Found on Twitter; taken some time recently. Don’t know what was done, either during photographing or in computer touching-up later, that gives it that weird painterly tone. I at first didn’t want to believe that it was a photo but a painting of sorts, but I don’t think a painter would have left the cables and sockets and plastic water bottle on the mid-to-lower left side of image.
With the coronavirus spreading fast in Gaza, the sides agreed to stop bombarding each other, and Israel said it would resume fuel supplies. A cash infusion from Qatar helped seal the deal.
Palestinian police officers guarded streets in Gaza City last week as part of a 48-hour lockdown imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Credit…Khalil Hamra/Associated Press
Mike Pompeo takes questions during a press conference in Washington DC Monday. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
I don’t even know what to say. It’s like mega-dufus and his cabinet get up every morning and think: “What completely, internationally destabilizing, unthought-out, randomly dangerous piece of shit-policy are we going to announce today?”
I won’t be able to blame Arabs (as all of you know I like to do) for even the extremest reactions.
“In making the case for the policy shift, Pompeo repeated some of the language he had used to justify the recognition of Israeli control of the Golan, saying it reflected “the reality on the ground”, and that it arose from the unique facts, history and circumstances” around the establishment of settlements.”
“…it arose from the unique facts, history and circumstances” around the establishment of settlements.”
One on Hardtalk with the BBC’s Stephen Sackur, the other from BBC’s Newsnight. I’ve forwarded first video to 15:58 because the first half of the talk is a bunch of ridiculous clichés on the part of both men on Zionism, anti-semitism and Israel. If you like you can always start it from the beginning. Ultimately both interviews leave you wanting more.
We ALL know — many of you detest me for it — that I’m the last person to come to if you want sympathy for Arab/Muslim dysfunction and inability to face modernity being blamed on “colonialism” and taken out on the rest of humanity. But the Brits’ track record is so awful, as I say in “Is England ready for fresh Irish blood on its hands?“, and this might, in certain ways, have been the worst of all.
“…or if you were caught even suggesting, heaven forbid, that maybe — just maybe — Arabs had simply conquered what were already the most sophisticated and civilized parts of the Greco-Roman and Sassanian worlds…”
TAYBEH, West Bank (AP) — A tiny Christian enclave in the overwhelmingly Muslim West Bank has for years crafted the only Palestinian beer and brought thousands of visitors flocking to its annual beer fest. Now, it is adding wine to its list of libations, hoping a boutique winery will be another tourist draw and contribute to keeping the small village afloat.
While Christians around the Middle East have seen their numbers dwindle due to conflict and the lure of better economic opportunities abroad, Taybeh has remained an exclusively Christian village, the last in the West Bank.
The family behind the wine and beer says they are carrying out “peaceful resistance” by investing in their homeland and staying put.
“This is how we believe the state of Palestine can be built: by people like us to invest in the country and encourage other Palestinians to come and invest in their country,” said Nadim Khoury, who founded the brewery and winery.
I’ve always been fascinated by the association, in so much Persian(ate) poetry, of alcohol with non-Muslims — and by extension, licentiousness, sexual desire, subversiveness, sin, etc. There’s probably a dissertation out there somewhere that I should try looking for. I thought about it a lot in my rant on the Gezi Park protests and the symbolic importance of Pera in the İstanbul imaginary that I wrote from Kabul last November. In fact, it was pretty much the thesis of the piece:
“And here we run into our first paradox, or the origins of a chain of paradox: that this now central “heart” of Istanbul began as a space of marginality. The Byzantines originally put some of their unwanted Catholics there: Galata’s mother city is actually Genoa. In Ottoman times, Christians and Jews lived there and made wine and everybody else came there to drink it. While not an exclusionary, extramural ghetto of any sort – to their credit the Ottomans didn’t often do that kind of thing – it was sort of the wrong side of the tracks: the Ottoman equivalent of the suburbs or the across-the-river Zoroastrian neighborhoods in Iran where Hafez and company went to drink the infidel’s wine and torment themselves with the beauty of the innkeeper’s son: the other side of town, the refuge of disbelief and transgression, of unorthodoxy and the unorthodox in every sense. The alcohol…”
…….
If 2013’s protests then – at least Istanbul’s –were at their core about protecting aspects of the essential urbanity of Istanbul, and Greeks played such a large role in shaping that urbanity, shouldn’t that be acknowledged? If Turkish society is playing out – again, at least in Istanbul – its most intense culture wars on a ghost blueprint of vanished minorities, then wouldn’t making that a more explicit part of the contest be immensely productive – all around.
“I DEMAND EITHER CITY-STATES OR A UNIVERSAL IMPERIUM OF HUMANITY”
-- Murtaza Muhammad Hussein (quoted above) is a journalist I respect immensely whose work focuses on national security, foreign policy, and human rights. His work has previously been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera English.
(See more of M.M. Hussein @theintercept)
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FROM BOSNIA TO BENGAL -- The purpose of this blog
Me, I'm Nicholas Bakos, a.k.a. "NikoBako." I'm Greek (Roman really, but when I say that in English some five people in the world today understand what I'm talking about, so I use "Greek" for shorthand). I'm from New York. I live all over the place these days. The rest should become obvious from the blog.
"What I hope this blog accomplishes is to create even the tiniest amount of common consciousness among readers from the parts of the world in question."
Please contact me with comments, questions, complaints or -- please -- corrections at: nikobakos@gmail.com
From Pulse News: “Beer, wine flow in West Bank Christian hamlet” by TIA GOLDENBERG | November 3, 2014
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