I just found today that many of the songs that I liked when I was a child were actually made by Beligh Hamdy. I also figured out why I liked many of Warda's songs. It turned out that he was her husband and he made a lot of songs for her (e.g. Mali ana bel ahzan, Helwa Belady, ....)
It is great to hear these songs again. It makes you feel happy. I do not know whether this is because they are good or because they remind me of my childhood. ... any way, I feel I was fortunate alhamdoAllah that I grew up listening to such great music pieces. I wonder what current Egyptian teenagers will remember 20 years from now ... will they actually remember Haifa saying "Ana Haifa Ana" and write in their blog ".. these were great songs ;)"
No offense to Haifa, but she represents a new direction in Arabic songs where the physical appearance of the singer (i.e. her different body parts) is more important than the music of her song or even the quality of her voice. It is not Haifa's fault that people and teenagers in Egypt are watching her. This is what she is capable of doing. I bet if she can make her voice better, she will do it. Instead let us blame those true musicians who do not offer us alternatives to Haifa and her sisters (have you seen Melisa?).
My wish for today: The Egyptian government starts offering a huge yearly annual prize for best singer, best composer and best poet ... and yes, please let us make this prize larger than what was offered to Kill Susan Tamim.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Colin Powell finally came to rescue Muslim Americans
On meet the press (NBC) this Morning: Colin Powell was commenting on members of the Republic Party saying such things as ”well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim”
Colin Powell commented: “The correct answer is: He is not a Muslim. He is Christian and he’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong about being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. This is not America. Is there something wrong with some 7 years old Muslim American kid believing he or she can be a president.”
I liked this guy in the past and I could not tell why exactly this is the case. I guess he had integrity and really believed in the American Dream that draws people from all over the world to this country.
Colin Powell commented: “The correct answer is: He is not a Muslim. He is Christian and he’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong about being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. This is not America. Is there something wrong with some 7 years old Muslim American kid believing he or she can be a president.”
I liked this guy in the past and I could not tell why exactly this is the case. I guess he had integrity and really believed in the American Dream that draws people from all over the world to this country.
Monday, October 13, 2008
population and real wages
On CNN today:
The article of Paul Krugman (Nobel Prize, 2008) outlined "a new theory of economic geography. Krugman's idea was that if two countries were exactly alike, except one had a larger population, real wages would be somewhat higher in the more populous country because companies there could make better use of economies of scale, creating a greater diversity of goods, lower prices, or both.
Because this enhances the welfare of consumers in that country, its population would increase as more people moved there, which would lead to additional increases in real wages."
The article of Paul Krugman (Nobel Prize, 2008) outlined "a new theory of economic geography. Krugman's idea was that if two countries were exactly alike, except one had a larger population, real wages would be somewhat higher in the more populous country because companies there could make better use of economies of scale, creating a greater diversity of goods, lower prices, or both.
Because this enhances the welfare of consumers in that country, its population would increase as more people moved there, which would lead to additional increases in real wages."
Friday, October 3, 2008
Egyptian Beaches
When I was in school in Egypt, I remember watching the TV one day and there was this one guy talking to the program host and saying he travelled all over the world and he never saw any beaches better than the Egyptian beaches ???
I remember I told myself "who is he fooling?, How could our beaches be better than all other beaches, The government keep fooling us with those TV programs?"
Days went by and after living in the USA for few years now and after visiting Orange County in California and Miami in Florida and the Big Island in Hawaii ... I can tell you they are not a match for Marsa Matrooh or Ghardaa' or Sharm Elsheikh. That guy was right, our beaches are really the best!! Amazing?!
I remember I told myself "who is he fooling?, How could our beaches be better than all other beaches, The government keep fooling us with those TV programs?"
Days went by and after living in the USA for few years now and after visiting Orange County in California and Miami in Florida and the Big Island in Hawaii ... I can tell you they are not a match for Marsa Matrooh or Ghardaa' or Sharm Elsheikh. That guy was right, our beaches are really the best!! Amazing?!
Thursday, September 4, 2008
الصيام, وكلمة الإرادة
مجرد رأي
بقلم: صلاح منتصر
الإرادة
للكاتب الكبير عباس محمود العقاد مقال قديم جميل يقول فيه: إن الإرادة من لوزام كل تكليف وكل تبعة وكل فضيلة, فلا قوام للفرائض والفضائل, جميعا بغير هذه الارادة فالإرادة هي فضيلة الفضائل في الصيام, وكلمة الإرادة وحدها تلخص اداب رمضان.. فرمضان هو شحن الارادة ادبه ادب الارادة, وحكمته حكمة الارادة.
وهذه الارادة التي وصفها العقاد هي التي تأمرنا بان نخرس في داخلنا النداء إلي فنجان قهوة أو الاحساس بالجوع, مع أن كثيرين في غير رمضان اذا تأخر فنجان القهوة أو موعد غدائهم ثاروا, وطوال النهار يرمرمون بسكويتة من هنا وكيس سوداني من هناك, فما الذي يجعلهم يتوقفون عن ذلك سوي الارادة؟ صحيح ان محركهم الامتثال لاوامر الخالق ولكن لم يستطع أحد ذلك إلا بقوة الارادة الموجودة في داخل كل منا ويمكن استدعاؤها لو اردنا والتحكم فيها وتطويعها اما للخير أو الشر.
بقلم: صلاح منتصر
الإرادة
للكاتب الكبير عباس محمود العقاد مقال قديم جميل يقول فيه: إن الإرادة من لوزام كل تكليف وكل تبعة وكل فضيلة, فلا قوام للفرائض والفضائل, جميعا بغير هذه الارادة فالإرادة هي فضيلة الفضائل في الصيام, وكلمة الإرادة وحدها تلخص اداب رمضان.. فرمضان هو شحن الارادة ادبه ادب الارادة, وحكمته حكمة الارادة.
وهذه الارادة التي وصفها العقاد هي التي تأمرنا بان نخرس في داخلنا النداء إلي فنجان قهوة أو الاحساس بالجوع, مع أن كثيرين في غير رمضان اذا تأخر فنجان القهوة أو موعد غدائهم ثاروا, وطوال النهار يرمرمون بسكويتة من هنا وكيس سوداني من هناك, فما الذي يجعلهم يتوقفون عن ذلك سوي الارادة؟ صحيح ان محركهم الامتثال لاوامر الخالق ولكن لم يستطع أحد ذلك إلا بقوة الارادة الموجودة في داخل كل منا ويمكن استدعاؤها لو اردنا والتحكم فيها وتطويعها اما للخير أو الشر.
Monday, August 25, 2008
اشارة عبور المشاه
In Aljazeera.net today:
written by: محمد السيد احمد
رغم احمرار اشارة عبور المشاه باحد ضواحي دبي الا ان الطريق كان سالك - فعبرت وبعض الهنود والافارقة - فيما ظلت فتاتين صينيتين ورجل اوروبي منتظرين حتى تفتح الاشارة - ففكرت في دلك واكتشفت ان هذا هو الفرق بين الصين واوروبا من جه وبين الدول الاخرى من جه اخرى - فاحترامهم للقواعد جعلتهم الاقوى - فقررت الالتزام باشارة المرور لعلي اصبح مثلهم - هذة هي الصين عملاق المستقبل
written by: محمد السيد احمد
رغم احمرار اشارة عبور المشاه باحد ضواحي دبي الا ان الطريق كان سالك - فعبرت وبعض الهنود والافارقة - فيما ظلت فتاتين صينيتين ورجل اوروبي منتظرين حتى تفتح الاشارة - ففكرت في دلك واكتشفت ان هذا هو الفرق بين الصين واوروبا من جه وبين الدول الاخرى من جه اخرى - فاحترامهم للقواعد جعلتهم الاقوى - فقررت الالتزام باشارة المرور لعلي اصبح مثلهم - هذة هي الصين عملاق المستقبل
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Muslim women were raped daily while held by Serb soldiers
- It amazes may how could the Serbs come up with all this much hate!
- How could the Serbs do this to defenseless muslim women?
- How can we make sure this does not happen to any other woman of any religion in any country on this earth?
Photo from Aljazeera.net
The arrest of Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic was finally accomplished.
The full story is in CNN today (7/22/2008):
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (CNN) -- The outbreak of war seemed like a joke to Jasmina, then just 19 years old. She dreamed of being an economist and says she played with her toddler son and baby daughter as if they were toys.
Jasmina says she was raped repeatedly during the rule of Radovan Karadzic: "Every day we were raped."
But in April 1992, the Serb soldiers took over her city of Bijeljina, in northeast Bosnia near the border with Serbia, and began to kill, torture and terrorize the Muslims there in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.
"Whole families were disappearing during the night. Sometimes we could see their bodies in the gardens, sometimes not even that," Jasmina said.
"The men from my family were beaten up the first day. ... My mother just disappeared. I never found out what happened."
Paramilitaries loyal to Arkan, the Serbian ultranationalist later indicted for crimes against humanity, came to the home Jasmina shared with her husband and extended family to search for valuables and weapons. When they found no guns they started beating her husband, said Jasmina who asked CNN not to use her last name to protect her children.
"Then they started torturing me. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was totally naked and covered in blood, and my sister-in-law was also naked and covered in blood. ... I knew I had been raped, and my sister-in-law, too." In a corner, she saw her mother-in-law, holding her children and crying.
"That same day we were locked in our house. That was the worst, the worst period of my whole life. That's when it started.
"Every day we were raped. Not only in the house -- they would also take us to the front line for the soldiers to torture us. Then again in the house, in front of the children," Jasmina said through a translator, remembering the 10 other women who were brutalized with her.
"I was in such a bad condition that sometimes I couldn't even recognize my own children. Even though I was in a very bad physical condition they had no mercy at all. They raped me every day. They took me to the soldiers and back to that house.
"The only conversation we had was when I was begging them to kill me. That's when they laughed. Their response was 'we don't need you dead.' "
Once at the front line, there were female soldiers who tortured her with a bottle and then slashed at her throat and wrist when it broke. Then the troops cut one of her breasts with a bayonet, said Jasmina, now looking older than her 35 years.
"It lasted for a year. Every day. ... Not all the women survived."
Karadzic was captured this week after years on the run and now will face war crimes charges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The tribunal, set up to try war crimes suspects, established for the first time that rape was a crime against humanity and that rape was "used by members of the Bosnian Serb armed forces as an instrument of terror."
For Jasmina, some relief came one day in 1993 when a familiar face, an older Serb who had been a friend of her parents, appeared at the house where she was being kept. Jasmina was told he had bought her as a prostitute but, once in a car with him, the man said he was saving her. "I owe this to your parents," he said.
He drove Jasmina and her children to the front lines, gave something to the Serb soldiers there and directed her toward the Bosnian position, saying, "now you are free to go."
"I was very weak. I weighed only 45 kilos [99 pounds]. I carried both my children for more than a kilometer to the Bosnian side."
Jasmina was safe but scarred. "I felt ashamed. I wanted to die, to disappear somehow. I couldn't take care of my children; others did that. I just didn't have the strength or the will."
A new low came when doctors began to treat her in one of the refugee centers around the city of Tuzla.
"They discovered that I was pregnant, six months pregnant, and I didn't know that. It was too late for any abortion, but I kept saying I didn't want that child."
The gynecologist pleaded with Jasmina to have the child and give it up for adoption, saying it was too dangerous to try anything else. But that was no option for Jasmina. "I didn't want to hear about that, about giving birth to that child at all."
Finally, medics said they could try to abort the child but it was a very risky operation that only one in 100 women would survive. "I begged them to do it," Jasmina said, pausing to remember an 18-year-old girl who had the same operation on the same day as her and died. Jasmina herself continues to have gynecological health problems stemming from her abuse.
Months later, her husband arrived at the same refugee center after managing to escape a camp in Serbia. A man he broke out with was killed by a mine.
"It was such a difficult moment for me. I wasn't even sure if I wanted him to be dead or alive. I knew that he knew what had happened to me, so it was very, very difficult for me," Jasmina said.
"I thought he was going to leave me and take my children because of everything that happened. But he told me he was not going to ask me about anything. And that he also went through terrible things himself, so he didn't want to discuss anything." Yet still she says she cannot look her husband in the eye.
Jasmina said she was unable to talk to the therapists in Tuzla and tried to kill herself in 1995, the first of three suicide attempts.
"I will never be OK," she said, adding that she believes God kept her alive for a reason.
She now lives in a modestly furnished apartment in a tower block in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. She has been there since 2001 with her husband and children.
Her dreams now are for her children. She believes it's crucial she give them some stability but says that's impossible when she doesn't know from day to day whether she will be evicted.
She does not own the apartment, and all property must be returned to rightful owners under the terms of an annex to the U.S.-brokered peace agreement that ended the war.
The same pact allows for the return of all refugees and displaced people -- more than half of the country's people left their homes during the war, according to the International Organization for Migration -- and the re-establishment of the mixed ethnic communities that had lived peacefully for centuries before the war.
The Office of the High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, an international body set up to oversee the implementation of the peace agreements, says almost all property rights have been restored. But it is impossible to say how many people have gone home and how many have sold their houses, leaving cities and towns like Bijeljina "ethnically cleansed," as the warmongers had planned.
A law enacted in September 2006 does include a section that says homes should be provided for victims of sexual torture during the war. It is not clear who should implement the act, and there is no agency making sure the law is enforced, according to the Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees.
Meanwhile, authorities say Jasmina should return to her mother-in-law's rebuilt house in Bijeljina. But she says she will never go back to the place where she lost 39 members of her family and where her abuse began.
It is a fear shared by other women, according to Alisa Muratcaus, the president of the Association of Concentration Camp Survivors -- Canton Sarajevo -- a group that offers classes and other support to Jasmina and 1,200 other women across the capital, including 150 victims of mass rape.
"Many of our members must deal with the realities of return. Not all members are able psychologically to return to regions in which they suffered such extreme human rights abuses," she said.
"No one raped women has returned to their pre-war houses, since it is immoral and inhuman to request their return while the war criminals who tortured them are still free and live in these regions."
The Sarajevo municipality that owns Jasmina's apartment says that it does not plan to evict her and that any such directive would come from the Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees.
Saliha Djuderija, head of the Ministry's Department of Human Rights, said she was aware of victims who could not face returning to the places where they were tortured and was working on a solution. In the past couple of years, between 15 and 20 women have been given somewhere to live, but lack of funding is restricting the help that can be given. Priority was given to women who testified against their attackers, and Jasmina is not in that group, as her case is still unsolved.
But if her future is in doubt, Jasmina's mind is made up. "I'm not going to take my children to Bijeljina. I told my children when I die, don't take my bones to Bijeljina. I don't want to hear about Bijeljina. It doesn't exist for me," she said, flashing anger for the first time in a lengthy interview.
Then she shows a picture of her daughter, a beautiful young woman, but even that causes Jasmina pain as she remembers how the soldiers picked her out. "I was beautiful once. It cost me my life."
- How could the Serbs do this to defenseless muslim women?
- How can we make sure this does not happen to any other woman of any religion in any country on this earth?
Photo from Aljazeera.net
The arrest of Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic was finally accomplished.
The full story is in CNN today (7/22/2008):
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (CNN) -- The outbreak of war seemed like a joke to Jasmina, then just 19 years old. She dreamed of being an economist and says she played with her toddler son and baby daughter as if they were toys.
Jasmina says she was raped repeatedly during the rule of Radovan Karadzic: "Every day we were raped."
But in April 1992, the Serb soldiers took over her city of Bijeljina, in northeast Bosnia near the border with Serbia, and began to kill, torture and terrorize the Muslims there in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.
"Whole families were disappearing during the night. Sometimes we could see their bodies in the gardens, sometimes not even that," Jasmina said.
"The men from my family were beaten up the first day. ... My mother just disappeared. I never found out what happened."
Paramilitaries loyal to Arkan, the Serbian ultranationalist later indicted for crimes against humanity, came to the home Jasmina shared with her husband and extended family to search for valuables and weapons. When they found no guns they started beating her husband, said Jasmina who asked CNN not to use her last name to protect her children.
"Then they started torturing me. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was totally naked and covered in blood, and my sister-in-law was also naked and covered in blood. ... I knew I had been raped, and my sister-in-law, too." In a corner, she saw her mother-in-law, holding her children and crying.
"That same day we were locked in our house. That was the worst, the worst period of my whole life. That's when it started.
"Every day we were raped. Not only in the house -- they would also take us to the front line for the soldiers to torture us. Then again in the house, in front of the children," Jasmina said through a translator, remembering the 10 other women who were brutalized with her.
"I was in such a bad condition that sometimes I couldn't even recognize my own children. Even though I was in a very bad physical condition they had no mercy at all. They raped me every day. They took me to the soldiers and back to that house.
"The only conversation we had was when I was begging them to kill me. That's when they laughed. Their response was 'we don't need you dead.' "
Once at the front line, there were female soldiers who tortured her with a bottle and then slashed at her throat and wrist when it broke. Then the troops cut one of her breasts with a bayonet, said Jasmina, now looking older than her 35 years.
"It lasted for a year. Every day. ... Not all the women survived."
Karadzic was captured this week after years on the run and now will face war crimes charges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The tribunal, set up to try war crimes suspects, established for the first time that rape was a crime against humanity and that rape was "used by members of the Bosnian Serb armed forces as an instrument of terror."
For Jasmina, some relief came one day in 1993 when a familiar face, an older Serb who had been a friend of her parents, appeared at the house where she was being kept. Jasmina was told he had bought her as a prostitute but, once in a car with him, the man said he was saving her. "I owe this to your parents," he said.
He drove Jasmina and her children to the front lines, gave something to the Serb soldiers there and directed her toward the Bosnian position, saying, "now you are free to go."
"I was very weak. I weighed only 45 kilos [99 pounds]. I carried both my children for more than a kilometer to the Bosnian side."
Jasmina was safe but scarred. "I felt ashamed. I wanted to die, to disappear somehow. I couldn't take care of my children; others did that. I just didn't have the strength or the will."
A new low came when doctors began to treat her in one of the refugee centers around the city of Tuzla.
"They discovered that I was pregnant, six months pregnant, and I didn't know that. It was too late for any abortion, but I kept saying I didn't want that child."
The gynecologist pleaded with Jasmina to have the child and give it up for adoption, saying it was too dangerous to try anything else. But that was no option for Jasmina. "I didn't want to hear about that, about giving birth to that child at all."
Finally, medics said they could try to abort the child but it was a very risky operation that only one in 100 women would survive. "I begged them to do it," Jasmina said, pausing to remember an 18-year-old girl who had the same operation on the same day as her and died. Jasmina herself continues to have gynecological health problems stemming from her abuse.
Months later, her husband arrived at the same refugee center after managing to escape a camp in Serbia. A man he broke out with was killed by a mine.
"It was such a difficult moment for me. I wasn't even sure if I wanted him to be dead or alive. I knew that he knew what had happened to me, so it was very, very difficult for me," Jasmina said.
"I thought he was going to leave me and take my children because of everything that happened. But he told me he was not going to ask me about anything. And that he also went through terrible things himself, so he didn't want to discuss anything." Yet still she says she cannot look her husband in the eye.
Jasmina said she was unable to talk to the therapists in Tuzla and tried to kill herself in 1995, the first of three suicide attempts.
"I will never be OK," she said, adding that she believes God kept her alive for a reason.
She now lives in a modestly furnished apartment in a tower block in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. She has been there since 2001 with her husband and children.
Her dreams now are for her children. She believes it's crucial she give them some stability but says that's impossible when she doesn't know from day to day whether she will be evicted.
She does not own the apartment, and all property must be returned to rightful owners under the terms of an annex to the U.S.-brokered peace agreement that ended the war.
The same pact allows for the return of all refugees and displaced people -- more than half of the country's people left their homes during the war, according to the International Organization for Migration -- and the re-establishment of the mixed ethnic communities that had lived peacefully for centuries before the war.
The Office of the High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, an international body set up to oversee the implementation of the peace agreements, says almost all property rights have been restored. But it is impossible to say how many people have gone home and how many have sold their houses, leaving cities and towns like Bijeljina "ethnically cleansed," as the warmongers had planned.
A law enacted in September 2006 does include a section that says homes should be provided for victims of sexual torture during the war. It is not clear who should implement the act, and there is no agency making sure the law is enforced, according to the Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees.
Meanwhile, authorities say Jasmina should return to her mother-in-law's rebuilt house in Bijeljina. But she says she will never go back to the place where she lost 39 members of her family and where her abuse began.
It is a fear shared by other women, according to Alisa Muratcaus, the president of the Association of Concentration Camp Survivors -- Canton Sarajevo -- a group that offers classes and other support to Jasmina and 1,200 other women across the capital, including 150 victims of mass rape.
"Many of our members must deal with the realities of return. Not all members are able psychologically to return to regions in which they suffered such extreme human rights abuses," she said.
"No one raped women has returned to their pre-war houses, since it is immoral and inhuman to request their return while the war criminals who tortured them are still free and live in these regions."
The Sarajevo municipality that owns Jasmina's apartment says that it does not plan to evict her and that any such directive would come from the Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees.
Saliha Djuderija, head of the Ministry's Department of Human Rights, said she was aware of victims who could not face returning to the places where they were tortured and was working on a solution. In the past couple of years, between 15 and 20 women have been given somewhere to live, but lack of funding is restricting the help that can be given. Priority was given to women who testified against their attackers, and Jasmina is not in that group, as her case is still unsolved.
But if her future is in doubt, Jasmina's mind is made up. "I'm not going to take my children to Bijeljina. I told my children when I die, don't take my bones to Bijeljina. I don't want to hear about Bijeljina. It doesn't exist for me," she said, flashing anger for the first time in a lengthy interview.
Then she shows a picture of her daughter, a beautiful young woman, but even that causes Jasmina pain as she remembers how the soldiers picked her out. "I was beautiful once. It cost me my life."
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