Cultural bridges must run both ways
One of the things I’ve discovered as a part-time resident of the Middle East is how easily things such as cultural nuances can hide in plain view.
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Newspaper columns
Who will play the movie’s wacky Iraqi?
Telling Lies in Iraq is my choice for the name of the flick we can only hope will be made about former Iraqi minister of misinformation Mohammed Saeed Sahaf. If it’s anything like a satirical Web site on this new cult figure, a site that once had an incredible 4,000 hits per minute, this movie will be stunning.
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Where does God sit in times of war?
Jean and I are packing to return to Hamilton to deliver our first child. And at the top of my to-do-in-Hamilton list, besides “get diapers for the bambino,” is watch a big, fat movie. There’s a single theatre here in Sana’a, a town of one million, but considering it’s infested with rats or something similarly revolting, I’ve avoided it.
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‘Jihad of soul’ arrived in Middle East long ago
Trying to galvanize sagging troops, one of Saddam Hussein’s last public pronouncements was recently to formally call for Muslims everywhere to join his ranks and fight Islamic jihad, or holy war. Should we care?
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Arab fears for region have substance
If truth is the first casualty of war, one has to wonder what that does in the socalled battle over hearts and minds of people, not only in Iraq, but across the Arab world and beyond.
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Is Yemen also on US hit list?
Washington admits that it wants to shape the entire Middle East into a kinder place. Sooner or later, that goal may take the U.S. to Yemen’s terrorist haven.
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Don’t expect Arab uprising soon
“We’re going to err on the side of caution and stay in the house for a few days,” is what I told a friend during a phone chat yesterday morning. Our self-imposed house arrest would mean Jean and I would miss a friend’s birthday party and a weekly gathering of friends. Not much of a sacrifice, considering a few hours later four Yemeni protesters, including an 11-year-old boy, lay dead on the streets of this capital city. They were killed by Yemeni police guarding the American embassy.
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Living under the threat of reprisal
If there is a time for everything — a time to search and a time to give up, a time for love and a time for hate — it would appear it’s time for the Americans to blow Saddam and all that is his to Kingdom Come.
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