Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal

But it’s not.  It’s Athens, “the Cradle of Democracy.”  Μigrants sitting on the sidewalk while surrounded by police officers during the operation. (click)

Comment: nikobakos@gmail.com

“Afghan refugees pray during Ramadan in Athens,” also from Demotix and by Christos Stamos, a Greek to be proud of (FB motto: “The whole secret of existence is to have no fear.”)

Under intense fear of increasing racist attacks on places of prayer, Afghan refugees, many of whom are Shia Muslims, gather to pray during Ramadan in a private community building that they have as their cultural center.
Athens is the only European capital that does not have a mosque yet.
That is why Muslims are forced to gather in private places to attend services and pray.

Ramadan is the month of fasting from dawn until sunset.
Every sunset Muslims gather to pray and have a common dining.
The building of the community is not in the center of Athens, and so the majority of Afghan refugees that cannot afford even the bus tickets, come here walking from the center, where they mainly live.
The atmosphere here is very pleasant. They greet each other with a warm handshake and a smile.
In the area of the prayer, there is a dividing curtain that separates the part of women with part of the men, so they cannot see each other while praying.
The property is underground and narrow for about five hundred people that have gathered to pray. The Athenian August is very hot and despite the fans on the roof, this cannot not prevent you from sweat.

These days Imam Mr. Sayyed Hasbem Khatami, who travels around the world, wherever there are Afghan refugees, is here to teach.

I met Mr Khatami and we exchanged a few words.
He says: “ When Muslims meet someone, a stranger or a known person, their very first word in their greeting translates: “Peace be upon you”. This has the meaning that what every I may offer to you has to be good. I have to offer you good food, good hospitality, good behaviour, etc. This peace that I wish you, is a series of obligations that I have in front of you. This permeates all our relationships.”

Mr Khatami speaks like he is familiar with the Greek reality: “Greeks should be informed by the Greek State, for what we do here!.”

About Afghan refugees living in Greece: “Our people must have knowledge: How we have to be in your country. What is the laws of your country. What we can do and what we cannot do.
For example in Canada, the state undertakes and explains to you what is the law.
They come to us and explain: You can do this! You cannot do that!

Here in Greece, nobody explains to us what is the law.
We have found a rough solution by asking NGO’s to send their members to speak and explain to these people, how is life here.

Every night about five hundred people walk from the center to this place, in dangerous streets, where racist attacks occur in daily basis. Greek state could have offered a bus service during Ramadan, for these families to be carried safe.

I have traveled to many countries. But the racism I met in Greece, I have not seen anywhere else.

Greek Police officially informed us to be careful because of the attacks.
So we have put guards on the door. And we pray in fear.”

Then Mr Khatami started his speech before the prayers.
Anyone would have expected to speak only on matters of religion.
But in his speech there are many tips for the laws that exist in Greece. He speaks with references in the Koran for the respect that should show when we are in a foreign country.

______________________________________________________

The prayer is followed by the common dinner.
I speak with Nadim who is 28 years old, and came in Greece from Afghanistan 8 years ago.
He says:
“ We forget that we are humans. We are Muslims, we are Christians, we are Greeks, we are Afghans, we are with the one political party or the other, but we forget the simple truth: We are humans.
Let us forget all the other things that separate us, and behave to each other like humans.

When I come here to this community place, I have very good time. I start smiling again.

My family is dispersed in various countries. In Iran and in Europe.
The same applies to many Afghan refugees.

We do not have the basics: eight hours work and eight hours rest, as mentioned by our religion.
I hope that the next generation will have the basics.

My favourite quote is from a Facebook page: “Things Are to Be Used and People Are to Be Loved”“

Comment: nikobakos@gmail.com

(hat tip to my buddy Aykut for this)

Kathikia.  And I don’t mean the Golden Dawn thugs either; I mean the millions of Greeks who passively support this shit, even individuals that I, personally, used to respect and love.  This, for me, is the definitive end — an end in total failure and shame — of the Neo-Greek project.  This is when you died.  Not when Paul and some other pesky Jews made you Christians and destroyed your supposed Classical purity.  Not in 1453.  Not in 1922.  This crisis, and the ugliness it’s unleashed in so many of the Statelet’s inhabitants is the definitive end.  Because it’s gonna be interment or starting from scratch now.  There’s no gluing this idea back together.

This is the end of your European fantasiwseis (delusions); this is the end of your Ancient Greek fantasiwseis, and how central to Europe you think they’re supposed to make you.  Of course, this is the end of the House-of-Cards economy you built on a folding table, which brought you the consumer culture of late capitalism which, for some reason, you felt entitled to, even though you had long stopped thinking of actually producing anything in order to support it.  It’s not the end of the politicians who kept pulling cards out from under the structure and thought nobody would notice, because you voted those kissers of Frango ass back into power again.  This is the end of all of the rest.  It’s the end of blaming Turkey or America for everything.  It’s the end.  Close the book.  Start looking for another one.

An Athenian fachito wrote me a couple of weeks ago and tried to justify these attacks to me.  “Wouldn’t the Ku Klux Klan,” he asked me rhetorically, “have been voted into office in the United States if it had been flooded by so many immigrants?”  No.  They wouldn’t have been.  I’m from a city where you stop being a stranger the second you arrive, maybe, as many say, because nobody can really be bothered to give you a second thought.  “We may not be very nice, or smile, or say ‘Good Morning’,” wrote Pete Hamill, “but there’s always room.”  But I don’t believe that New York is tolerant just because everybody’s too busy to be intolerant.  I believe there’s a sadness behind New York cynicism and irony and supposed “world-weary stoicism” that few people really understand, but if you feel the city in your gut and it’s not just a cool glamour-spot for you, then you know.  You can hear it in people’s voices, in the accent, in their body language and facial expressions, and in the kindness and blunt bursts of warmth you’ll suddenly get from where you least expect it.  It’s the sorrow of exile — and the wisdom it forces on you.  He may not know a word of whatever it was his great-grandparents spoke or seen even a picture of the land they came from, but every New Yorker carries a bit of that sense of loss in him and an innate knowledge of what drove him and his away and brought them here: the destitution of Ireland, the grinding poverty of Sicily, the fear of just being Jewish in Russia, the terror of being Black in Georgia, the violence of Colombia…  You think it’s romantic; it’s not.  (In fact, there’s lots of research out now suggesting that external experience can and does become genetic information that is then transmitted.)  Every New Yorker just knows it’s the human condition.  So when the next stranger comes along, he nods, says hi, and goes about his business.  Maybe takes a curious interest in where the new guy is from and learns a little something about the world; maybe helps him out if he can.  Of course, it’s now a cliche to say that New York isn’t America; but it’s just as true that it couldn’t exist in any other country.

How Greeks forgot the “sorrow of exile” is beyond me.  Mostly through suddenly thinking they were above and beyond that kinda Third-World thang.  You disdained or hated your neighbours for so long that you forgot who they were, no?  (The quickest way to forget who you are too.)  The Greek diaspora was no longer a motivated, highly creative and industrious group for you to be proud of, adventurers in the best Greek tradition, who went off and spun gold out of thin air while you sat around waiting for Providence to give you a cushy life.  They’re just an embarrassment and an object of condescension for you now, right?  Not for you Astoria and its tackiness — “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” — ha, ha…  You were Europeans now, right?  You didn’t emigrate anymore.  That was just for Cypriots.

Most of all, it’s the end of any sense of honour you might have still had left. You say these outsiders are destroying your “national identity”…pffff…and you declare it loudly without the slightest sense of irony…  You know “stranger” and “guest” have been the same word in Greek since classical times.  And strangers are a strain, of course.  It was a strain for that poor Greek family to feed you like you were a king and give you their beds while they took the floor.  It was a strain for that practically bed-ridden old woman to still get up and give you a lokum and a glass of water.  It was a strain to have a guest express admiration for an object in your house and to immediately make him a gift of it.  But you did it, and if not out of compassion for the poor and persecuted who came among you, you did it for your own sense of honour.

But you’ve now definitively failed that test like you’ve done all the others modernity presented you with.  I don’t know who replaced the Greeks I describe above.  I don’t know who you are any more.  I’ve groped around for decades trying to figure out what you’ve become exactly and mostly come out with a big handful of nothingness.  At best you seem like glib tourists in your own country to me, for whom Greek-ness is knowing the best beach in Melos or a cool baraki in Gazi you go to.  Is that the “national identity” these desperate people are threatening?  Other times you’re more and more starting to seem like mice in a cage who start biting pieces off of each other when there’s no food left.  And now you’re just shitty bullies, who beat up on the world’s most destitute, instead of providing them with pou ten kefalen kline and hoping that maybe you’ll save part of your souls that way — and your last scraps of honour.

And yet you still prattle on about philotimo and all the other ancient virtues you believe yourselves heirs to…  Even to having the unmitigated shamelessness of calling the police’s anti-immigrant round-up “Xenios Zeus”: “Zeus Xenios, Philoxenon or Hospites: Zeus was the patron of hospitality and guests, ready to avenge any wrong done to a stranger.” [My empasis]

You were always envious, petty and malicious, the way the impotent usually are; Greece was the only country from where I got gloating “I’m so happy” emails after September 11th.  You were always whiney hysterics.  Flash floods would hit Athens, as they tend to do in deforested, arid-zone mountain basins all over the world; some mud would get on the plakakia of your house’s pylwte — which was built illegally on top of a dry gulley bed anyway — and you’d come out screeching on television like you’d just lived through the bombing of Dresden.  You just seemed ridiculous then.  Now you’ve crossed the line into the unforgivable.  Now you’ve sat Brownshirts and criminals in your Parliament and let them declare themselves your protectors.

I don’t know you any more.  And I’m not sure I want to.

Here is the article from “Demotix: News by You.”  I’m ripping off the whole text from them and a couple of pictures, and hope that they’ll understand why.  Read about fifty attack in six months, a rate that definitely outdoes any ten-million-inhabited section of the nineteenth-century Jim Crow South.

And see the rest of the excellent photos; with Eid approaching, the way they capture the beautiful military discipline of Muslim prayer couldn’t be more timely.