATE: For more representative photos and a humorous comment on the event, see Shlemazl's post at http://shlemazl.blogspot.com/2006/09/muslims-suffer-from-pope-and-blue.html.
Big Pharaoh's post (http://www.bigpharaoh.com/2006/09/18/nope-to-the-pope/) is also worth seeing. Alas, it serves well to illustrate that even the best moderate Muslims are not to be relied as our allies, because in the decisive moment they choose to be in the same boat as the radicals. But Big Pharaoh has good audience - the comments show it.
Now, pious Muslims are outraged again, this time by the Pope. Last week, he delivered a speech criticizing Islam. It contained a citation from a 14th century Byzantine emperor: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
Predictably, Muslim anger accumulated and bursted out. Protests mounted in various Muslim countries, the Web was filled with threats. A representative photo is shown by Leilouta at http://leilouta.blogspot.com/2006/09/recipe-for-muslim-anger.html. In her post, she gives a recipe for Muslim anger and adds: "This delicious dish will give the eater the strength and courage to burn flags, destroy property, and kill 70 year old women who spend their life in the service of God."
The murdered old lady was an Italian Catholic nun in Mogadishu, Somalia. She and her bodyguard were shot dead inside a children's hospital. Tell me, if the Pope and that Byzantine emperor were so wrong, why did she need in the first place a bodyguard while visiting a hospital?
Meanwhile, Benedict XVI expressed deep regrets that his words had elicited so much anger in the Muslim world and said he wanted to invite Muslims to a sincere dialogue. However, Muslim leaders don't find this regret enough, they demand a clear apology instead (http://news.netinfo.bg/?tid=40&oid=937514). I hope to be wrong, but I expect more people to be killed. As for myself, I am unhappy that the Pope expressed regret at all.
A link from Hyscience has just brought me to a blog with a delighting motto: "Civilization, in every generation, must be defended from barbarians. The barbarians outside the gate, the barbarians inside the gate, and the barbarian in the mirror." Its author Matteo gave to his post the following long title: "Are Unreasonable Bloodthirsty Savages Preparing To Rampage In Response To Pope Saying That Being An Unreasonable Bloodthirsty Savage Is Unreasonable?". Read the entire post at http://cartagodelenda.blogspot.com/2006/09/are-unreasonable-bloodthirsty-savages.html.
Iranian expatriate Winston is even sharper: "Well, idiot muslims are mad again about what Pope said about their crazy prophet. He was damn right and nailed it on point. And it is also my question: What else the crazy prophet of Islam has brought us except war, craziness, rage, torture and murder?" (http://thespiritofman.blogspot.com/2006/09/pope-nails-it.html). If you think that Winston is too insensitive to people's feelings, remember that his beloved country was brought to its current miserable state by Islam and that many of his fellow countrymen were murdered in the name of Islam.
And finally, let me quote an old Nadz's post from the time of the cartoon crisis: "Religion is fair game. It may be a sacred subject for you, but for others who don't follow your particular deity and holy man, it is a fit subject for ridicule and scrutiny. We will respect your right to follow your own religion if you respect our right to not believe and criticize it. Do these nuts fail to see the irony of their violent rampages? How dare you denounce our religion as irrational and violent? Because of this, I'll go on an irrational and violent rampage! Hand me the molotov!" (http://nadz101.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_nadz101_archive.html)
UPDATE: For more representative photos and a humorous comment on the event, see Shlemazl's post at http://shlemazl.blogspot.com/2006/09/muslims-suffer-from-pope-and-blue.html.
Big Pharaoh's post (http://www.bigpharaoh.com/2006/09/18/nope-to-the-pope/) is also worth seeing. Alas, it serves well to illustrate that even the best moderate Muslims are not to be relied as our allies, because in the decisive moment they choose to be in the same boat as the radicals. But Big Pharaoh has good audience - the comments show it.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Five years since September 11, 2001
Here is the World Trade Center, as I photographed it during my visit to the USA in 1997. I admit I didn't appreciate very much the Twin Towers while they were still standing. Now, in retrospect, the old Manhattan skyline in the golden mist of the sunset seems to me a picture of a blessed realm too beautiful to exist in this world - not for long at least. It represents a lost paradise.
September 11, 2001 became one of the most important events in my life. It changed my view on the world. Before it, I worried whether and when my country would fully join the civilization. After it, I realized that the entire civilization was at stake, brought by its prosperity to a comfortable nap, having neglected the power of barbarism for too long and now attacked by the 7th century Barbarians at its heart.
At the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, I have to say with regret that I am less optimistic than I was at Sept. 12, 2001. Then, I hoped that the Western world would awaken to defend its values with unity and resolve, while many millions of Muslims, disgusted by this mass murder, would be driven by their conscience to either reform their faith or leave it. Neither did happen.
One of the best songs of Bee Gees is New York Mining Disaster 1941. Although commemorating a much earlier event unknown to me, it is strikingly coherent with my feelings about Sept. 11. Here are the first three couplets of the lyrics (copied from http://www.absolutelyrics.com/lyrics/view/bee_gees/new_york_mining_disaster_1941/; the other couplets repeat the first two):
In the event of something happening to me,
there is something I would like you all to see.
It's just a photograph of someone that I new.
Have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones?
Do you know what it's like on the outside?
Don't go talking too loud, you'll cause a landslide, Mr. Jones.
I keep straining my ears to hear a sound.
Maybe someone is digging underground,
or have they given up and all gone home to bed,
thinking those who once existed must be dead.
In memory of the Sept. 11 victims, I translated the lyrics to Bulgarian:
Понеже нещо може да се случи с мен,
моля, всички погледнете за момент -
това е снимката на скъп за мен човек.
Да сте виждали моята жена?
Знаете ли навън какво става?
Тихо, че ще се срути от гласа ви някой пласт.
Все наострям уши да чуя звук -
дали някой за нас копае тук,
или спасителният отряд се е прибрал,
мислейки, че няма никой оцелял.
Friday, September 08, 2006
The HIV trial in Libya, part 1: The infection and the charges
I have intended to write about the HIV trial in Libya ever since I begun this blog. I have mentioned this trial in two earlier posts, here and in a here. These days Libyan-American blogger Suliman expressed wish to put a comment about this trial on my blog, so I am providing an appropriate post. I warn from the beginning that I won't try to be "objective" and when writing of what evil and crazy people did, will use the adjectives that seem appropriate to me.
To my surprise, the trial has its own page in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_scandal_in_Libya. A chronology of the events by the Bulgarian news agency BTA can be found at http://www.bta.bg/site/libya/en/02chronology.htm. However, it reflects exclusively what official Bulgarian institutions say.
Because the text will be too long, I'll divide it into more than one post.
The infection
The core of the story are the numerous cases of HIV-infected children among those treated in the El-Fateh Children's Hospital in Benghazi, Libya. It is difficult to say when the infections began, given the various and often long incubation periods of the disease, the tendency of the Libyan authorities to lie even when the dates of infections are known in order to dismiss the possibility that some occured before the defendants began work in the hospital, and the wish of the same authorities to put under the common denominator all childhood HIV infections in Libya. According to two Western scientists who later became defense witnesses, the epidemic began in 1997. The official number of the infected children is 426.
The alleged motivation of this monstrous alleged crime? I'll cite a BBC report: "At one point, the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, had accused the health workers of acting on orders from the CIA and the Israeli secret service, Mossad. Libya later rowed back on this allegation." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3689355.stm). I know from the media (unfortunately, I cannot find a link) that currently the Libyan prosecution says the accused were performing an illegal trial of anti-HIV vaccine developed by a Western company. They allegedly injected the children first with the vaccine and then with the actual virus to see whether the vaccine works (and it evidently didn't).
Should I discuss the original charge, after it is so absurd that even its authors couldn't maintain it after the case received international publicity? It seems to me that to duscuss it, means to offend the intellectual capacity of my readers. However, I cannot skip it because, according to opinion polls and my personal observation, many Muslims either believe it or for some reason find it necessary to claim that they believe it. I won't state that Bulgarians are not so blood-thirsty and it is virtually impossible to find not one or two but six Bulgarian psychopaths to realize such a plan. This would be akin to the statements of many Arabs and Muslims that Arabs and Muslims are good people and would never crash kidnapped planes into buildings. Nobody buys such arguments, and with good reason.
However, each crime (unless done by absolutely insane people) has its motivation and purpose. Why would CIA and/or Mossad attack Libyan children? Both secret services have had enough experience with totalitarian regimes to know that a regime like Qaddafi's one cannot be harmed by terror against civilians. It is democratic governments that are vulnerable to terror. So why waste the virus? I can imagine CIA encouraging some top Libyan officials to overthrow Mr. Qaddafi, but not to supply virus for Libyan children. As for Mossad, they lack even the motivation. As far as I know, the Q-man doesn't do much harm to Israel. Well, he brainwashes his people with anti-Semitism, but who doesn't do this? If Mossad wanted to fight their Arab enemies by infecting children, wouldn't you rather expect Palestinian children to be infected?
Besides, both secret services would have enormous problems with the law and the public opinion once the operation comes to light. Remember what problems Sharon had with the Sabra and Shatila massacre, although it was done by Israel's Lebanese allies and not by Israelis themselves. As for the USA, they are still in shock because years ago the penises of suspected criminals and terrorists were photographed in Abu Ghraib.
Also, when one is considering a current event, it is often helpful (though no proof) to compare it to similar earlier events. I know of two accusations of deliberately causing epidemics in order to hurt a regime or a community: against the medieval Jews (e.g. http://scarab.msu.montana.edu/historybug/YersiniaEssays/Doherty.htm) and against Jewish doctors at the end of Stalin's rule (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors). It is now evident that both were phony: in the first case, the Jews couldn't have the necessary knowledge of plague epidemiology needed to use it as a bio-weapon, nor could they have any means to protect themselves; in the second case, there was simply no epidemic at all. On the other hand, known iatrogenic (i.e. caused by medical procedures) AIDS epidemics have been found to be due to "incompetence, greed, bribery, denial, and conflict of interest" - but not to malicious intent (see e.g. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/340/12/973 and for cases of children's infections, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=990CE7DE1730F932A0575BC0A963958260 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=14534057&dopt=Abstract).
Let's now consider the current charge that the children were infected in order to perform an illegal vaccine trial. At least, this is not a thing unheard of in history: Edward Jenner did exactly this, vaccinating with cowpox and then innoculating with smallpox first his baby son and then another 8-year-old boy. However, his vaccine worked and so he is remembered as a hero, not as a villain. Of course today it is absolutely unthinkable to innoculate a pathogen in order to test a vaccine's efficiency. You have to recruit a large group of volunteers, inject half of them with the vaccine (of which you believe that it is at least safe) and the others with a placebo, then let them live their lives and check how many will catch the infection naturally. If you do the things like Jenner did, you not only risk to find yourself behind bars, but you cannot publish the results in any scientific journals and hence cannot make money from your vaccine. So why make an illegal trial, after you have to make a legal one anyway to obtain publishable results? Why do the work twice?
"But the illegal trial will show you whether the vaccine works or not, and if it doesn't work, you needn't perform a legal trial and will save money and time," somebody might say.
No, the illegal trial will show nothing. You need to recruit some idiots to do it and smuggle first the vaccine, then the actual virus. If the injected children remain healthy, this means either that the vaccine works or that the virus has lost its virulence because of the non-standard conditions of the trial (e.g. overheated during the smuggling or improperly manipulated by the idiots). If the children become infected, this means either that the vaccine doesn't work or that it has lost its activity, as was just described for the virus. At the end of the day, you know nothing. No one pharmaceutical company operating this way would survive in business for more than three days. So, I think that the vaccine trial hypothesis also doesn't hold water.
Anyway, at some time the epidemics was halted. Not immediately after the arrests, but some time after them the young patients of the El Fateh hospital stopped being infected. To my opinion, this shows that while the professional torturers were weaving fairy tales about CIA and Mossad, another team of professionals was sent to the hospital to find out what was wrong and fix it. However, these men and women remain unknown to us because any acknowledgement of their work would blow up the official conspiracy theory. So they haven't received and are unlikely ever to receive the gratitudes of the Benghazi parents whose kids would otherwise also be infected and the whole Libyan society. But, as Walter Scott once wrote, people who fulfil their duty are rarely rewarded by the world, their reward is a sense of internal satisfaction which the world could neither give nor take away.
To my surprise, the trial has its own page in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_scandal_in_Libya. A chronology of the events by the Bulgarian news agency BTA can be found at http://www.bta.bg/site/libya/en/02chronology.htm. However, it reflects exclusively what official Bulgarian institutions say.
Because the text will be too long, I'll divide it into more than one post.
The infection
The core of the story are the numerous cases of HIV-infected children among those treated in the El-Fateh Children's Hospital in Benghazi, Libya. It is difficult to say when the infections began, given the various and often long incubation periods of the disease, the tendency of the Libyan authorities to lie even when the dates of infections are known in order to dismiss the possibility that some occured before the defendants began work in the hospital, and the wish of the same authorities to put under the common denominator all childhood HIV infections in Libya. According to two Western scientists who later became defense witnesses, the epidemic began in 1997. The official number of the infected children is 426.
At any rate, in 1998 it became evident that there was a real AIDS epidemic among children in Benghazi and that at least for some of them the only possible infection source was the El-Fateh Children's Hospital. At first, the reaction of the authorities was to try to cover up the problem. A Libyan, when later asked by the Bulgarian journalist Nina Spasova why such an important event wasn't widely discussed in public space, answered by asking, "In 1986, was there much public talk about Chernobyl in Bulgaria?".
However, the three-digit number of infected children made silence impossible. The story was made public by the Libyan magazine La in an article including interviews with victims' parents and linking the infection to the particular hospital. Years ago, I read an English translation of this article at the Libya Our Home site. Unfortunately, I cannot find it now. The article was published without (and as it turned out, against) the authorities' approval. For that reason, the journal was closed. I don't know what happened to the journalists; I hope they just lost their jobs and didn't suffer further consequences.
However, the three-digit number of infected children made silence impossible. The story was made public by the Libyan magazine La in an article including interviews with victims' parents and linking the infection to the particular hospital. Years ago, I read an English translation of this article at the Libya Our Home site. Unfortunately, I cannot find it now. The article was published without (and as it turned out, against) the authorities' approval. For that reason, the journal was closed. I don't know what happened to the journalists; I hope they just lost their jobs and didn't suffer further consequences.
To prove how unobjective I am, I'll state right now what my opinion is: the infection was due to poor hygiene and violation of safety rules in the hospital. This was clear to all people with common sense right from the beginning. Later the above mentioned scientists, Luc Montagnier (co-discoverer of HIV) and Vittorio Colizzi, wrote a report coming to the same conclusion. However, the official Libyan opinion was different.
The charges
Libyan authorities finally reacted to the scandal by arresting dozens of foreign medics-guest workers from various countries. Most foreigners were soon released but another wave of arrests followed, smaller and targetting exclusively Bulgarians. So in early 1999 the list of the defendants "crystallized", including 6 Bulgarians (5 nurses and a doctor), a Palestinian doctor and 9 Libyan doctors holding high positions at the El-Fateh hospital. The foreigners were accused of INTENTIONALLY infecting the children, while the Libyans were accused only of carelessly letting the satanic foreign plot unveil under their very noses. At least some of these Libyan defendants later, speaking before the court, supported the official version of intentional infection and so tried to save their asses by sacrificing their colleagues. They were acquitted, so the only court they may have problems with is that of their conscience. (By the way, not all Western media kept silence about these defendants, as seemed to Highlander; e.g. San Francisco Chronicle mentions them athttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/06/INGUQ6VPD91.DTL.)The charges
The alleged motivation of this monstrous alleged crime? I'll cite a BBC report: "At one point, the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, had accused the health workers of acting on orders from the CIA and the Israeli secret service, Mossad. Libya later rowed back on this allegation." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3689355.stm). I know from the media (unfortunately, I cannot find a link) that currently the Libyan prosecution says the accused were performing an illegal trial of anti-HIV vaccine developed by a Western company. They allegedly injected the children first with the vaccine and then with the actual virus to see whether the vaccine works (and it evidently didn't).
Should I discuss the original charge, after it is so absurd that even its authors couldn't maintain it after the case received international publicity? It seems to me that to duscuss it, means to offend the intellectual capacity of my readers. However, I cannot skip it because, according to opinion polls and my personal observation, many Muslims either believe it or for some reason find it necessary to claim that they believe it. I won't state that Bulgarians are not so blood-thirsty and it is virtually impossible to find not one or two but six Bulgarian psychopaths to realize such a plan. This would be akin to the statements of many Arabs and Muslims that Arabs and Muslims are good people and would never crash kidnapped planes into buildings. Nobody buys such arguments, and with good reason.
However, each crime (unless done by absolutely insane people) has its motivation and purpose. Why would CIA and/or Mossad attack Libyan children? Both secret services have had enough experience with totalitarian regimes to know that a regime like Qaddafi's one cannot be harmed by terror against civilians. It is democratic governments that are vulnerable to terror. So why waste the virus? I can imagine CIA encouraging some top Libyan officials to overthrow Mr. Qaddafi, but not to supply virus for Libyan children. As for Mossad, they lack even the motivation. As far as I know, the Q-man doesn't do much harm to Israel. Well, he brainwashes his people with anti-Semitism, but who doesn't do this? If Mossad wanted to fight their Arab enemies by infecting children, wouldn't you rather expect Palestinian children to be infected?
Besides, both secret services would have enormous problems with the law and the public opinion once the operation comes to light. Remember what problems Sharon had with the Sabra and Shatila massacre, although it was done by Israel's Lebanese allies and not by Israelis themselves. As for the USA, they are still in shock because years ago the penises of suspected criminals and terrorists were photographed in Abu Ghraib.
Also, when one is considering a current event, it is often helpful (though no proof) to compare it to similar earlier events. I know of two accusations of deliberately causing epidemics in order to hurt a regime or a community: against the medieval Jews (e.g. http://scarab.msu.montana.edu/historybug/YersiniaEssays/Doherty.htm) and against Jewish doctors at the end of Stalin's rule (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors). It is now evident that both were phony: in the first case, the Jews couldn't have the necessary knowledge of plague epidemiology needed to use it as a bio-weapon, nor could they have any means to protect themselves; in the second case, there was simply no epidemic at all. On the other hand, known iatrogenic (i.e. caused by medical procedures) AIDS epidemics have been found to be due to "incompetence, greed, bribery, denial, and conflict of interest" - but not to malicious intent (see e.g. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/340/12/973 and for cases of children's infections, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=990CE7DE1730F932A0575BC0A963958260 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=14534057&dopt=Abstract).
Let's now consider the current charge that the children were infected in order to perform an illegal vaccine trial. At least, this is not a thing unheard of in history: Edward Jenner did exactly this, vaccinating with cowpox and then innoculating with smallpox first his baby son and then another 8-year-old boy. However, his vaccine worked and so he is remembered as a hero, not as a villain. Of course today it is absolutely unthinkable to innoculate a pathogen in order to test a vaccine's efficiency. You have to recruit a large group of volunteers, inject half of them with the vaccine (of which you believe that it is at least safe) and the others with a placebo, then let them live their lives and check how many will catch the infection naturally. If you do the things like Jenner did, you not only risk to find yourself behind bars, but you cannot publish the results in any scientific journals and hence cannot make money from your vaccine. So why make an illegal trial, after you have to make a legal one anyway to obtain publishable results? Why do the work twice?
"But the illegal trial will show you whether the vaccine works or not, and if it doesn't work, you needn't perform a legal trial and will save money and time," somebody might say.
No, the illegal trial will show nothing. You need to recruit some idiots to do it and smuggle first the vaccine, then the actual virus. If the injected children remain healthy, this means either that the vaccine works or that the virus has lost its virulence because of the non-standard conditions of the trial (e.g. overheated during the smuggling or improperly manipulated by the idiots). If the children become infected, this means either that the vaccine doesn't work or that it has lost its activity, as was just described for the virus. At the end of the day, you know nothing. No one pharmaceutical company operating this way would survive in business for more than three days. So, I think that the vaccine trial hypothesis also doesn't hold water.
Anyway, at some time the epidemics was halted. Not immediately after the arrests, but some time after them the young patients of the El Fateh hospital stopped being infected. To my opinion, this shows that while the professional torturers were weaving fairy tales about CIA and Mossad, another team of professionals was sent to the hospital to find out what was wrong and fix it. However, these men and women remain unknown to us because any acknowledgement of their work would blow up the official conspiracy theory. So they haven't received and are unlikely ever to receive the gratitudes of the Benghazi parents whose kids would otherwise also be infected and the whole Libyan society. But, as Walter Scott once wrote, people who fulfil their duty are rarely rewarded by the world, their reward is a sense of internal satisfaction which the world could neither give nor take away.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Nothing new in Libya
On Aug. 29, the Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor accused in intentionally infecting Libyan children with HIV appeared before the court for Nth time. The prosecutor said that evidence and confessions were present and demanded death sentences, again. No one of the witnesses called by the defense was present. It turned out that at least some of them were not subpoenated by the prosecutor and this made their presence optional (source, in Bulgarian: http://news.netinfo.bg/?tid=40&oid=928965).
So, if you are a defendant in Libya, you'll have in court witnesses whose testimony could prove your innocence only if there is goodwill in the prosecutor, i.e. the person who wants you either in jail with maximum term or at the gallows.
I guess, possibly some defense witnesses would still appear and speak if the defendants were their fellow Libyans. But now they think, "It may be my duty to speak, because I know these people are innocent. But I don't feel like getting into trouble for them. Unlike me, they had the luck to be free and what did they do? They came here to work for one of the nastiest dictators on Earth because he offered them higher salaries. No, I prefer not to risk my ass."
Two days later, Qaddafi, the Q-man, called in another blog "the man with 72 name spellings who has ruled for 36 years" (http://www.ordoesitexplode.com/me/2006/08/holy_st_qaddafi.html) gave a speech to mark his 37th year in power. Its most important moments are summarized at http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060831/wl_nm/libya_gaddafi_dc. Qaddafi said those who hope for political change in Libya see its people as "ignorant and immature." "Our enemies have been crushed inside Libya and you have to be ready to kill them if they emerge anew," he said. Qaddafi also advised poor Libyans how to improve their well-being: by setting up oil services companies to replace foreign firms in the country.
The same source says, "Opponents abroad had said they hoped that Gaddafi might hint at political change in Thursday's speech. His influential son Saif al-Islam recently told Libyans their country was in a political impasse and needed reforms to free it from what he called the grip of "Libyan mafia" which monopolizes power and wealth." Personally, I have never been impressed by Saif al-Islam's reformist-like talk. The game of bad cop, good cop is too transparent.
Qaddafi was briefly shown on our TV delivering his speech and I said to my husband that I cannot decide whether this man is really mad or just pretending to be mad. He replied, "Of course he is mad. Just look at his hair. Any sane person would pass a comb through it before appearing in public."
So Libyans have the task to keep watch and if their (i.e. Qaddafi's) enemies emerge anew, to kill them. The method of recognizing the enemies and the procedure of killing remain unspecified.
So, if you are a defendant in Libya, you'll have in court witnesses whose testimony could prove your innocence only if there is goodwill in the prosecutor, i.e. the person who wants you either in jail with maximum term or at the gallows.
I guess, possibly some defense witnesses would still appear and speak if the defendants were their fellow Libyans. But now they think, "It may be my duty to speak, because I know these people are innocent. But I don't feel like getting into trouble for them. Unlike me, they had the luck to be free and what did they do? They came here to work for one of the nastiest dictators on Earth because he offered them higher salaries. No, I prefer not to risk my ass."
Two days later, Qaddafi, the Q-man, called in another blog "the man with 72 name spellings who has ruled for 36 years" (http://www.ordoesitexplode.com/me/2006/08/holy_st_qaddafi.html) gave a speech to mark his 37th year in power. Its most important moments are summarized at http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060831/wl_nm/libya_gaddafi_dc. Qaddafi said those who hope for political change in Libya see its people as "ignorant and immature." "Our enemies have been crushed inside Libya and you have to be ready to kill them if they emerge anew," he said. Qaddafi also advised poor Libyans how to improve their well-being: by setting up oil services companies to replace foreign firms in the country.
The same source says, "Opponents abroad had said they hoped that Gaddafi might hint at political change in Thursday's speech. His influential son Saif al-Islam recently told Libyans their country was in a political impasse and needed reforms to free it from what he called the grip of "Libyan mafia" which monopolizes power and wealth." Personally, I have never been impressed by Saif al-Islam's reformist-like talk. The game of bad cop, good cop is too transparent.
Qaddafi was briefly shown on our TV delivering his speech and I said to my husband that I cannot decide whether this man is really mad or just pretending to be mad. He replied, "Of course he is mad. Just look at his hair. Any sane person would pass a comb through it before appearing in public."
So Libyans have the task to keep watch and if their (i.e. Qaddafi's) enemies emerge anew, to kill them. The method of recognizing the enemies and the procedure of killing remain unspecified.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Convert to Islam, or else
(Warning: long post)
Recently, two Fox News journalists, while doing their work in Gaza, were kidnapped. They were released two days ago, but only after saying on video that they had converted to Islam. They later said they were forced to "convert" at gunpoint. There is talk that ransom has also been paid for their release. For details, see e.g. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24104.
The other thing which inspired me to write this post was Non-blogging's opinion about whether conversion to Islam, required for a non-Muslim man if he wants to marry a Muslim woman, is acceptable: "Converting because it's demanded should perhaps be between acceptable and unacceptable... Unacceptable because that would mean lying to an imam, maybe lots of genuinely believing relatives and last but not least to all honest Muslims who have said their creed believing every word of it." (http://lonehighlander.blogspot.com/2006/08/mr.html#comments). Reading this, I was amazed how a non-Muslim, pressed by Muslims to convert, still would think he does wrong to these Muslims because his conversion is not sincere! So I'll write a post about conversions to Islam in Bulgarian history and we'll see whether the sincerety of conversion mattered.
When Ottoman Turks defeated the divided Bulgarian ministates in 1393-1396 and included them in the Ottoman Empire, they didn't impose Turkish feudals everywhere. Some of the Bulgarian feudals were offered and agreed to convert to Islam. Having fulfilled this condition, they were allowed to continue to rule over their land, or at least part of it. Among them was the son of Ivan Shishman, the last pre-Ottoman Bulgarian king.
Throughout the nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule, ambitious individuals were voluntarily converting to Islam in order to make a career in the Ottoman society. However, there were many more Bulgarians who were forced to convert. The first among them were women who were made invaders' wives against their will. There is a saying that "not a single Turkish woman ever crossed from Asia to Europe". It's an exaggeration, but contains much truth. It is also consistent with the logic of the Islamic family model. In a monogamous society, any massive conquest could easily lead to demographic collapse at home, because many women would either remain without husbands or have to follow their husbands to the newly conquered land, depopulating the old territory. Poligamy solves the problem. Any Ottoman or other Muslim ruler could send as many as three quarters of his men to conquer new lands and there would still be partners for all women. The remaining quarter of men could take 4 wives each and children would continue to be born in the old territory. In the new territories, the soldiers turning into settlers could take local wives. Of course, this model can work only if the woman is kept in subhuman position, otherwise the wife coming from a hostile population could bring up children with dubious loyalty. This was the case - women were "letters without voice". Who cared whether they really believed that Mohammed was God's prophet? Turks continued to take Bulgarian wives up to the very liberation of Bulgaria in 1878 and never had any problems with pro-Bulgarian sentiments of the children of such marriages.
Another important group of converts were the Janissaries; you can read about them in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissary, although this article seems to me rather inaccurate. Like other Christian nations of the Ottoman Empire, Bulgarians were forced to pay "blood tax" - a proportion of the boys aged around 10 (the strongest were selected) were taken from their parents, converted to Islam and brought up to be Sultan's elite soldiers. This practice changed the life of one of my great-grandparents. The Turkish authorities of his town, Bansko, once announced that landowners were hiring young boys as farm hands. Many families sent one or more of their sons to earn some money. Several adults, including that my ancestor, were sent to accompany the boys. However, when the group reached the destination, it was encircled by soldiers who said that the boys were in fact needed to be recruited as Janissaries. The adult Bulgarians were left to go home. When they arrived and brought the catastrophic news, the public turned against them with anger. The parents were of course shocked by the loss of their sons and needed to blame somebody. It was unsafe to speak against the Turks, so the returning adult companions were blamed, as if they could have done anything in this situation. My great-grandfather left the town and moved to the village of Shipka, hundreds of kilometers away.
There were also many "casual" conversions. Here I'll cite again the experience of my great-grandfather (descendant of the above mentioned man who moved from Bansko to Shipka). His closest friend once committed an offense (I've forgotten what exactly, but it was a minor one). He was caught by the authorities and threatened with death, unless he converted to Islam. So he became a Muslim. At first, the two men continued to be friends. It was logical, the convert was in fact the same person, wasn't he? What happened to him wasn't his fault and could have happened to anybody. But, as time passed, my great-grandfather severed the ties with the convert, telling to his family that his ex-friend had "begun to smell like a Turk". I can speculate that if the story had happened not to that friend but to the other, I could be a Muslim now.
All types of conversion described above were confined to individuals taken from communities which continued to be Christian. However, there were also mass conversions. They were done in strategic regions - the Rhodopa mountain (today in Southern Bulgaria) and the Dobrudja plain which formed the north-east border of the Ottoman Empire (today - the corresponding border of Bulgaria). In rare cases, the authorities awaited a suitable moment to push for a quasi-voluntary conversion. So in the Chepinsko area of the Rhodopa mountain, the population agreed to convert to Islam in exchange for food aid during famine. However, the typical scenario was as follows: Ottoman troops encircling the village, giving the residents the choice of conversion or death, then leaving an imam and several officials to spy on the converts and help them become real pious Muslims.
There was no way out. In theory, the converts could emigrate and revert to Christianity, but those villagers didn't have the resources and knowledge needed to reach an immigrant-friendly land. So they became ancestors of today's Bulgarian Muslims. They often proceeded further to become Turkish-speaking. Sources differ about whether this change was also forced by the Ottoman authorities. I tend to think that in most cases it's likely to have been voluntary. Religion was used by Bulgarians as a national identifier. The terms "Christianity" and "Islam" were rarely used; instead, people were talking about "the Bulgarian faith" and "the Turkish faith". So those who were Muslims but Bulgarian-speaking were in the inconvenient position of people belonging nowhere; for many of them, it was logical to switch to Turkish.
The Bulgarian population was never able to mount effective resistance. If only they had wanted, the Turks could easily convert (or exterminate) the entire Bulgarian nation. However, this wouldn't be good for the economy. In the Ottoman empire, agriculture, crafts and other productive activities were largely reserved for non-Muslims who paid almost all taxes. The Muslims, especially the Turks, were soldiers, administrators and judges. It is clear that excessive conversion would destabilize this host-parasite relationship, although many converts retained their old lifestyle. So the partition between trusted "citizens" and productive second-class subjects saved the national identity of Bulgarians and other subjugated Christian nations. In the same time, it prevented the Ottoman Empire from becoming a modern state.
The relationship between Christian Bulgarians and the converts were uneasy. The latter were included in the Basibozuk - irregular troops responsible for the worst atrocities after quashing Christian Bulgarian uprisings. When Bulgarian statehood was restored by the Russia's 1877-78 war, the rich and powerful Turks fled to the territories remaining in the Ottoman Empire while the Bulgarian Muslims and the poorer Turks (presumably the converts) remained where they were. I guess there were many acts of revenge against them, but my sources say little about this.
One could expect that many Bulgarian Muslims and ethnic Turks after 1878 would convert (revert) to Christianity. After all, the Muslim faith had been imposed in most cases by force. Besides, as any cynic would mention, once Christians were in a favourable position, you should expect that many Muslims would remember their Christian roots... Some Muslim individuals indeed became Christians, but they were surprisingly few. Mass conversions in Rhodopa and Dobrudja had largely ended by the beginning of the 19th century, so three or more generations separated that event from the 1878 liberation. The memory of the original Christian faith had faded. The brutal force had paid, as usually in history.
Therefore, I think that Highlander is a little irrelevant when she writes (about the Fox News journalists), "I have to stress that I strongly condemn kidnappings of this sort. I was especially appalled that they were forced to convert to Islam on TV while in captivity.Those two moves are so stupid and if the perpetrators are hoping to be garnering sympathy to the Palestinian cause - or any cause for that matter- then they are failing miserably and further disfiguring the image of Islam." (http://lonehighlander.blogspot.com/2006/08/unreachable-just-cause-i-had-one-of.html) I don't think that the Islamist captors were so stupid. Islam has always been promoted this way and so it has not only survived but become No. 2 (now possibly No. 1) religion in the world.
Recently, two Fox News journalists, while doing their work in Gaza, were kidnapped. They were released two days ago, but only after saying on video that they had converted to Islam. They later said they were forced to "convert" at gunpoint. There is talk that ransom has also been paid for their release. For details, see e.g. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24104.
The other thing which inspired me to write this post was Non-blogging's opinion about whether conversion to Islam, required for a non-Muslim man if he wants to marry a Muslim woman, is acceptable: "Converting because it's demanded should perhaps be between acceptable and unacceptable... Unacceptable because that would mean lying to an imam, maybe lots of genuinely believing relatives and last but not least to all honest Muslims who have said their creed believing every word of it." (http://lonehighlander.blogspot.com/2006/08/mr.html#comments). Reading this, I was amazed how a non-Muslim, pressed by Muslims to convert, still would think he does wrong to these Muslims because his conversion is not sincere! So I'll write a post about conversions to Islam in Bulgarian history and we'll see whether the sincerety of conversion mattered.
When Ottoman Turks defeated the divided Bulgarian ministates in 1393-1396 and included them in the Ottoman Empire, they didn't impose Turkish feudals everywhere. Some of the Bulgarian feudals were offered and agreed to convert to Islam. Having fulfilled this condition, they were allowed to continue to rule over their land, or at least part of it. Among them was the son of Ivan Shishman, the last pre-Ottoman Bulgarian king.
Throughout the nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule, ambitious individuals were voluntarily converting to Islam in order to make a career in the Ottoman society. However, there were many more Bulgarians who were forced to convert. The first among them were women who were made invaders' wives against their will. There is a saying that "not a single Turkish woman ever crossed from Asia to Europe". It's an exaggeration, but contains much truth. It is also consistent with the logic of the Islamic family model. In a monogamous society, any massive conquest could easily lead to demographic collapse at home, because many women would either remain without husbands or have to follow their husbands to the newly conquered land, depopulating the old territory. Poligamy solves the problem. Any Ottoman or other Muslim ruler could send as many as three quarters of his men to conquer new lands and there would still be partners for all women. The remaining quarter of men could take 4 wives each and children would continue to be born in the old territory. In the new territories, the soldiers turning into settlers could take local wives. Of course, this model can work only if the woman is kept in subhuman position, otherwise the wife coming from a hostile population could bring up children with dubious loyalty. This was the case - women were "letters without voice". Who cared whether they really believed that Mohammed was God's prophet? Turks continued to take Bulgarian wives up to the very liberation of Bulgaria in 1878 and never had any problems with pro-Bulgarian sentiments of the children of such marriages.
Another important group of converts were the Janissaries; you can read about them in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissary, although this article seems to me rather inaccurate. Like other Christian nations of the Ottoman Empire, Bulgarians were forced to pay "blood tax" - a proportion of the boys aged around 10 (the strongest were selected) were taken from their parents, converted to Islam and brought up to be Sultan's elite soldiers. This practice changed the life of one of my great-grandparents. The Turkish authorities of his town, Bansko, once announced that landowners were hiring young boys as farm hands. Many families sent one or more of their sons to earn some money. Several adults, including that my ancestor, were sent to accompany the boys. However, when the group reached the destination, it was encircled by soldiers who said that the boys were in fact needed to be recruited as Janissaries. The adult Bulgarians were left to go home. When they arrived and brought the catastrophic news, the public turned against them with anger. The parents were of course shocked by the loss of their sons and needed to blame somebody. It was unsafe to speak against the Turks, so the returning adult companions were blamed, as if they could have done anything in this situation. My great-grandfather left the town and moved to the village of Shipka, hundreds of kilometers away.
There were also many "casual" conversions. Here I'll cite again the experience of my great-grandfather (descendant of the above mentioned man who moved from Bansko to Shipka). His closest friend once committed an offense (I've forgotten what exactly, but it was a minor one). He was caught by the authorities and threatened with death, unless he converted to Islam. So he became a Muslim. At first, the two men continued to be friends. It was logical, the convert was in fact the same person, wasn't he? What happened to him wasn't his fault and could have happened to anybody. But, as time passed, my great-grandfather severed the ties with the convert, telling to his family that his ex-friend had "begun to smell like a Turk". I can speculate that if the story had happened not to that friend but to the other, I could be a Muslim now.
All types of conversion described above were confined to individuals taken from communities which continued to be Christian. However, there were also mass conversions. They were done in strategic regions - the Rhodopa mountain (today in Southern Bulgaria) and the Dobrudja plain which formed the north-east border of the Ottoman Empire (today - the corresponding border of Bulgaria). In rare cases, the authorities awaited a suitable moment to push for a quasi-voluntary conversion. So in the Chepinsko area of the Rhodopa mountain, the population agreed to convert to Islam in exchange for food aid during famine. However, the typical scenario was as follows: Ottoman troops encircling the village, giving the residents the choice of conversion or death, then leaving an imam and several officials to spy on the converts and help them become real pious Muslims.
There was no way out. In theory, the converts could emigrate and revert to Christianity, but those villagers didn't have the resources and knowledge needed to reach an immigrant-friendly land. So they became ancestors of today's Bulgarian Muslims. They often proceeded further to become Turkish-speaking. Sources differ about whether this change was also forced by the Ottoman authorities. I tend to think that in most cases it's likely to have been voluntary. Religion was used by Bulgarians as a national identifier. The terms "Christianity" and "Islam" were rarely used; instead, people were talking about "the Bulgarian faith" and "the Turkish faith". So those who were Muslims but Bulgarian-speaking were in the inconvenient position of people belonging nowhere; for many of them, it was logical to switch to Turkish.
The Bulgarian population was never able to mount effective resistance. If only they had wanted, the Turks could easily convert (or exterminate) the entire Bulgarian nation. However, this wouldn't be good for the economy. In the Ottoman empire, agriculture, crafts and other productive activities were largely reserved for non-Muslims who paid almost all taxes. The Muslims, especially the Turks, were soldiers, administrators and judges. It is clear that excessive conversion would destabilize this host-parasite relationship, although many converts retained their old lifestyle. So the partition between trusted "citizens" and productive second-class subjects saved the national identity of Bulgarians and other subjugated Christian nations. In the same time, it prevented the Ottoman Empire from becoming a modern state.
The relationship between Christian Bulgarians and the converts were uneasy. The latter were included in the Basibozuk - irregular troops responsible for the worst atrocities after quashing Christian Bulgarian uprisings. When Bulgarian statehood was restored by the Russia's 1877-78 war, the rich and powerful Turks fled to the territories remaining in the Ottoman Empire while the Bulgarian Muslims and the poorer Turks (presumably the converts) remained where they were. I guess there were many acts of revenge against them, but my sources say little about this.
One could expect that many Bulgarian Muslims and ethnic Turks after 1878 would convert (revert) to Christianity. After all, the Muslim faith had been imposed in most cases by force. Besides, as any cynic would mention, once Christians were in a favourable position, you should expect that many Muslims would remember their Christian roots... Some Muslim individuals indeed became Christians, but they were surprisingly few. Mass conversions in Rhodopa and Dobrudja had largely ended by the beginning of the 19th century, so three or more generations separated that event from the 1878 liberation. The memory of the original Christian faith had faded. The brutal force had paid, as usually in history.
Therefore, I think that Highlander is a little irrelevant when she writes (about the Fox News journalists), "I have to stress that I strongly condemn kidnappings of this sort. I was especially appalled that they were forced to convert to Islam on TV while in captivity.Those two moves are so stupid and if the perpetrators are hoping to be garnering sympathy to the Palestinian cause - or any cause for that matter- then they are failing miserably and further disfiguring the image of Islam." (http://lonehighlander.blogspot.com/2006/08/unreachable-just-cause-i-had-one-of.html) I don't think that the Islamist captors were so stupid. Islam has always been promoted this way and so it has not only survived but become No. 2 (now possibly No. 1) religion in the world.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Water regime, or how to create and perpetuate misery
(Warning: long post)
Last Saturday we went to my mother in-law's summer house in the village of Rasnik. There was no supply of running water and we were not surprised, because water in Rasnik is often stopped, especially during summer weekends. My husband's aunt, who had been there since the middle of the week, said, "They had let the water (run), but many people watered their gardens, so the water was stopped again."
"Oh, don't buy this explanation," I replied. "Are people expected NOT to water their gardens? After all, they pay for the water they use! This is a village, people grow vegetables and depend on them. Remember how during socialism everything was in short supply and the authorities kept telling that commodities don't suffice because we are consuming them!"
Because water was not expected to return before Monday, we depended on several liters we had brought from Sofia, plus a public fountain several hundred meters away. I took no part in the water-supplying expeditions because my doctor had forbidden me to lift weights and to walk under the sun. However, on Sunday I had to go there once. My little boy, who is only beginning his toilet training, had a bowel movement in his pants. So I cleaned him with wet wipes as I could and went to the fountain to wash his clothes. I was a bit ashamed of the "perfume" cloud spreading around me. Happily, I saw nobody - everyone was hiding from the sun; it was the hottest time of the day forecasted to be the hottest for 2006.
The man maintaining the water pipes in Rasnik receives orders from the water company to stop the supply every time when there is some problem. As you can guess, the company needn't seek additional water sources or minimize transit losses. Why care that plenty of water leaks into the earth through the old porous pipes? If this makes the pressure fall, the company can always stop the water and so will have no problem - all problems are for the consumers.
And because nobody controls whether that man lets the water run again when he must, he can leave his fellow villagers without water for much longer than due. I'm sure he feels almighty, he is happy that a simple movement of his hand can keep hundreds withouth running water. He prefers to stop the water on weekends, because then many people from the cities of Sofia and Pernik come to Rasnik. To cap it all, he is an alcoholic and often gets so drunk that he forgets to release the water. For this reason, the village sometimes stays dry for a week or longer.
The villagers are old and poor. They cannot wage protests and legal battles. They even don't think of beating up the alcoholic (which I think would be quite acceptable in the situation). Instead, they have invested in wells in their yards so that to have some independence from the water company. The fact that everybody can dig a well and obtain water directly from his backyard shows that there is no real problem with the water availability in the region, all problems come from the water monopolist's impunity and the people's helplessness.
A number of cities and many towns and villages in Bulgaria suffer such regular stopping of water for hours and days. This is called rezhim na vodata (water regime); I don't know whether the word regime has such a meaning in English, because I have never read about a similar phenomenon in another country! I don't know how many Bulgarians live under water regime - tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions? My city Sofia is spared from it, except in early 1995. At that time, some empowered people wanted to fill their pockets by a project to capture the water of the small river Skakavitsa. But they first needed to prove that the city was short of water. For that purpose, they first let masses of water flow out of the main water supply for Sofia - the Iskar dam lake, in the summer of 1994. Then the dam lake was declared empty, water regime was endorced on Sofia and the Skakavitsa project was approved. Residents of the little town of Sapareva Banya protested, because they obtained their water from Skakavitsa. Anti-terrorist police was sent to "occupy" the town and beat the protesting grandmothers. In Sofia, the deaths of two babies from intestinal infections were attributed to the water regime. I don't know whether the Skakavitsa pipeline is still maintained and in use; it has served its function.
In earlier years, Bulgaria had also electricity regime - planned periodic blackouts. It was usually for several hours a day, but the most severe case followed the scheme "3 hours with electricity - 3 hours without it". That was in the 1984-85 winter when the Communists forcibly renamed the Bulgarian Turks. The electricity regime seems to have had no technological or economic reason and its aim is believed to have been political - to distract attention from the renaming. (Of course those who were losing their names cared little about the elecricity, but the Communist government apparently feared solidarity protests by other citizens.)
In later years, we occasionally suffered electricity regime. It was meant either to distract attention from different government failures or to convince the public that we need more nuclear power generators. There was never true shortage of electricity - actually, all the time Bulgaria was selling it to neighbouring countries, usually at lower prices than those we were paying for it. When in 1990 or 1991 my brother had his appendix removed, he didn't return from the hospital straight home. Instead, my mother took him to a cafe and they spent an hour, waiting for the electricity to return (my mother's apartment is at the 7th floor - too high to climb if the lift doesn't work and you have had recent surgery).
And at some later time things changed. Once I was attending an opposition rally (the party I had voted for was in opposition, as usual). The speaker was talking about the government's attempts to distract attention from its failures. I said to those nearest to me, "They can't fool me even in they impose electricity regime again."
"There will never again be electricity regime in Bulgaria," a young man replied.
"Why do you think so?" I asked, surprised.
"Because we already have a powerful banking system. The banks will never allow their computers to be subjected to arbitrary blackouts and power surges."
I remembered his words. He was right - planned blackouts never happened again. Both water and electricity regimes existed without objective reason, just because they were tolerated. Banks stopped tolerating electricity regime and it was abandoned. But citizens continue to tolerate water regime and it remains at many places. When Bulgarians criticize their own national psyche, one of the charges heard most often is that they have "sheep mentality" (ovchedushie). Alas, there is much truth in this statement.
Water (and electricity) regime is an example of misery. I want to differentiate misery from poverty, although they are interconnected and highly correlated. Poverty simply means having little resources. Misery is mainly about being helpless, at the hands of some Big Brother who feels free to take decisions about your life. It would be poverty if the water prices were too high for the people's incomes. You are not quite helpless in this situation - you can try to manage your daily life with less water consumption. In the misery of the water regime, it doesn't matter how economically you are using the water on Friday - your tap will anyway be dry on Saturday. Also, the individual at least in theory can make his way out of poverty by hard work, ingenuity or luck. Misery is always nation-scale, although it is felt in some places harder than in others. You can escape it only by emigration and even this usually doesn't help: by the time you decide to emigrate, misery has penetrated and engulfed your mind and you bring it with yourself wherever you go.
Misery was deliberately introduced in Bulgaria with socialism. A well-known instruction of the Stalin's governments to the Soviet occupation authorities in Bulgaria in the late 1940s includes, among many other things, orders to centralize electric and water supply and to destroy local water sources and power generations. Also, the Socialist idea of housing were ugly multi-storey apartment blocks. Have you mentioned how every totalitarian government tries its best to accommodate its subjects inside such blocks? A friend of mine calls them "hen-houses"; she hates them very much because as a child she lived in a real house, then it was demolished to build a block on the spot and her family was "compensated" with an apartment. In an individual house with a yard, you always retain some control over your life. You need no lift, you can install solar batteries or a small power generator, you can try and dig a well or at least a water-independent toilet of the type people have used for millenia (a hole in the ground with a wooden shelter over it; we have such one in Rasnik). In an apartment, you are completely helpless.
And because these days I seem unable to write a text without any mention of you-know-what conflict, let me finally connect the Bulgarian to the Palestinian experience. When Israel was pulling out of Gaza, I wasn't at all surprised to read that the Palestinian Authority intended to demolish the pretty houses left by the Jewish settlers and build instead multy-storey apartment blocks. Isn't it logical? If you want to prevent your subjects from growing into thinking, independent, freedom-loving human beings, lock them in hen-houses and keep repeating that you have "built homes" for them. You can rest assured that the misery surrounding them will reside in their souls.
Last Saturday we went to my mother in-law's summer house in the village of Rasnik. There was no supply of running water and we were not surprised, because water in Rasnik is often stopped, especially during summer weekends. My husband's aunt, who had been there since the middle of the week, said, "They had let the water (run), but many people watered their gardens, so the water was stopped again."
"Oh, don't buy this explanation," I replied. "Are people expected NOT to water their gardens? After all, they pay for the water they use! This is a village, people grow vegetables and depend on them. Remember how during socialism everything was in short supply and the authorities kept telling that commodities don't suffice because we are consuming them!"
Because water was not expected to return before Monday, we depended on several liters we had brought from Sofia, plus a public fountain several hundred meters away. I took no part in the water-supplying expeditions because my doctor had forbidden me to lift weights and to walk under the sun. However, on Sunday I had to go there once. My little boy, who is only beginning his toilet training, had a bowel movement in his pants. So I cleaned him with wet wipes as I could and went to the fountain to wash his clothes. I was a bit ashamed of the "perfume" cloud spreading around me. Happily, I saw nobody - everyone was hiding from the sun; it was the hottest time of the day forecasted to be the hottest for 2006.
The man maintaining the water pipes in Rasnik receives orders from the water company to stop the supply every time when there is some problem. As you can guess, the company needn't seek additional water sources or minimize transit losses. Why care that plenty of water leaks into the earth through the old porous pipes? If this makes the pressure fall, the company can always stop the water and so will have no problem - all problems are for the consumers.
And because nobody controls whether that man lets the water run again when he must, he can leave his fellow villagers without water for much longer than due. I'm sure he feels almighty, he is happy that a simple movement of his hand can keep hundreds withouth running water. He prefers to stop the water on weekends, because then many people from the cities of Sofia and Pernik come to Rasnik. To cap it all, he is an alcoholic and often gets so drunk that he forgets to release the water. For this reason, the village sometimes stays dry for a week or longer.
The villagers are old and poor. They cannot wage protests and legal battles. They even don't think of beating up the alcoholic (which I think would be quite acceptable in the situation). Instead, they have invested in wells in their yards so that to have some independence from the water company. The fact that everybody can dig a well and obtain water directly from his backyard shows that there is no real problem with the water availability in the region, all problems come from the water monopolist's impunity and the people's helplessness.
A number of cities and many towns and villages in Bulgaria suffer such regular stopping of water for hours and days. This is called rezhim na vodata (water regime); I don't know whether the word regime has such a meaning in English, because I have never read about a similar phenomenon in another country! I don't know how many Bulgarians live under water regime - tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions? My city Sofia is spared from it, except in early 1995. At that time, some empowered people wanted to fill their pockets by a project to capture the water of the small river Skakavitsa. But they first needed to prove that the city was short of water. For that purpose, they first let masses of water flow out of the main water supply for Sofia - the Iskar dam lake, in the summer of 1994. Then the dam lake was declared empty, water regime was endorced on Sofia and the Skakavitsa project was approved. Residents of the little town of Sapareva Banya protested, because they obtained their water from Skakavitsa. Anti-terrorist police was sent to "occupy" the town and beat the protesting grandmothers. In Sofia, the deaths of two babies from intestinal infections were attributed to the water regime. I don't know whether the Skakavitsa pipeline is still maintained and in use; it has served its function.
In earlier years, Bulgaria had also electricity regime - planned periodic blackouts. It was usually for several hours a day, but the most severe case followed the scheme "3 hours with electricity - 3 hours without it". That was in the 1984-85 winter when the Communists forcibly renamed the Bulgarian Turks. The electricity regime seems to have had no technological or economic reason and its aim is believed to have been political - to distract attention from the renaming. (Of course those who were losing their names cared little about the elecricity, but the Communist government apparently feared solidarity protests by other citizens.)
In later years, we occasionally suffered electricity regime. It was meant either to distract attention from different government failures or to convince the public that we need more nuclear power generators. There was never true shortage of electricity - actually, all the time Bulgaria was selling it to neighbouring countries, usually at lower prices than those we were paying for it. When in 1990 or 1991 my brother had his appendix removed, he didn't return from the hospital straight home. Instead, my mother took him to a cafe and they spent an hour, waiting for the electricity to return (my mother's apartment is at the 7th floor - too high to climb if the lift doesn't work and you have had recent surgery).
And at some later time things changed. Once I was attending an opposition rally (the party I had voted for was in opposition, as usual). The speaker was talking about the government's attempts to distract attention from its failures. I said to those nearest to me, "They can't fool me even in they impose electricity regime again."
"There will never again be electricity regime in Bulgaria," a young man replied.
"Why do you think so?" I asked, surprised.
"Because we already have a powerful banking system. The banks will never allow their computers to be subjected to arbitrary blackouts and power surges."
I remembered his words. He was right - planned blackouts never happened again. Both water and electricity regimes existed without objective reason, just because they were tolerated. Banks stopped tolerating electricity regime and it was abandoned. But citizens continue to tolerate water regime and it remains at many places. When Bulgarians criticize their own national psyche, one of the charges heard most often is that they have "sheep mentality" (ovchedushie). Alas, there is much truth in this statement.
Water (and electricity) regime is an example of misery. I want to differentiate misery from poverty, although they are interconnected and highly correlated. Poverty simply means having little resources. Misery is mainly about being helpless, at the hands of some Big Brother who feels free to take decisions about your life. It would be poverty if the water prices were too high for the people's incomes. You are not quite helpless in this situation - you can try to manage your daily life with less water consumption. In the misery of the water regime, it doesn't matter how economically you are using the water on Friday - your tap will anyway be dry on Saturday. Also, the individual at least in theory can make his way out of poverty by hard work, ingenuity or luck. Misery is always nation-scale, although it is felt in some places harder than in others. You can escape it only by emigration and even this usually doesn't help: by the time you decide to emigrate, misery has penetrated and engulfed your mind and you bring it with yourself wherever you go.
Misery was deliberately introduced in Bulgaria with socialism. A well-known instruction of the Stalin's governments to the Soviet occupation authorities in Bulgaria in the late 1940s includes, among many other things, orders to centralize electric and water supply and to destroy local water sources and power generations. Also, the Socialist idea of housing were ugly multi-storey apartment blocks. Have you mentioned how every totalitarian government tries its best to accommodate its subjects inside such blocks? A friend of mine calls them "hen-houses"; she hates them very much because as a child she lived in a real house, then it was demolished to build a block on the spot and her family was "compensated" with an apartment. In an individual house with a yard, you always retain some control over your life. You need no lift, you can install solar batteries or a small power generator, you can try and dig a well or at least a water-independent toilet of the type people have used for millenia (a hole in the ground with a wooden shelter over it; we have such one in Rasnik). In an apartment, you are completely helpless.
And because these days I seem unable to write a text without any mention of you-know-what conflict, let me finally connect the Bulgarian to the Palestinian experience. When Israel was pulling out of Gaza, I wasn't at all surprised to read that the Palestinian Authority intended to demolish the pretty houses left by the Jewish settlers and build instead multy-storey apartment blocks. Isn't it logical? If you want to prevent your subjects from growing into thinking, independent, freedom-loving human beings, lock them in hen-houses and keep repeating that you have "built homes" for them. You can rest assured that the misery surrounding them will reside in their souls.
Monday, August 21, 2006
A Bulgarian-Libyan nightmare
I had to do blood and urine tests this morning, so last night I prepared for it - asked my mother in-law to look after my son, put inside the bag the "redirection papers" from my doctor. Then I blogged till late at night, in fact till early morning. The last person I exchanged comments with was Libyan girl Highlander.
Falling asleep, I was still thinking about the tests and the "conversation" with Highlander. The combination "blood testing - Libya" produced one of these dreams which, while far from the logic of the awakened state, have a logic and insight of their own. I dreamed I was already in the medical center, sitting on a chair and preparing to give a blood sample. I was looking what the nurse was doing. In reality, I never do this - I prefer to look in another direction while people are drawing my blood, because I don't endure the sight very well. But that was not reality.
The nurse was holding a syringe and reached out to take a needle. But the needles were not in the neat individual sterile packages they had to be. Instead, there was a transparent plastic box of the type ice-cream is sold in. Bulgarian housewives often wash and reuse these boxes. This one was full of needles. They didn't even look very clean. The upper ones had attached pieces of what looked like fruit cake. The bottom of the box was covered by a thin layer of syrup. (I know needles are expected to be contaminated with blood. Don't ask me why it was syrup.)
I said, "But you must use disposable sterile needles! These here have been used and then haven't been sterilized, they haven't even been washed!"
The nurse opened a drawer, took out two needles in sterile packages and showed them to me.
"See, this is all we have," she said. "And we keep them, in case a foreigner or another important patient comes."
I opened my mouth to ask why I was considered unimportant, but at this point my brain decided enough was enough and I awakened.
One needn't be Freud to interpret this dream. It was derived from the event everybody thinks about when Bulgaria and Libya are mentioned together: the infection of more than 400 Libyan children with HIV, thought to be a result of reusing syringes, needles and other blood-handling equipment without sterilization. (Except in Libya, where the Q-man convinced most people that the infection was deliberately induced by six Bulgarian medics and a Palestinian doctor - it's amazing how Libyans still trust him.)
If you ask whether the nightmare had any prognostic value - no, it hadn't. When I actually went to the medical center, there were no dirty needles in ice-cream boxes.
Falling asleep, I was still thinking about the tests and the "conversation" with Highlander. The combination "blood testing - Libya" produced one of these dreams which, while far from the logic of the awakened state, have a logic and insight of their own. I dreamed I was already in the medical center, sitting on a chair and preparing to give a blood sample. I was looking what the nurse was doing. In reality, I never do this - I prefer to look in another direction while people are drawing my blood, because I don't endure the sight very well. But that was not reality.
The nurse was holding a syringe and reached out to take a needle. But the needles were not in the neat individual sterile packages they had to be. Instead, there was a transparent plastic box of the type ice-cream is sold in. Bulgarian housewives often wash and reuse these boxes. This one was full of needles. They didn't even look very clean. The upper ones had attached pieces of what looked like fruit cake. The bottom of the box was covered by a thin layer of syrup. (I know needles are expected to be contaminated with blood. Don't ask me why it was syrup.)
I said, "But you must use disposable sterile needles! These here have been used and then haven't been sterilized, they haven't even been washed!"
The nurse opened a drawer, took out two needles in sterile packages and showed them to me.
"See, this is all we have," she said. "And we keep them, in case a foreigner or another important patient comes."
I opened my mouth to ask why I was considered unimportant, but at this point my brain decided enough was enough and I awakened.
One needn't be Freud to interpret this dream. It was derived from the event everybody thinks about when Bulgaria and Libya are mentioned together: the infection of more than 400 Libyan children with HIV, thought to be a result of reusing syringes, needles and other blood-handling equipment without sterilization. (Except in Libya, where the Q-man convinced most people that the infection was deliberately induced by six Bulgarian medics and a Palestinian doctor - it's amazing how Libyans still trust him.)
If you ask whether the nightmare had any prognostic value - no, it hadn't. When I actually went to the medical center, there were no dirty needles in ice-cream boxes.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Vote if you want the Twin Towers rebuilt
As far as I know, the project for a new World Trade Center is already approved and doesn't resemble the old one. However, today I saw by chance an online petition by The Twin Towers Alliance to rebuild the towers. If you support the idea, you can express your opinion at http://www.twintowersalliance.com/petition/.
Although nothing can bring back the lost lives, I would feel a bit better if I could see the towers again at their place. I still feel pain in the heart when their image appears in some old movie.
Although nothing can bring back the lost lives, I would feel a bit better if I could see the towers again at their place. I still feel pain in the heart when their image appears in some old movie.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
The war aborted, and why not to trust Margarita Mihneva
(Caution: long post)
The war between Hezbollah/Lebanon and Israel I wrote about on July 29 was aborted. The enemy claims they won and Israel lost. In a sense, they are right: without finding the kidnapped soldiers, Israel agreed to a cease-fire and so used the simplest and most reliable way to lose - left the battlefield. Has Israel caught from old Europe the virus of unwillingness to survive?
However, it would be wrong to blame Israeli leadership alone. I cannot imagine the war led logically, i.e. spreading to Hezbollah sponsors Iran and maybe Syria, without the help of the USA. And instead of helping, the Americans were pressing Israel to step back. Somebody rightly described Bush as "all talk, no walk".
Of course it was just a stage in the ongoing global war and, as such, it produced some benefits: revealed the arsenal and capabilities of Hezbollah, the attitudes of key world players and the so-called world opinion (about the latter and how much it costs, read a good essay at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23635). However, this knowledge will be useful only if somebody really intends to resume the fight.
As for the Lebanese, it seems that what sympathy I had for them was largely undeserved and the support for Hezbollah actually is much stronger than I thought. I'm translating information by Netinfo: "The (Lebanese) government hasn't even considered disarming Hezbollah, which is one of the basic requirements in the UN Security Council cease-fire resolution... The pro-Syrian president Emil Lahud said it would be a shame to insist for disarming the national resistance (Hezbollah), the only force in the Arab world that stood against Israel..." (http://news.netinfo.bg/?tid=40&oid=923890).
Hezbollah ringleader Hassan Nasrallah became a hero of the Muslim world because of his successes in kidnapping soldiers and shelling Israeli cities and villages. These same Muslims who hail a thug for deliberate killings of civilians are angry when we say they are bad people... I recently commented on Highlander's blog, "Can the Muslim world reach a deeper point in moral degradation? I cannot imagine, but let's wait and see, every time when I think this is impossible they manage to make another step downward. If the Devil exists and makes list of the souls who belong to him, I pity the poor fellow, he must already have arthritis from the too-intensive writing or typing."
Or possibly I'm too pessimistic. Perhaps, when things become much worse, the civilized world will awaken from its lethargy and take care of itself. And at least our media will stop working as enemy PR. Last night, I watched the TV show "Neudobnite (The Inconvenient)". It's broadcasted by cable TV Channel 3 and its host is one of the best known Bulgarian journalists, Margarita Mihneva. She had invited two Lebanese who offered plenty of anti-Israel talk and put photos of killed Lebanese children under our noses (as if the Israeli children killed on Friday are expected, like Jesus Christ, to be alive again on Sunday).
I liked just one of the questions asked by Mihneva: what the ordinary Lebanese think about Hezbollah. The Lebanese guests said that the lack of support of Lebanese to Hezbollah is US media disinformation, in fact all Hezbollah fighters are Lebanese and the population supports them. Unfortunately, Mihneva offered no comment and no further questions to clarify this important issue.
All the time Mihneva was saying that she will present the Jewish viewpoint as well. Only during the last minutes we heard a Bulgarian Jewish intellectual, Jacob Dzherasi. However, he was not in the studio, his voice was taped. And he was not discussing the current conflict but something completely unrelated - the architecture and history of a particular house at Oborishte street in Sofia! She used him just to wash her hands. So much about the honest representation of opposite viewpoints.
Finally, let me quote a different Arab voice, like a beam of light in a realm of darkness: Libyan reformist writer Dr. Muhammad Al-Huni and his article "The lexicon of resistance", presented by MEMRI (http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD125306#_edn1):
"The word 'resistance' has come to be constantly used in the killing fields known as the Middle East... When Shi'ites kill Sunnis and Sunnis kill Shi'ites in Iraq merely for their [sectarian] identity, it is called 'resistance.' When Janjaweed gangs murder unarmed civilians in Darfour, it is called 'resistance.' When year after year, Hamas and Islamic Jihad extinguish any spark of peace which can end the suffering of the Palestinian people, it is called 'resistance.' When Hizbullah takes an entire people hostage and refuses to obey the elected [authorities], dragging Lebanon into destruction, it is called 'resistance.' The war which is being waged by the new global terrorism under the command of bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and Al-Zarqawi is called 'resistance'... What is common to these types of resistance is that they all present themselves as 'Islamic'... The project of these resistance [groups] has had its day in the Arab world. It made the most noise and the most bloodshed, and therefore its dreadful collapse is highly imminent. They betted on a wild horse, and have left not a single seed that can sprout, nor a single bud that can open. They are the murderers of the future, and therefore they have no future."
Read the whole text, it's worth it. I hope Highlander will see it, too, because it's by her fellow countryman not very likely to be published in Jamahiriya or any other Libyan newspaper. I hope his prognosis will come true.
The war between Hezbollah/Lebanon and Israel I wrote about on July 29 was aborted. The enemy claims they won and Israel lost. In a sense, they are right: without finding the kidnapped soldiers, Israel agreed to a cease-fire and so used the simplest and most reliable way to lose - left the battlefield. Has Israel caught from old Europe the virus of unwillingness to survive?
However, it would be wrong to blame Israeli leadership alone. I cannot imagine the war led logically, i.e. spreading to Hezbollah sponsors Iran and maybe Syria, without the help of the USA. And instead of helping, the Americans were pressing Israel to step back. Somebody rightly described Bush as "all talk, no walk".
Of course it was just a stage in the ongoing global war and, as such, it produced some benefits: revealed the arsenal and capabilities of Hezbollah, the attitudes of key world players and the so-called world opinion (about the latter and how much it costs, read a good essay at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23635). However, this knowledge will be useful only if somebody really intends to resume the fight.
As for the Lebanese, it seems that what sympathy I had for them was largely undeserved and the support for Hezbollah actually is much stronger than I thought. I'm translating information by Netinfo: "The (Lebanese) government hasn't even considered disarming Hezbollah, which is one of the basic requirements in the UN Security Council cease-fire resolution... The pro-Syrian president Emil Lahud said it would be a shame to insist for disarming the national resistance (Hezbollah), the only force in the Arab world that stood against Israel..." (http://news.netinfo.bg/?tid=40&oid=923890).
Hezbollah ringleader Hassan Nasrallah became a hero of the Muslim world because of his successes in kidnapping soldiers and shelling Israeli cities and villages. These same Muslims who hail a thug for deliberate killings of civilians are angry when we say they are bad people... I recently commented on Highlander's blog, "Can the Muslim world reach a deeper point in moral degradation? I cannot imagine, but let's wait and see, every time when I think this is impossible they manage to make another step downward. If the Devil exists and makes list of the souls who belong to him, I pity the poor fellow, he must already have arthritis from the too-intensive writing or typing."
Or possibly I'm too pessimistic. Perhaps, when things become much worse, the civilized world will awaken from its lethargy and take care of itself. And at least our media will stop working as enemy PR. Last night, I watched the TV show "Neudobnite (The Inconvenient)". It's broadcasted by cable TV Channel 3 and its host is one of the best known Bulgarian journalists, Margarita Mihneva. She had invited two Lebanese who offered plenty of anti-Israel talk and put photos of killed Lebanese children under our noses (as if the Israeli children killed on Friday are expected, like Jesus Christ, to be alive again on Sunday).
I liked just one of the questions asked by Mihneva: what the ordinary Lebanese think about Hezbollah. The Lebanese guests said that the lack of support of Lebanese to Hezbollah is US media disinformation, in fact all Hezbollah fighters are Lebanese and the population supports them. Unfortunately, Mihneva offered no comment and no further questions to clarify this important issue.
All the time Mihneva was saying that she will present the Jewish viewpoint as well. Only during the last minutes we heard a Bulgarian Jewish intellectual, Jacob Dzherasi. However, he was not in the studio, his voice was taped. And he was not discussing the current conflict but something completely unrelated - the architecture and history of a particular house at Oborishte street in Sofia! She used him just to wash her hands. So much about the honest representation of opposite viewpoints.
Finally, let me quote a different Arab voice, like a beam of light in a realm of darkness: Libyan reformist writer Dr. Muhammad Al-Huni and his article "The lexicon of resistance", presented by MEMRI (http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD125306#_edn1):
"The word 'resistance' has come to be constantly used in the killing fields known as the Middle East... When Shi'ites kill Sunnis and Sunnis kill Shi'ites in Iraq merely for their [sectarian] identity, it is called 'resistance.' When Janjaweed gangs murder unarmed civilians in Darfour, it is called 'resistance.' When year after year, Hamas and Islamic Jihad extinguish any spark of peace which can end the suffering of the Palestinian people, it is called 'resistance.' When Hizbullah takes an entire people hostage and refuses to obey the elected [authorities], dragging Lebanon into destruction, it is called 'resistance.' The war which is being waged by the new global terrorism under the command of bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and Al-Zarqawi is called 'resistance'... What is common to these types of resistance is that they all present themselves as 'Islamic'... The project of these resistance [groups] has had its day in the Arab world. It made the most noise and the most bloodshed, and therefore its dreadful collapse is highly imminent. They betted on a wild horse, and have left not a single seed that can sprout, nor a single bud that can open. They are the murderers of the future, and therefore they have no future."
Read the whole text, it's worth it. I hope Highlander will see it, too, because it's by her fellow countryman not very likely to be published in Jamahiriya or any other Libyan newspaper. I hope his prognosis will come true.
Friday, August 11, 2006
The map of Israel as a message
This post, like the previous one, will be about one of my students.
At the beginning of the second semester, I had a group of freshmen whom I was meeting for first time. Among them there was a boy with a strange piece of metal hanging from his neck. Its shape was roughly triangular and seemed familiar to me, though I couldn't recognize it.
Checking the students' files, I saw that boy had Arab name. I asked him where he was from. He answered, "Palestine".
When I heard this, I figured out what the strange metal object was. I felt physical discomfort, some kind of pressure in the stomach. But I still had to check to be sure. When I returned to my room, I launched Google Image Search and typed two words: "israel map". The roughly triangular shape appeared: it was the map of Israel plus the Territories, "the whole Palestine".
You would ask what I did then? Nothing. If I were a fellow student of the boy, I would say, "What the hell you think you are doing, walking around with this map of Israel? Doesn't it come to your head that I could be a Jew and have in Israel a brother, a sister-in-law and two little nieces? Do you think that only you in this world have feelings, wishes and rights?" But I was his teacher and my lips were closed, as if I didn't see the stupid little thing.
Once I supported the Palestinians because I believed all they wanted was a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza. This was what their leaders said, wasn't it? They were just making fools of us. But even fools cannot be made fools indefinitely.
Another detail about that student: He spoke excellent Bulgarian. I asked him whether he had something Bulgarian in his origin and he said "Yes", without elaborating. I guess his mother was a Bulgarian. He also said he had attended secondary school here (the Iraqi school in Sofia, I'll write a separate post about it some day). I wouldn't be surprised if he had been born and spent his entire life in Bulgaria. Yet his behaviour and performance didn't show a single element of influence by Bulgarian culture, except the ability to speak the language. I think this resistance to integration can teach us a lot.
At the beginning of the second semester, I had a group of freshmen whom I was meeting for first time. Among them there was a boy with a strange piece of metal hanging from his neck. Its shape was roughly triangular and seemed familiar to me, though I couldn't recognize it.
Checking the students' files, I saw that boy had Arab name. I asked him where he was from. He answered, "Palestine".
When I heard this, I figured out what the strange metal object was. I felt physical discomfort, some kind of pressure in the stomach. But I still had to check to be sure. When I returned to my room, I launched Google Image Search and typed two words: "israel map". The roughly triangular shape appeared: it was the map of Israel plus the Territories, "the whole Palestine".
You would ask what I did then? Nothing. If I were a fellow student of the boy, I would say, "What the hell you think you are doing, walking around with this map of Israel? Doesn't it come to your head that I could be a Jew and have in Israel a brother, a sister-in-law and two little nieces? Do you think that only you in this world have feelings, wishes and rights?" But I was his teacher and my lips were closed, as if I didn't see the stupid little thing.
Once I supported the Palestinians because I believed all they wanted was a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza. This was what their leaders said, wasn't it? They were just making fools of us. But even fools cannot be made fools indefinitely.
Another detail about that student: He spoke excellent Bulgarian. I asked him whether he had something Bulgarian in his origin and he said "Yes", without elaborating. I guess his mother was a Bulgarian. He also said he had attended secondary school here (the Iraqi school in Sofia, I'll write a separate post about it some day). I wouldn't be surprised if he had been born and spent his entire life in Bulgaria. Yet his behaviour and performance didn't show a single element of influence by Bulgarian culture, except the ability to speak the language. I think this resistance to integration can teach us a lot.
Friday, August 04, 2006
My Turkish student Eva, the Islamist students and the choice of civilization
(Caution: long post)
In recent time, the mosque in Sofia made headlines. Ataka activists (I've wrote about these idiots at http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/04/volen-siderov.html) suddenly decided that the summon for prayer disturbs non-Muslims and began a petition to force the imam to use only his voice, no loudspeakers. Tensions accumulated, somebody broke a window of the mosque, somebody set the mosque in the town of Kazanlak on fire. Happily, the damage was small (both mosques are historical buildings, remained from the Ottoman era).
So much from me about this controversy, I don’t want to cover in detail Ataka and their heroic deeds. I'm myself an Islamophobe, now if I criticize Islam, the opponent may well ask me where I was in the night when the window was broken :-). We Bulgarians often praise ourselves for our tolerance, we’d better let others judge it. I prefer to write something else about this mosque, or rather about some worshippers.
During the 2005-06 academic year, I had no classes with the foreign students of the preparatory year (when they learn Bulgarian and some high school-level basic facts). I was glad that I hadn't. These students are always difficult, but this year they were the worst audience we've ever had. So said my colleagues who lectured to them. Once I entered briefly the lecture room and saw for myself. The students were speaking loudly in their native languages and were playing with their cellular phones, not even pretending to listen.
A significant part of these students were Turks. We've had many students from Turkey and they all looked quite secular. These ones were Islamists. All the girls wore headscarves and characteristic dresses designed to hide the body outline, to protect the woman's virtue and to facilitate fractures. My colleague complained that, when he was explaining evolution, the Turkish students interrupted indignantly: "This is not true! It is Allah who created all species! And how dare you say that we are descendants of monkeys and apes?"
These students also refused to come to class before 3 PM on Fridays, because they wanted to pray in the above mentioned mosque. I remember one Friday when my colleague was awaiting them nervously. "I have to lecture about meiosis," she said. "How can I explain it in so little time?"
(Meiosis is the most complex type of cell division.)
"Don't trouble," I replied. "Lecture only as long as you are due, not a minute more. If after that the students still have questions about meiosis, let them go to the mosque and ask the imam. Allah will give him the necessary inspiration to clarify meiosis."
So different were these kids from my student Eva that it was hard to believe they belonged to the same nation. Let me now write about Eva. She was a regular 1st year student in my group. Her first name was an Old Testament name acceptable for a Turk but more common in the Western world (I'm using another Old Testament name, Eva, to preserve her anonymity - I haven't taken her permission to blog about her.) Her second and family name were Turkish but with the characteristic Bulgarian ending -va. Her Bulgarian was perfect, so I naturally assumed that she was born and raised in Bulgaria, an ethnic Turk or a Bulgarian Muslim. We have a few such students every year and I'm always happy for them, because it's not easy for them to become our students. Not that they are discriminated, as somebody might think. It would be impossible because our Medical University, like all serious Bulgarian universities, has a strictly reglamented anonymous entry exam. But these kids typically grow in small towns or villages, usually don't go to the best schools and, if they are ethnic Turks, have to do the exam in their second language. So, on the average, it is more difficult for them to succeed in education.
Once I looked at Eva's faculty number and saw it was of a foreign student. I was disappointed. Because the above mentioned candidate student exam is very difficult, some bypass it, usually by spending a semester or a whole academic year in a foreign university and then transfering to our Medical University. These students are usually children of renowned doctors, politicians or rich people. They can be recognized because, although they are Bulgarians, they have faculty numbers as if they were foreigners. I don't like this sneaking into the University through the back door, I wouldn't allow it if it depended on me. So you understand why I thought sadly, "The girl couldn't do the exam. Or possibly she could but her parents didn't want to take the chance? What a pity." Of course I voiced none of these thoughts. At any rate, no matter how she got there, Eva fully deserved to be in the University. She was one of my best students.
Once I had to call Eva's group for an additional class. I proposed to see them at 1.30 PM. Most agreed, but Eva said, "I cannot come at 1.30. I have to attend a lesson of Bulgarian exactly at this time." "I'm surprised that you attend Bulgarian classes," I said. "I was sure you were from Bulgaria." Eva laughed and thanked for this compliment to her Bulgarian language skills. So I realized by chance that Eva was a real foreign student. Had she been educated in Bulgaria, she wouldn't have to learn Bulgarian in the university.
Later she told me more about herself. Her family was originally from Bulgaria, but emigrated to Turkey. Some of their relations remained in Bulgaria and Eva visited them every summer, so she kept her Bulgarian in good shape. She graduated a secondary school in Turkey and even studied philosophy in Istanbul for a year before coming to Sofia to study medicine.
I thought about Eva and her parents and wondered. Why did these people care for her daughter to speak good Bulgarian, why did they send her to study here? If you don't know it yet, Bulgaria is a miserable country. Moreover, in the last years of Communists rule in Bulgaria (1984-1989) ethnic Turks suffered terrible wrongs: their names were forcibly changed to Bulgarian ones. So why did this family keep such close ties with Bulgaria?
My guess: because they felt belonging to the Western civilization and Bulgaria, however miserable, was their only direct connection to this civilization. When Bulgaria was joining NATO, Peter Stoyanov, Bulgarian President at that time, said this was "civilizational choice". So Eva's family also made their choice of civilization.
I think that the main force keeping a civilization alive and advancing is the feeling of people that they belong to it. There are always some who have grown in it but dislike it, they are a disintegrating force acting from inside. Among the outsiders, some will like the civilization, some will dislike it. I feel fully belonging to the Western civilization and convinced in its values. I don't understand why so many people outside it, instead of trying to join it, make efforts to ruin it. Maybe these enemies can be subdued by force, I don't know. Maybe they’ll succeed. But why are they against it in the first place? Why are our troops forced to fight them, why don't they just drop their arms?
During the last academic year, I saw about a dozen Turkish students spending the Friday in the mosque - and just one Eva. The balance is quite grim, isn't it? As the proverb says, one swallow makes no spring. Or possibly there are many more Western-minded Turks like Eva's parents, but they have more money and send their kids directly to Cambridge? Let's hope so :-). But I doubt.
In recent time, the mosque in Sofia made headlines. Ataka activists (I've wrote about these idiots at http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/04/volen-siderov.html) suddenly decided that the summon for prayer disturbs non-Muslims and began a petition to force the imam to use only his voice, no loudspeakers. Tensions accumulated, somebody broke a window of the mosque, somebody set the mosque in the town of Kazanlak on fire. Happily, the damage was small (both mosques are historical buildings, remained from the Ottoman era).
So much from me about this controversy, I don’t want to cover in detail Ataka and their heroic deeds. I'm myself an Islamophobe, now if I criticize Islam, the opponent may well ask me where I was in the night when the window was broken :-). We Bulgarians often praise ourselves for our tolerance, we’d better let others judge it. I prefer to write something else about this mosque, or rather about some worshippers.
During the 2005-06 academic year, I had no classes with the foreign students of the preparatory year (when they learn Bulgarian and some high school-level basic facts). I was glad that I hadn't. These students are always difficult, but this year they were the worst audience we've ever had. So said my colleagues who lectured to them. Once I entered briefly the lecture room and saw for myself. The students were speaking loudly in their native languages and were playing with their cellular phones, not even pretending to listen.
A significant part of these students were Turks. We've had many students from Turkey and they all looked quite secular. These ones were Islamists. All the girls wore headscarves and characteristic dresses designed to hide the body outline, to protect the woman's virtue and to facilitate fractures. My colleague complained that, when he was explaining evolution, the Turkish students interrupted indignantly: "This is not true! It is Allah who created all species! And how dare you say that we are descendants of monkeys and apes?"
These students also refused to come to class before 3 PM on Fridays, because they wanted to pray in the above mentioned mosque. I remember one Friday when my colleague was awaiting them nervously. "I have to lecture about meiosis," she said. "How can I explain it in so little time?"
(Meiosis is the most complex type of cell division.)
"Don't trouble," I replied. "Lecture only as long as you are due, not a minute more. If after that the students still have questions about meiosis, let them go to the mosque and ask the imam. Allah will give him the necessary inspiration to clarify meiosis."
So different were these kids from my student Eva that it was hard to believe they belonged to the same nation. Let me now write about Eva. She was a regular 1st year student in my group. Her first name was an Old Testament name acceptable for a Turk but more common in the Western world (I'm using another Old Testament name, Eva, to preserve her anonymity - I haven't taken her permission to blog about her.) Her second and family name were Turkish but with the characteristic Bulgarian ending -va. Her Bulgarian was perfect, so I naturally assumed that she was born and raised in Bulgaria, an ethnic Turk or a Bulgarian Muslim. We have a few such students every year and I'm always happy for them, because it's not easy for them to become our students. Not that they are discriminated, as somebody might think. It would be impossible because our Medical University, like all serious Bulgarian universities, has a strictly reglamented anonymous entry exam. But these kids typically grow in small towns or villages, usually don't go to the best schools and, if they are ethnic Turks, have to do the exam in their second language. So, on the average, it is more difficult for them to succeed in education.
Once I looked at Eva's faculty number and saw it was of a foreign student. I was disappointed. Because the above mentioned candidate student exam is very difficult, some bypass it, usually by spending a semester or a whole academic year in a foreign university and then transfering to our Medical University. These students are usually children of renowned doctors, politicians or rich people. They can be recognized because, although they are Bulgarians, they have faculty numbers as if they were foreigners. I don't like this sneaking into the University through the back door, I wouldn't allow it if it depended on me. So you understand why I thought sadly, "The girl couldn't do the exam. Or possibly she could but her parents didn't want to take the chance? What a pity." Of course I voiced none of these thoughts. At any rate, no matter how she got there, Eva fully deserved to be in the University. She was one of my best students.
Once I had to call Eva's group for an additional class. I proposed to see them at 1.30 PM. Most agreed, but Eva said, "I cannot come at 1.30. I have to attend a lesson of Bulgarian exactly at this time." "I'm surprised that you attend Bulgarian classes," I said. "I was sure you were from Bulgaria." Eva laughed and thanked for this compliment to her Bulgarian language skills. So I realized by chance that Eva was a real foreign student. Had she been educated in Bulgaria, she wouldn't have to learn Bulgarian in the university.
Later she told me more about herself. Her family was originally from Bulgaria, but emigrated to Turkey. Some of their relations remained in Bulgaria and Eva visited them every summer, so she kept her Bulgarian in good shape. She graduated a secondary school in Turkey and even studied philosophy in Istanbul for a year before coming to Sofia to study medicine.
I thought about Eva and her parents and wondered. Why did these people care for her daughter to speak good Bulgarian, why did they send her to study here? If you don't know it yet, Bulgaria is a miserable country. Moreover, in the last years of Communists rule in Bulgaria (1984-1989) ethnic Turks suffered terrible wrongs: their names were forcibly changed to Bulgarian ones. So why did this family keep such close ties with Bulgaria?
My guess: because they felt belonging to the Western civilization and Bulgaria, however miserable, was their only direct connection to this civilization. When Bulgaria was joining NATO, Peter Stoyanov, Bulgarian President at that time, said this was "civilizational choice". So Eva's family also made their choice of civilization.
I think that the main force keeping a civilization alive and advancing is the feeling of people that they belong to it. There are always some who have grown in it but dislike it, they are a disintegrating force acting from inside. Among the outsiders, some will like the civilization, some will dislike it. I feel fully belonging to the Western civilization and convinced in its values. I don't understand why so many people outside it, instead of trying to join it, make efforts to ruin it. Maybe these enemies can be subdued by force, I don't know. Maybe they’ll succeed. But why are they against it in the first place? Why are our troops forced to fight them, why don't they just drop their arms?
During the last academic year, I saw about a dozen Turkish students spending the Friday in the mosque - and just one Eva. The balance is quite grim, isn't it? As the proverb says, one swallow makes no spring. Or possibly there are many more Western-minded Turks like Eva's parents, but they have more money and send their kids directly to Cambridge? Let's hope so :-). But I doubt.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
The Black Sea coast: newspapers are telling the truth
Last week, we went to the sea resort of Primorsko for a vacation. We had been there 4 years ago. Now I couldn't recognize the place, so much new hotels had been built. The out-of-control construction works at the Bulgarian Black Sea coast are often reported in our newspapers. I had the opportunity to see for myself that newspapers had written nothing but the truth.
There were so many and densely distributed newly-biult hotels and hotels in construction that, despite evident efforts to make their architecture diverse, the overall impression was very poor. My husband rightly said that it looked like Lyulin (this is one of the Sofia districts built for the working class during the socialist era, all in ugly multy-storey buildings).
I wonder how the numerous investors get their construction permits. In fact, everybody knows: by bribing the buraucrats. And of course nobody cares to protect the coast against landslides, to take care of the sewage waters etc. All the mad new construction is overlaid on the fragile infrastructure of the old, village-like town. Small wonder that a week or two before we arrived, an ordinary rain caused overflow of the sewage system and the streets were immersed in contaminated water. I am even afraid to think what happens with the sewage of those new hotels that are nearest to the beach. I bet it goes directly into the sea. Happily, none of us suffered any gastrointestinal infection, as I feared.
Neither my husband nor I want to go to Primorsko again. I hope next time we'll find some small town or village that has mostly escaped development, doesn't look like a socialist suburb and has no water jets. I'm afraid no such place has remained.
There were so many and densely distributed newly-biult hotels and hotels in construction that, despite evident efforts to make their architecture diverse, the overall impression was very poor. My husband rightly said that it looked like Lyulin (this is one of the Sofia districts built for the working class during the socialist era, all in ugly multy-storey buildings).
I wonder how the numerous investors get their construction permits. In fact, everybody knows: by bribing the buraucrats. And of course nobody cares to protect the coast against landslides, to take care of the sewage waters etc. All the mad new construction is overlaid on the fragile infrastructure of the old, village-like town. Small wonder that a week or two before we arrived, an ordinary rain caused overflow of the sewage system and the streets were immersed in contaminated water. I am even afraid to think what happens with the sewage of those new hotels that are nearest to the beach. I bet it goes directly into the sea. Happily, none of us suffered any gastrointestinal infection, as I feared.
Neither my husband nor I want to go to Primorsko again. I hope next time we'll find some small town or village that has mostly escaped development, doesn't look like a socialist suburb and has no water jets. I'm afraid no such place has remained.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
When I really pitied the Lebanese
As I mentioned in my previous post, when Israel begun military operation in Lebanon, most people were quick to express sympathy for the Lebanese. I didn't hurry, because I was angry at them for their complains against Israel and their calls for international intervention to achieve immediate cease-fire. My thoughts were generally as follows:
"Why do you say you have nothing to do with Hezbollah actions, after you have a Hezbollah minister in your government? But even if you hadn't this minister, aren't Hezbollah acting from your territory? Or you don't mind armed thugs on your land, as long as they shoot at someone else? Then, don't turn into crybabies at the moment when somebody begins shooting at you.
Imagine that I live alone. A man comes to live with me, shoots at my neighbour from my window, then kidnaps his sons and hides them in my house. My neighbour invades my house, hits me, smashes my furniture while looking for his sons and the kidnapper. I scream, "Don't touch me! And spare my furniture! I'm innocent! It was a big bad guy who harmed you! And I'm not his girlfriend, he's just raping me! Anybody help me!" Then people could be excused if they think, "You must quite enjoy the raping."
Dear Lebanese, until recently you didn't mind Syrian occupation forces. You don't mind Hezbollah even now, just some of their side-effects. But you are against the Israeli troops. What, any army or militia is welcome to trot on your land except IDF? This is what people call anti-Semitism.
And what is your so-called army doing while the Israelis are fighting Hezbollah? A foreign army is fighting a gang of armed thugs on your land and your army is standing by! Such an army is a joke. Such a country is a joke. Nobody can take it seriously."
Such were my thoughts and I don't think I was wrong, though I admit it's cruel to think this way when hundreds of civilians are dead and hundreds of thousands are fleeing. It was a short post by Big Pharaoh that made me feel real pity for the Lebanese: his friend, a young Lebanese woman who was demonstrating against Syria, has now fled to Syria (http://www.bigpharaoh.com/2006/07/18/she-fled-to-syria-she-fled-to-syria/).
Perhaps because for me possibly the worst thing that can happen to somebody is - to be forced to speak or act against what he really feels and thinks, against what he is. Loss of identity. Death is of course also awful, but we are all mortals, and if somebody has an identity and keeps it until his last moment, even if his life has been relatively short, people usually say that it has been meaningful.
"Why do you say you have nothing to do with Hezbollah actions, after you have a Hezbollah minister in your government? But even if you hadn't this minister, aren't Hezbollah acting from your territory? Or you don't mind armed thugs on your land, as long as they shoot at someone else? Then, don't turn into crybabies at the moment when somebody begins shooting at you.
Imagine that I live alone. A man comes to live with me, shoots at my neighbour from my window, then kidnaps his sons and hides them in my house. My neighbour invades my house, hits me, smashes my furniture while looking for his sons and the kidnapper. I scream, "Don't touch me! And spare my furniture! I'm innocent! It was a big bad guy who harmed you! And I'm not his girlfriend, he's just raping me! Anybody help me!" Then people could be excused if they think, "You must quite enjoy the raping."
Dear Lebanese, until recently you didn't mind Syrian occupation forces. You don't mind Hezbollah even now, just some of their side-effects. But you are against the Israeli troops. What, any army or militia is welcome to trot on your land except IDF? This is what people call anti-Semitism.
And what is your so-called army doing while the Israelis are fighting Hezbollah? A foreign army is fighting a gang of armed thugs on your land and your army is standing by! Such an army is a joke. Such a country is a joke. Nobody can take it seriously."
Such were my thoughts and I don't think I was wrong, though I admit it's cruel to think this way when hundreds of civilians are dead and hundreds of thousands are fleeing. It was a short post by Big Pharaoh that made me feel real pity for the Lebanese: his friend, a young Lebanese woman who was demonstrating against Syria, has now fled to Syria (http://www.bigpharaoh.com/2006/07/18/she-fled-to-syria-she-fled-to-syria/).
Perhaps because for me possibly the worst thing that can happen to somebody is - to be forced to speak or act against what he really feels and thinks, against what he is. Loss of identity. Death is of course also awful, but we are all mortals, and if somebody has an identity and keeps it until his last moment, even if his life has been relatively short, people usually say that it has been meaningful.
The faces that launched a thousand warplanes
I wanted to show here photos of the Israeli soldiers Ehud Goldwasser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26, but Blogger refuses to accept the images. Anyway, their faces launched a thousand warplanes and burnt the topless towers of Beirut.
The story, told very shortly, is as follows: Last month Hamas "fighters" from Gaza emerged through a tunnel, killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped one, Gilad Shalit (19). Israel began a military operation in Gaza. One of the thing I dislike most in Islamists is that they are ambitious and cannot bear to see their fellow Islamist as the star. They immediately rush to follow and, if possible, to outperform him. Remember how Palestinian suicide murders intensified after Sept. 11? Well, now Hezbollah opened a second front from the north, killing 8 Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two (mentioned above). Israel is bombing Lebanon, the country seems to be already in ruins but, unfortunately, the same cannot yet be said about Hezbollah. The war isn't promising to be a blitzkrieg.
By the way, the names of the two kidnapped soldiers seem Jewish but several sources reported that they are Israeli Arabs, members of the Druze minority. Most Druze live in Lebanon. They are an old Muslim sect and have often been regarded as heretics and treated cruelly by other Muslims. As far as I know, military service for non-Jewish Israeli citizens is optional, although it is useful for your career if you can write in your CV that you have been in the Army. So we see here two Arab citizens of Israel who, instead of sitting in a dusty corner and complaining how bad their country is, to treat them as second-class citizens, stepped forward to prove that they are first-class citizens, no worse than any Jew.
Now of course everybody is shedding crocodile tears for the humanitarian disaster in Lebanon, blaming Israel for its "disproportionate" use of force and demanding restrain. I wonder, what reaction would be considered as appropriate? Perhaps Israeli Prime Minister Olmert should have written an indignant e-mail to Mr. Nasrallah, the Hezbollah ringleader?
My advice to Israel: Smash the bastards.
The story, told very shortly, is as follows: Last month Hamas "fighters" from Gaza emerged through a tunnel, killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped one, Gilad Shalit (19). Israel began a military operation in Gaza. One of the thing I dislike most in Islamists is that they are ambitious and cannot bear to see their fellow Islamist as the star. They immediately rush to follow and, if possible, to outperform him. Remember how Palestinian suicide murders intensified after Sept. 11? Well, now Hezbollah opened a second front from the north, killing 8 Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two (mentioned above). Israel is bombing Lebanon, the country seems to be already in ruins but, unfortunately, the same cannot yet be said about Hezbollah. The war isn't promising to be a blitzkrieg.
By the way, the names of the two kidnapped soldiers seem Jewish but several sources reported that they are Israeli Arabs, members of the Druze minority. Most Druze live in Lebanon. They are an old Muslim sect and have often been regarded as heretics and treated cruelly by other Muslims. As far as I know, military service for non-Jewish Israeli citizens is optional, although it is useful for your career if you can write in your CV that you have been in the Army. So we see here two Arab citizens of Israel who, instead of sitting in a dusty corner and complaining how bad their country is, to treat them as second-class citizens, stepped forward to prove that they are first-class citizens, no worse than any Jew.
Now of course everybody is shedding crocodile tears for the humanitarian disaster in Lebanon, blaming Israel for its "disproportionate" use of force and demanding restrain. I wonder, what reaction would be considered as appropriate? Perhaps Israeli Prime Minister Olmert should have written an indignant e-mail to Mr. Nasrallah, the Hezbollah ringleader?
My advice to Israel: Smash the bastards.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Remembering a man of piece
With this post, I am joining Robert Spencer's appeal to mark the 15th anniversary of Hitoshi Igarashi's murder(http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/011820.php; the photo is also from there).Don't know who he was? I am pasting his very short Wilipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitoshi_Igarashi):
"Hitoshi Igarashi (...1947—July 11, 1991) was the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses.
After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of "the author of the Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Qur'an, and all those involved in its publication who are aware of its content...", he was stabbed to death on July 11 1991 at his workplace, the University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki."
Hitoshi Igarashi is usually remembered anonymously just as The Satanic Verses' Japanese translator. I have imagined him either a champion of free speech or a hard-working expert whose professional honour forbade him to succumb to fear. The truth was quite different - I am citing Spencer again:
"Igarashi, known to be one of Japan's leading young Islamic scholars, a man who had lived in Iran, decided to translate The Satanic Verses to act as a mediator between Khomeini (and the Muslim world) and Rushdie...
Igarashi's translation was not an attempt to force the Muslim world to accept the Western value of freedom of expression in an absolute form. It was a third-party effort to show common, middle ground, in order to end the conflict.
For his search for common ground, a kind of search that is suggested almost everyday now in media and politics in the Netherlands and other western countries as the right approach towards the jihadists, he paid with his life.
And that shows the effectiveness of that approach. Those who are calling for us to do the same thing now should take heed.
Remember him on July 11 and say to the jihadists: No more.
And may his memory be eternal."
Here are some of the comments to this article: "I think I'll pass on celebrating Mr. Igarashi's efforts. I find Theo Van Gogh a more suitable martyr, someone who paid a horrendous price for daring to pursue freedom of speech in his own land." "Mr. Igarashi was a tragically flawed, pathetic figure. But I do not mourn tragically flawed, pathetic figures. I mourn fallen heroes."
I understand these opinions, words of people in the middle of a war. Just look at the photo - Hitoshi Igarashi seems a man of another era, of another world, possibly a world which could never become a reality. 15 years after the burtal murder of this man of piece, it seems that piece itself has been killed and cannot be resurrected.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Trud publishers showing muscles to blind people
I have several times cited Trud, the most popular Bulgarian daily newspaper. This is not because I like it. On the contrary, I'd advise readers to put rubber gloves on their hands before even touching it. But we have to read some paper, how else can we can be (dis)informed. Trud's German publisher, WAZ (Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung), widely believed to be connected to the former Communist secret police Stasi, has monopolized Bulgarian newspaper market. Demokratsia, the daily paper I used to read, was driven out of business. So I read Trud sometimes, although I don't like it at all. It has grown into a sub-empire and has its own publishing house with ambitious business goals.
A monopolist is of course expected to be insolent and nasty, a bully to everybody thought to present even the slightest challenge to his monopolism. But these days I read about some actions that seem to go too far even for a monopolist. Trud Publishing House has acquired the copyright over the works of Elin Pelin, Angel Karaliichev and other 20th century Bulgarian classics (or at least Trud people say they have the copyright - nobody has been shown any documents!). By the way some of these works are taught at school, so every Bulgarian schoolkid has to give money to Trud in order to do his study. But the most outrageous thing is the action against Victor Lubenov and his site http://www.bezmonitor.com/. Blind since childhood, Victor created this site to help other visually impaired people to use computer and widen their world. Among other literature classics, he had uploaded some works by E. Pelin and A. Karaliichev in a format suitable for use by the blind. However, Trud notified him that they had the copyright and he had to remove these texts from the site. To stay out of harm's way, he complied, but that was not enough. Trud complained to the National Service for Contol of Organized Crime (NSBOP), a specialized police department. Victor was summoned there and intimidated. (Bulgarian police is too often hired by those who can pay and used as a weapon against those who cannot.) So far go Trud people in their effort to get every possible penny, even from the blind.
When Victor and his supporters complained to the few non-WAZ media, the answer was, "We cannot tell your story to the public - our policy is not to criticize other media." Finally, Weekly Mail ("Sedmichna poshta") published a report and so I learned about the case. This paper contains mainly ads and is distributed freely to Sofia residents' mailboxes. I usually pay no attention to it, considering it a spam.
Details in the Web: in Bulgarian at http://gatchev.info/blog/, in English at http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/27/german_publisher_att.html, in both languages at http://antonia.del.bg/2006/06/28/againsttrud/ and http://protest.bloghub.org/. The last site contains, at http://protest.bloghub.org/2006/05/19/trud/, e-mails of Trud Publishing House where one can send his opinion about their anti-blind campaign.
A monopolist is of course expected to be insolent and nasty, a bully to everybody thought to present even the slightest challenge to his monopolism. But these days I read about some actions that seem to go too far even for a monopolist. Trud Publishing House has acquired the copyright over the works of Elin Pelin, Angel Karaliichev and other 20th century Bulgarian classics (or at least Trud people say they have the copyright - nobody has been shown any documents!). By the way some of these works are taught at school, so every Bulgarian schoolkid has to give money to Trud in order to do his study. But the most outrageous thing is the action against Victor Lubenov and his site http://www.bezmonitor.com/. Blind since childhood, Victor created this site to help other visually impaired people to use computer and widen their world. Among other literature classics, he had uploaded some works by E. Pelin and A. Karaliichev in a format suitable for use by the blind. However, Trud notified him that they had the copyright and he had to remove these texts from the site. To stay out of harm's way, he complied, but that was not enough. Trud complained to the National Service for Contol of Organized Crime (NSBOP), a specialized police department. Victor was summoned there and intimidated. (Bulgarian police is too often hired by those who can pay and used as a weapon against those who cannot.) So far go Trud people in their effort to get every possible penny, even from the blind.
When Victor and his supporters complained to the few non-WAZ media, the answer was, "We cannot tell your story to the public - our policy is not to criticize other media." Finally, Weekly Mail ("Sedmichna poshta") published a report and so I learned about the case. This paper contains mainly ads and is distributed freely to Sofia residents' mailboxes. I usually pay no attention to it, considering it a spam.
Details in the Web: in Bulgarian at http://gatchev.info/blog/, in English at http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/27/german_publisher_att.html, in both languages at http://antonia.del.bg/2006/06/28/againsttrud/ and http://protest.bloghub.org/. The last site contains, at http://protest.bloghub.org/2006/05/19/trud/, e-mails of Trud Publishing House where one can send his opinion about their anti-blind campaign.
Monday, July 03, 2006
A racist post
A Gypsy ghetto in Sofia, built on mucipality land without any permissions, was scheduled for demolition last Friday. However, Tsvetelin Kanchev, leader of the Euro-Roma party, notified members of the European Parliament. Four of them (from the Green Party) sent a furious letter to the Bulgarian Prime Minister Stanishev. As a result, the demolition is postponed (a link in Bulgarian, http://www.btv.bg/news/?magic=bulgaria&story=50471).
I've posted earlier both about the Gypsies (http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/04/gipsies-in-rasnik.html) and the EU (http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/06/why-i-am-reserved-towards-european.html).
Let me first say who Tsvetelin Kanchev is. I'm translating his page in Wikipedia: "He feels a Gypsy by soul... Media call him Don Tsetsi... He was elected in Parliament in 1997 in the group of the Bulgarian Business Block party, later moved to the Euro-Left party. Founder and then chairman of the Euro-Roma party (founded in 1998)... Stripped of his immunity in 1999, sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment in 2000 for beatings and abductions... Released in 2003, pardoned in 2005..."
As you see, the self-appointed defender of the Gypsies is a convicted felon. Also, he isn't of Gypsy origin. In fact, he tried to present himself as a Gypsy, but too many people had witnessed and talked about his birth and growth in a Bulgarian family. One should ask, what motivation had this criminal to embrace the Gypsies? I guess, he sensed that there are much Euro-money and power associated with the Gypsy cause ("Euro" is another buzz word in the above citation).
Gypsies, the only surviving nomadic people of Europe, got swamped by the modernization wave of the 20th century. Without having ever been very productive, they degraded to a parasitic and aggressive community becoming more numerous, parasitic and aggressive with every generation. Gypsies originate from India and so have a slightly darker skin colour that other Europeans, which allows everybody talking about the Gypsy problem to be labeled as a racist. Yes, racism and discrimination against the Gypsies do exist, but they aren't the real trouble. The real trouble is that Gypsy adults don't work and Gypsy kids don't go to school, and no name-calling can change this disastrous fact.
To be solved, the Gypsy problem requires indefinite supply of funds, resolve, expertise and goodwill. Unfortunately, none of this is available in Bulgaria and, as I see, in the EU even less. The EU is virtually hijacked by the brainless and destructive Left. There are basic rules of economy (You cannot distrubute more that is produced), upbringing (Never encourage unwanted behaviour) and law (Nobody must be allowed to benefit from his guilty behaviour). The Left, on the contrary, think that all problems in the society can be solved by taxing productive law-abiding people and distrubuting the money among non-productive and law-breaking people. The Left particularly like taxing white people in order to subsidize coloured people. And the more parasitic and aggressive these coloured people are, the more they are viewed by the Left as victims and darlings. These leftist attitudes transformed the Third World immigrants into the greatest menace for Europe. Without the Left, I'm sure, these immigrants would be ordinary workers and taxpayers. I bet that without the Left even the famous Palestinians would by today be an unremarkable community of olive producers. I wish to tell the European Leftists, "Please leave us alone with our minorities! Unlike yours, ours at least don't put bombs in subways. But if you continue to mess, nobody knows."
I've posted earlier both about the Gypsies (http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/04/gipsies-in-rasnik.html) and the EU (http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/06/why-i-am-reserved-towards-european.html).
Let me first say who Tsvetelin Kanchev is. I'm translating his page in Wikipedia: "He feels a Gypsy by soul... Media call him Don Tsetsi... He was elected in Parliament in 1997 in the group of the Bulgarian Business Block party, later moved to the Euro-Left party. Founder and then chairman of the Euro-Roma party (founded in 1998)... Stripped of his immunity in 1999, sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment in 2000 for beatings and abductions... Released in 2003, pardoned in 2005..."
As you see, the self-appointed defender of the Gypsies is a convicted felon. Also, he isn't of Gypsy origin. In fact, he tried to present himself as a Gypsy, but too many people had witnessed and talked about his birth and growth in a Bulgarian family. One should ask, what motivation had this criminal to embrace the Gypsies? I guess, he sensed that there are much Euro-money and power associated with the Gypsy cause ("Euro" is another buzz word in the above citation).
Gypsies, the only surviving nomadic people of Europe, got swamped by the modernization wave of the 20th century. Without having ever been very productive, they degraded to a parasitic and aggressive community becoming more numerous, parasitic and aggressive with every generation. Gypsies originate from India and so have a slightly darker skin colour that other Europeans, which allows everybody talking about the Gypsy problem to be labeled as a racist. Yes, racism and discrimination against the Gypsies do exist, but they aren't the real trouble. The real trouble is that Gypsy adults don't work and Gypsy kids don't go to school, and no name-calling can change this disastrous fact.
To be solved, the Gypsy problem requires indefinite supply of funds, resolve, expertise and goodwill. Unfortunately, none of this is available in Bulgaria and, as I see, in the EU even less. The EU is virtually hijacked by the brainless and destructive Left. There are basic rules of economy (You cannot distrubute more that is produced), upbringing (Never encourage unwanted behaviour) and law (Nobody must be allowed to benefit from his guilty behaviour). The Left, on the contrary, think that all problems in the society can be solved by taxing productive law-abiding people and distrubuting the money among non-productive and law-breaking people. The Left particularly like taxing white people in order to subsidize coloured people. And the more parasitic and aggressive these coloured people are, the more they are viewed by the Left as victims and darlings. These leftist attitudes transformed the Third World immigrants into the greatest menace for Europe. Without the Left, I'm sure, these immigrants would be ordinary workers and taxpayers. I bet that without the Left even the famous Palestinians would by today be an unremarkable community of olive producers. I wish to tell the European Leftists, "Please leave us alone with our minorities! Unlike yours, ours at least don't put bombs in subways. But if you continue to mess, nobody knows."
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