Okay, God. So Let's get this straight: You gave Pigs 30 minute orgasms, and Jellyfish immortality ( mind you, they revert to youth after they have finish mating, so orgasms and then youth), and all we get is religion? Can we talk about this? 

ehh, ahh,, yeah, that, it happened, don't wanna talk about it, don't wanna elaborate how the symbol for arab people's anger is now shoes. Don't want to even think about it.

I have signaled in the past my great disdain for Bibi, and was surprised that some of my israeli readers were actually highly considering him in the coming elections. Now, I do have my sympathies for those who might be leaning his way, because, let's face it, all of your choices are shit, but come on, he is probably the worst pick. As fr why that is, honestly, snoopy the good put it way better than I ever could in that post:

The man who promised all of us that a peace treaty with Syria could be
achieved without parting with a single square meter of Golan Heights.
Yeah, we still have the Golan Heights, and where is that peace?

The
man who signed that Hebron deal that became and still remains a total
disaster both for the settlers and for their neighbors.

The man
who assured the whole world that Israel will get a totally free market
economy managed in the ways of the Wall Street. Forced all pension
funds to deal in speculative stocks, and it is now, when our pension
savings are going down the drain, that he calls for a bi-partisan
effort to save them.

The man who, while serving as our finance
minister, cut the budget required for the deployment of active
protection systems of our armored troops, which act of fiscal prudence
killed quite a few soldiers during the second Lebanon war.

The man who presided over the Khaled Mashaal's assassination fiasco
that is (probably quite rightly) considered to be a biggest flop in
Mossad's history. Made to eat a humongous crow by the late king Hussein
and released the late Sheikh Yassin, who so successfully motivated
Hamas suicide bombers for several years after his release.

The man who promised to put an end to the Intifada and totally failed in this endeavor.

The man who keeps embroidering his biography by so many mythical details. Quite awkwardly too.

The
man whose lust for power is matched only by his lack of self control.
Like in the case when he hastily expressed his condolences to Sharon's
family after Sharon's first stroke.

The man whose lack of
stamina and his tendency to break under pressure was noticed by so
many. Politics aside, the ridiculous case of the "hot cassette" that
caused him to make a public confession of sins in the best "mea culpa"
style of some religious preachers you know where. There was no
cassette, as it appeared afterwards.

I bet he promises it's gonna be different this time, right? 

His name is Pales, and the entire country is named after him, and he was celebrated by both the jews and the cananites (arab grandparents) of the time. And check this out, he was a Bi-sexual Ass-God (Ass meaning Donkey, of course).

Pales was also the name of the "Ass-God" of ancient Cannan, and Babylon where the ass-god was known as Set. Pales was a playful, bisexual deity, having the reproductive organs of both men and women. The references to the god and his/her cult can be found all over the biblical and ancient world– Samson slew the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Jesus rode into Jerusalem on an Ass, and early images of the Hebrew Messiah show a man with an ass head crucified to a tree. Palestine is named for the god. The Festival of Palilia was appropriated by the Christian calendar into the Feast of St. George.

More on it here.

Hamas just rejected the egyptian Truce draft. While hostilities are not yet resumed, until actual negotiations start, war might break out again. Do you care? I am not sure I do at the moment.

If you are sick of the whole thing, the Onion has an Op-Ed for you!

I am really preplexed by this. I really am. How do you get 46 men to agree to rape the same girl, and do it all in one day? How did it go down exactly? Did they start calling their friends who had a free afternoon on the hand to rape somebody? How did the Phone call go down? "Hello, Fahd. What are you doing right now? Nothing? Good. Wanna come over to the rest house and rape an indonesian maid? Oh, yeah, I am for real. We have been raping her the whole afternoon. Gamal and Ahmed are even here and they raped her as well. They can tell you all about it. Ahmed was the last one. He is the 25th to rape her. You can be 26 if you want to. Come on man. What else do you have to do? Come get some. And hurry. We told the entire bin Hamood clan and they are coming all the way from Jaddah. And you know they don't really shower, so if you wanna get it while it's still clean, come now. Okay, okay, we are waiting for you. Bye. Fahd is coming boys. Allright. Maybe we should also call Faysal. You can't not invite him to a rape party, especially if we invited Fahd. Ok. Time to call Faysal. Hello Faysal…"

Could it have gone this way? I am not trying to be funny. I am mad as hell and seriouslly horrified here. How do you find so many men who are willing to rape someone in one day? AND HOW THE FUCK DOES THIS HAPPEN IN MECCA? MECCAAAAAA of all places! I mean, logically, the following Question should never have the following Answer in this reality:

Q) Where do you find 46 men who are willing to rape someone at a day's notice?

A) MECCA!

WHAT THE FUCK, PEOPLE???????? WHAT THE FUCK???????????

After creating a probably heavily romantcized version of the life of the blood-thirsty-tyrranical asshole that is Che Guevara, Benicio Del Toro faced a heated questioning of one of Guevara's victims, to which he couldn't respond, and ended up walking out because "the questions made him uncomfortable". Here is a beautiful part of the article:

Mr. del Toro doesn't deny that Guevara's persona had some darker aspects. "We have to omit a lot of stuff about his life," he said, "but we're not omitting the fact that he's for capital punishment, which is the essence of that."

In the movie, Guevara is shown executing a man. But the man is executed for raping a child, not for being disloyal to the cause of revolution. Troops are offered a chance to desert, and get nothing more than a scolding for their cowardice.

Mr. Valladares is less convinced of Guevara's dedication to due process.

"Che Guevara executed dozens and dozens of people who never once stood trial and were never declared guilty," he said. "In his own words, he said the following: 'At the smallest of doubt we must execute.' And that's what he did at the Sierra Maestra and the prison of Las Cabanas."

"They didn't do it blindly; they had trials," Mr. del Toro said. "They found them guilty, and they executed them - that's capital punishment."

But Mr. Radosh said it wasn't as simple as that.

"Huber Matos was guilty of nothing," he said. Mr. Matos was a commandant under Fidel Castro, one of the revolutionary's earliest followers and a fervent enemy of the Batista regime. But he was no communist, and when he saw where the country was headed, he wanted out.

"He didn't even want to go into opposition," said Mr. Radosh. "He simply said, 'I don't like the direction of the government, I don't want to be part of the government, I'll voluntarily relinquish my command.' He was convicted of treason, and after a sham trial that Fidel presided over, was sent to prison for a 25- to 30-year sentence."

Guevara was instrumental in the creation of Cuba's forced labor camps, which were used to imprison and extract work from those who had committed no crimes but were thought to be insufficiently revolutionary.

The policy of extrajudicial imprisonment that Guevara favored would later expand to include political activists of all stripes, musicians, artists, homosexuals and others deemed to be dangerous to the maintenance of the Stalinist regime.

Mr. del Toro grew agitated when these prisons were described as "concentration camps," a phrase that Mr. Valladares freely employs.

"I'm a survivor of those concentration camps. And I stand firm by my belief that they were concentration camps," he said. "The forced labor camps where I also worked, where dozens and dozens of political prisoners were murdered, where thousands were tortured, that's something that even the most ardent believers in Castro´s tyranny can't deny."

Critics of "Che" have suggested that the film whitewashes its protagonist's legacy and that it's impossible to understand the man by glorifying his more romantic aspects while ignoring his darker side.

"We can't cover it all," Mr. del Toro said. "You can make your own movie. You know? You can make your own movie. And let's see. Do the research."

Did you?

An Indonesian woman was raped in Saudi by 46 men (yes..46), including a police Officer who was supposed to aid her after her initial rape. The men are being arrested now, and awaiting a harsher punishment than the usual dick cutting that happens in Saudi when facing rape: medical tests after the rape have shown that the victim had AIDS before they raped her, so they are all probably infected now.

Otherwise you won't get anywhere. The Train signal operators have started a strike, stopping all the Trains in Egypt, and Microbus drivers are striking in Gam3et el dowal street over the new traffic law. Hopefully the subway operators are next, so that egyptians would have every excuse to get the rest of the week off. Sure, they could go there on bicycles, but, like, seriously dude, we are not that in shape! 

I am gonna ignore the fighting in Ghaza. Not gonna acknowledge the fighting in Ghaza. There is no fighting erupting again in Ghaza. I caaaan't heeeear youuuu! lalalalalalalalaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

(Don't you people ever get bored? Why can't you watch American Idol like the rest of us? What do you think of the new Judge? I like her. She is feisty! I hope she stabs Paula.)

Many people, over the years in which I have written in this blog, have accused me of being a callous and insensitive human being. The reason behind such accusation, they would tell me, that I seem to find the humor in the most horrifying of things and events. This has increased lately, due to the whole Ghaza conflict thing, with many e-mails accusing me of many many things, like undermining the gravity of Egypt's "Betrayal of the palestinain cause", or calling bullshit on theor doncpsiracy theories regarding the "real reason behind the Ghaza offensive" (Alaa, the person who started pushing that idea around, refused to debate me on the merit of his argument and called me a "subhuman", and then deletd any comments I made challenging that claim. An open-minded champion of freedom of speech that Alaa, I tell ya!) or for not focusing my blogging to shed more light on the suffering inflicted on Ghaza's children and families, etc… My humor, my so called snarky outlook on the whole deal, is a testemant to how disconnected I am from the seriousness of such life and death matters. I am even more guilty, I am told, because my audience takes me seriously, so by making light of the whole thing, I am undermining in their collective consciounsess the severity of what's going on in the region. I have to make a choice, whether I want to be serious, or just "peddeling my idea of funny"!

Yes, people, I am a bad bad man, apparently.

Now, usually I would ignore such comments or accusations out of the sheer redicliousness of their scope. As arrogant as I am, I don't think I am capable of undermining the collective consicouness of a bed bug to such a degree that they would look at the Ghaza situation and go "Mehh". I really doubt I have this kind of power over anybody. And if there is someone whom I can affect to such a degree, I really don't think I should be held responsible for how their thought process works. I didn't make them this way, God did. Take it up with the man upstairs.

However, if there is one thing that I would agree with them on, one thing I am guilty of, it's definitely my insistence on not being serious most of the time, and trying to find the funny in the world. There are a couple of reasons behind that, the first of which is the fact that this conflict, and the world at large, doesn't need to be taken more seriously by anybody. I would argue that the main reason and impetus of conflict and misery in this world is due to too many people taking too much too seriously, and are willing to fight till the end of the earth for it. Anybody who committed any atrocious act in the past 100 years, from the world wars to the cold wars, to the middle-east wars and terrorists attacks, those are people who, for lack of a better way to put it, have no sense of humor. Humor is a weapon whose effectiveness is more powerful than most people think or believe, and the fact that it isn't deployed more often against the atrocious as often as we are willing to deploy our guns, is the reason why the world is such a shitplace today. I am willing to bet you, that had the people in the pubs of Berlin laughed at Adolf Hitler during his drunken speeches instead of taking him seriously, there probably wouldn't have been a second world war, or a holocaust. If you would ask me what trait seperates the humans from the other animals on the planet, the first one that would come to my mind would have to be humor. They too, kill each other, fuck each other and have communities and relationships and even battles and wars, but they have no sense of humor. Had they had any, they would've spent their time pointing at us and laughing. The only exception to this fact are the dolphins, who definitely have a sense of humor and laugh at us all the time. Maybe that's why we like them and they like us so much.

The second reason behind my so called Playful view of the world is in my utter belief that if there is a God, then he is really not as serious as we people believe him to be. Evidence of that exists everywhere in nature, from his creation of the Penguin to the way he made men's nutsacks, but no bigger evidence exist than the way the world he made functions. Yes, the world is full of tragedies, but it's also an incredibly hilarious place, and I suspect that God made it this way for a reason. Or maybe he just couldn't make up his mind about it, so why should I make up my own mind before he makes up his? How can you read the newspapers every day or watch TV news and not see that the world is simultaneously most tragically serious and ridiculously funny? If I have learned anything in my somewhat short life, it is that there is no wisdom without playfulness. The Children know this very well, they, in their hearts, more than anybody, know that the world is a playground and that we should have fun while we are here. They know this, until we beat it out of them with our "seriousness", and fears and insecurities and bigotries. And then they become us. Responsible serious adults. Grown-ups. Hey, grown-up serious readers of mine. How has being a grown-up been working out for you so far? Be honest!

And finally, I never persumed to tell you or anybody how to fix the world. I am not any kind of leader, nor would I wish to become the kind of asshole who craves the subservience and following of men of lesser minds. I am, at best, a court jester. I exist to remind everybody that the world is a joke, and while it's not a very good joke most of the time, it sometimes exhibits flashes of comedic genius, which is visible from the middle east than from anywhere else in the world. I am the one who reminds you that suffering is not a virtue, and those who make their entire life about the removal or remedying of suffering are doomed to become addicted to it and a reflection of it. Their life is validated through all of their "good work" in letting the world know what a miserable little shithole it can be most of the time, and they see themselves as saints for it. Their's is a very popular worldview and many people share their opinion, but not me. To me this whole thing is silly, because Misery and suffering are usually the end product of serious minds, and the same kind of thinking that produced something can not possibly be the same kind of thinking used to negate it. If one was truly serious about saving the world, I persume that the first step would have to be for you to stop taking your leaders seriously, and, whenever possible, stop them from taking "serious decisions" that will require you to "sacrifise" your quality of life in order to remedy the problems other serious leaders made with their serious decisions. Remind them that you only get one life where the choices you make do matter, and you chose not to make life a serious orderly little place, while it could be a celebration of life with all its sweet dirty festive nasty possibilities. And laugh at them. Always laugh at them. From Haniya, to Olmert, to Mubarak, to Aassad, to Nasrallah (especially Nasrallah- he really takes himself seriously). Remind them that they are men, and they are not greater than Life. Because nothing is greater than Life. And maybe once we stop forgetting that and not get caught up in whatever miserable horrible shit that is about to happen somewhere on this planet instead of actually enjoying what little sweet time we have on this big blue ball, we might actually evolve. But that's me, the court jester, the monkey, talking. And what do I know?

So, please, don't come here if you are looking for seriousness all the time. I might indulge in being serious once every now and then, but most of the time I will just point at the world and laugh. So don't take me, or the world, but especially me, so seriously. Cause even I don't.

Have a nice day.

Because right after Our own Qorqor talked about Angelic fighters fighting on the side of muslims, Israeli Rabbis are talking about how Rachel (as in the biblical Rachel, people) has appeard to IDF soldiers and showed them where the terrorists are. One wonders howcome Rachel did not tell them where Gilad Shalit is, but I am guessing she is just into it for the killing of arab terrorists. Saving captive jewish soldiers? Mehh.. She is too busy for that. Too many arabs, so little time, or something!

I love the middle east. Anyone else hates the fact that he wasn't born in Switzerland?

How do you know that Kefaya is over?

When the overhwelmingly secular movement's new Deputy Director Magdy Qorqor publishes an article talking about his total belief that the same Angels (yes, actual angels. with wings and everything) who were fighting alongside the Prophet Mohamed in the Battle of Badr were also fighting alongside Hamas in Ghaza. Yes, let that sink in for a moment. Angelic warfare. Angelic warriors dispatched from heaven to kick zionist ass. Oh yeah!

Now, if one does take such a statement seriously (and lord knows some DO), one has to wonder what kind of sissy-ass angelic warriors were those whose assistance made the casualty ratio literally 1:100 Israeli to palestinians (13 israelis to 1300 pleastinians). But then you do a review on the Battle of Badr and the answer becomes clear: the same kind of sissy-ass angelic warriors whose assistance in warefare lead to the total death toll of 70 quraishi infidels. Amazingly effective death machines, those angelic warriors are. Like a Terminator, with wings.

Once, Kefaya had promise. Now it's nothing more than a farce.

This piece is fictitious, of course, but funny nonetheless

I caught up with a few of these interrogation specialists at a bar just outside of Guantanamo and this was indeed the sentiment.  Terry (not his real name), an associate in the interrogation department, said he’s in complete shock and never saw it coming:  “When I joined right after 9/11 my recruiter told me that with the current political climate bein’ what it was, there would always be a market for a person with good water-boarding skills…now it’s just ‘See ya later, Terry. Maybe try starting a dog walking business.’ ”

Honestly, what do you put on your resume after spending a couple of years wokring as a Guantanamo Bay interrogator? And where do you apply for work? I am thinking HR might be a possibility, but the idea of dealing with waterboarding on a first interview is just unpleasant. I mean, it better be a really cool job. Like really really cool!

Last weekend ( i.e. last week's weekend. Even though I am working, it is sunday after all) I had a bunch of friends come over to attend a conference in Doha, titled "Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow" or MLT for short (Insert sandwich joke here). I, naturally, was not invited, but crashed the party anyway, because of the number of people I knew attending said conference,  which some  did out of belief that something positive could come out of it, some for the media spotlight, and others because they wanted to come see yours truly. The conference itself was actually funny because they gatherd an unusual amount of  international freaks that made you really worry about The future of Islam if those were its leaders of tomorrow. The most telling moment was when this  young French Canadian Salafist (Yes, ponder the combination for a second, and ask yourself: Is that what Satan shits or what?) at the very begining of the conference raised his hand to speak, and stating that he is glad to have met Islam before he met muslims, because of what he sees in the conference from "intermingeling of the sexes" to "greetings using kisses" and finally to "Open aclohol drinking". I wanted to raise my hand to ask him where the "Kissing and drinking" section was so that I could go sit there, but Mona Al Tahawy was faster than me and ripped the poor guy a new asshole very very quickly. It was actually beautiful. (In an unrelated note, when I was telling a friend who works for Al Jazeera about how strange I found the combination of a French-canadian AND a salafist to be, he responded by saying "Oh, they are the worst kind. I have one in accounting and he is a total prick". So world, pay attention, there are apparently many french-canadian salafists running around. You have been warned!)

Anyway, the days passed and-with the exception of few minor incidents of sabotage conducted by yours truly- it was actually a very pleasant conference with some cool people in it. After a discussion with group of guys over the need for "a Fatwa-issuing religious authority" in Islam, where one pimply-faced turk who couldn't be more than 18 years old said "Well, when you are sick, don't you go to a doctor for the remedy? It's the same thing!", I decided to avoid the men all together and hung out with the islamic sisters, a.k.a the Satanic-tempting-whores by french-canadian boy. It was a very enlightning experience, if not for confirming my suspicions that the main problem with Islam is that Men are its religious leaders. The horror stories those women told me about how their work (much of which is very respctable and with aim to improve living conditions and literacy rate amongst their native population) was always undermined and thwarted by a bunch of idiotic chauvinistic mullahs who had no problem issuing life-destorying fatwas at time just because they didn't like to see a woman read (and the stories are all the same, from Bahrain, to Iran, to Denmark, to Kashmir to Indonesia and Pakistan). It became abundently clear that what Islam needs, more than anything, is more Female influence and eventually more female leadership. At least they were more interested in moving the religion forward and elevating its people, than debating the remedic values of Camel piss or if women should pluck their eyebrows. But what do I know?

The Punchline for the entire conference though came 2 days after it ended. You see, one evening a friend asked me to come to her table to start talking to this american guest called Daniel Pincus, who happend to be jewish. Apparently the other guests were ignoring him and he was very uncomfortable being the lone jew there in case a "Ghaza" conversation did start up. So I went there and chatted with him a bit, but he seemed to be doing fine and Azhar Usman started his stand up routine, so I ignored him and life went on. It wasn't until a few days later when I recieved an e-mail from one of the people who was at that table regarding this piece of news: An American fellow who was coming back to the US from a flight from Turket, flipped out on the airline because "some arab types" whose looks freaked him out boarded the plane. The name of the idiot?

Daniel Pincus.

Priceless!

I keep finding it very disturbing that I find out information on Egyptian internal politics and its players through the Israeli Media. Here is a profile Haaretz has on the head of the egyptian intelligence agency, Omar Suleiman. It's mostly accurate, except that what I know of the man is that he is incredibly secular. Maybe the displays of religiousity is for show, or my information is wrong. Either way, that piece has far more information on the man than the entire egyptian press published in the past 5 years combined.

Here is a collection. I want the "Be Hard" one!

This is an important read, I think! Moneyshot:

But once you come down off of the Civil Rights Movement high, you might actually start to think about what Obama's presidency REALLY means. His office and his job have NOTHING to do with race. His being elected DOES NOT improve race relations in this country or abroad.

In fact, his presidency has already proven that Americans are still STUCK ON STUPID when it comes to cultural and racial sensitivity and tolerance, whether they be Black, White, Brown, or otherwise.

Case in point:

As the inauguration approached, more White and Latino Americans began asking my husband and I if we were excited, if we were "going to party" with "our president", and other paternalistic, foot-in-mouth questions. Am I planning to 'party' with 'my president' on Tuesday? I'm supposed to be excited about this just because I'm Black, with no regard to my values or even my political affiliation? No matter what I stand for, Obama's being Black is supposed to be enough to make me want to party? That's how you see it? Of COURSE that's how they see it, because that's all we project! Then we allow the drive-by media to make it all about race while pretending it's not all about race! Aaaaagh 

[...]

Since Black Americans made this election all about having our first African-American president, please believe that's what his tenure is going to be about. The media played on White guilt while Obama campaigned, being sure to put every proud Black face and African relative the man had on national television. We showed our preoccupation with race, and they showed it to the world (If you don't think this was intentionally done and that it didn't affect any White voters, you are fooling yourself). So, understand that Obama's skin is always going to be in the forefront during his tenure as president, whether you like it or not, and whether people are willing to admit it or not.

So, what does that mean?

* If he makes any huge mistakes (and he will), non-Black Americans will deflect those failures upon Black leadership in general.

* If Black Americans as a whole do not improve their condition during his tenure, Obama will appear to be an exceptional African-American compared to the rest of us ignorant thugs.

* If Hollywood gets too progress-happy, we may see a huge increase in Black characters who are professionals and government officials in television and movies - that's just superficial and annoying to ANYONE who watches it long enough.

* All of the cries of disenfranchisement will be thwarted and considered baseless because if America can elect an African-American president, the playing field must be leveled, right? This isn't good if you are a proponent for Affirmative Action or other special rights for minorities.

* Black History Month will probably bring out the nationalistic tendencies in most of us, causing us to overdo it and put our Blackness in everyone else's face, turning off White Americans who thought that electing an African-American president was about togetherness and the progress of the country as a whole when it was really about us 'having our day in the sun'. This will serve to separate us even more.

* If Obama screws up royally, White Americans won't be voting for another African-American president for a long time, considering that so much emphasis was placed on his being African-American.

Don't get me wrong, people; I understand the historical significance of an African-American president, and it is something that should be celebrated. However, I believe that we were exploited by the Democratic Party and the left-wing media in order to further their own causes, NOT ours! At the end of the day, we play the race card and we make race an issue WAY TOO MUCH, even when we have the right to do so. It's like the football team who discourages end zone dancing - when you have a victory, act like you expected to. When you make your way to success, have some class; act like you've been there before. We can still celebrate progress while having a certain amount of necessary reservation. We want people to treat us as if they are colorblind when we're not. So, when it works in our favor, we're happy. However, when the racially charged beast we helped create comes back to bite us in the butt, who will we blame then?

It's kinda already happening!

Poor Livni. It seems that despite bombing the shit out of Ghaza and killing over 1000 people, she is still going to lose that election to Netenyahu. Arab readers, I am sure your hearts are bleeding for her. I know my heart is. Totally!

She was yesterday, between 12:00 noon and 12:01 Pm. And then Obama got sworn in.