Are you--yes. Yes, you are crazy.

This one is not that fresh from the interweb presses, but the bouquet of its madness remains as aromatic as on the day I first read it: Israel must topple Assad in next conflict with Syria proxies.

I tried to find a money quote, but the crazy is so artfully laced throughout that I couldn't pick one. It's really in the way all the parts relate to one another. The parts are as follows:

1. Syria has delivered SCUD missile systems to Hizballah [though it seems the proof of this actually having happened is a tad iffy; I've seen it confirmed by sources I trust, too, though, so I'm not sure what I think about it].

2. Goldstone concluded that any and all deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure constitutes a war crime as a form of collective punishment. However, Israel need not obey this ruling, only find a way to dance around it or get away with violating it.

3. Therefore [?!], Israel should announce that any aggression by Hizballah will lead to a direct and unrelenting attack on Syria's infrastructure and the deposition of President al-Assad instead of/before retaliation to Hizballah. Further, Israel should make it clear that it has no choice in doing so.

4. This will act as a deterrent.


So, yeah, this is beyond crazy in a variety of ways. And who wrote it? Oh, no one very important, just the former head of the IDF artillery corps, which is, you know, no big deal--oh, wait, it is. I'm not saying this makes him the voice of the government, but it's not like he's ignorant of military matters.

I can't imagine who would support Israel were it to take such a step. Even the U.S. would be hard put in that situation, I think. Not to mention the "you break it, you bought it" rule--what happens to Syria after that? Does Israel just withdraw and assume that will be the end of things? Until the current president (Bashar al-Assad)'s father, Hafez al-Assad, took over, Syria was a realm of total chaos and massive political instability. (There's a reason Syria invited Egypt to form a political union with it and take over the country back in the late fifties, and it wasn't because they loved Gamal al-Nasser so much, okay?) I have no idea what it would be like without the Assad family in charge.

I just--it's nutso, okay? Let's just leave it at that and go about our lives.

The glories of social networking

I just got a message on Facebook from a friend in Syria. I spent a lot of time--and I do mean a lot--helping him with his English studies and tutoring him. Our friendship was one big language exchange and we taught each other a lot. Anyway, he said the following:

Hi! How is it going . what dose girrrrrl maen in USA does it mean lettel girl . and that why you wrote boyyyyyy .for jock or somthing .انا حبيت الرساله كتير . يعني كتير شكرا وحظا سعيدا مع الجامعة. انت شاطرة وانا فخور بك . انا الان في المسوى السابع في الانكليزي وادرس جيدا. طبعا انت السبب في ذلك

First let me say that his spoken English is exponentially better than his written English. I mean unbelievably so. He picked up a good accent from me and he speaks and understands very well. But his reading and writing are not so hot, partly because the English program he's in sucks. They didn't even teach them that capital letters come after periods. ANYWAY, what he said in Arabic was:

I liked the message [from you] a lot. I mean, thanks very much and good luck with university. You are clever and I am proud of you. I am now in the seventh level in English and I study well. Of course you are the reason for that.

I feel really good about that, what can I say? Last I heard from him he had stopped studying, so I'm really happy he's back at it.

Qifa Nakbi makes many funnies

The Qnion is totally my new favorite thing. It's like the biggest inside joke ever (in that people who don't follow the Middle East wouldn't find most of it funny, but if you do it's brilliant).

From a recent post from Alex at Syria Comment:

“The Syrians knew that the Israelis were following their official in the U.K,” says retired Russian intelligence specialist Vladimir Balakhoff. “So they loaded all of these false photographs of nuclear reactors, diagrams, and documents in North Korean onto his computer. And the Israelis fell for it.”

“Why do you think that no one in Israel made a big deal out of the bombing?” asks Egyptian political affairs expert Gamal Galagala. “Once they realized that they’d been caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they tried to sweep it under the carpet, but that’s hard to do when the milk’s already been spilled. If you catch my drift.”

High-level Syrian sources are now confirming that the laptop decoy was intended to veil a much more sophisticated security project, one with the potential to change the strategic balance of power in the region.

This project, known as the Syrian Computer Society (SCS), is headquartered in another remote town, Hassake, not far from the site of the fake nuclear power plant. It boasts three desktop computers – two IBM compatibles with 486 processors and an iMac G3 – and a 14.4 kbit/s dial-up modem.

The project’s director, Dr. Samir Mahdoum, suggested that Syria could use these advanced machines to spy on Israel, thereby denying their arch-enemy the element of surprise. “Using Google Maps Satellite View, we see all of Israel,” said Dr. Mahdoum, stroking an albino hamster. “Their troop movements, their weapons, everything!”

Regional specificity be damned, it was the albino hamster that really did me in.

Culture shock is always fun.

So I culture shocked real hard when I left Syria. This was to be expected and I sort of went through it in stages; one phase when I got to Beirut and they had (gasp) more than two kinds of restaurant and (gasp) tall buildings and (gasp) women wearing tank tops and (gasp) fashion and (gasp) Dunkin Donuts.

But I got over that pretty fast; it was still an Arab country and people still spoke Arabic and I could more or less make my way around as not-quite-a-tourist.

Then I got to Istanbul and the world sort of exploded around me. I did not speak the language, I could not find my way around, and I was definitely 100% a tourist. On top of this I was on my own; I left my travel companion in Beirut. I can't remember the last time I've been that disoriented.

It wasn't just the disorientation of being in a new place; it was the disorientation of a complete change of role. I had been very definitely Not A Tourist in Damascus and invested a fair amount of energy in making that clear: when you're Not A Tourist people don't rip you off as much, they treat you better, and it's much easier to fend off inquiring men. In Istanbul I had none of the necessary tools for Not A Tourist vibes and as a result became fair prey for everyone. To be frank, it was horrible. I clung to Arabic like a safety raft, constantly searching for Turkish cognates and on occasion replying to people who addressed me in Turkish (apparently I look potentially Turkish enough that people got confused a lot) in Arabic because I felt better about that than English. Somehow admitting to being an English speaker without language skills made me feel less safe, possibly because the first thing to do in an Arab country to get someone on your side is to show that you speak Arabic.

I did notice, in my defense, that I did have a much easier time if I spoke only Arabic and pretended not to speak or understand English, if only because many Turks speak English but none that I encountered spoke Arabic. This made it much easier to fend off shopkeepers, tourguides, and enquiring men (though some of their persistence in the face of apparent total noncomprehension was rather impressive).

Finally I got back to the States, where I continued to suffer from culture shock somewhat but got over it fairly fast--at least this place is familiar to me, just less recently.

But what I find interesting is that the longest-lingering aspect of culture shock so far has been my perception of my own appearance. In Damascus, there weren't a lot of mirrors around, diet culture is more or less nonexistent if you're me and hanging out with boys all the time, and we were all more or less equally scruffy and resigned to looking, well, like students abroad. I got back and all of a sudden realized how much weight I had gained, how completely not used to thinking about, oh, outfits and accessories and such I am, and how (seemingly) effortlessly everyone around me is in a completely different sartorial mentality--that is to say that they have one.

In reaction I basically feel like a sort of poor FOB and eternally, inescapably scruffy. This too, shall pass, of course, but of all things I did not expect beauty culture to be the last and in some ways most difficult hurdle.

Retrospect

So I'm back.

I didn't update here nearly as much as I expected I would. There were some practical reasons: I didn't and couldn't go to the internet cafés as often as would have been required to keep the posts coming at regular speed, and when I did go I had to catch up with email; anything with the word "blog" in it is liable to be blocked in Syria, so I couldn't always access the blog even if I wanted to.

But more than that, as it was happening I just sort of decided to let it happen to me and not make such a project of every little thing. I disconnected from the Internet completely for a few weeks at one point before eventually coming back, but then only for the minimum, really. I feel okay about that.

It was a fantastic summer, the best in years. Whether or not I wrote, I definitely learned a lot.

I do have some thoughts worth posting (by my standards anyway), and I'm sure more will come to light as time goes on and I get some perspective. But for right now, I'm going to let them all wait.

It is good to be back. I think.

Huh

So I just went to a christening. I got invited to this because my father's company is doing a project in Syria and my dad put me in touch with two of the people working here on it, and one of them--a Syrian-American--was christening his baby.

This ceremony was particularly interesting because the situation was rather fraught. The father comes from a Muslim family. His wife is from a Christian family. His family is rather conservative, parts of it, and in Islam baptizing a baby--essentially removing it from Islam (unless it should choose to convert later on)--is blasphemy.

I didn't see much of the evidence of the tension, just a smaller family presence than I would have expected. But what I did see was a family full of people who had no idea what you do at a christening ceremony. The godfather had to tell everyone what to do, his wife was running back and forth with towels and candles, and everyone was generally a bit lost.

Also, a bunch of totally random Syrian people just sort of crashed the ceremony. They came into the church, saw what was up, got themselves candles and joined the procession around the baptismal font. The craziest thing about this is that it's completely normal. Syrians are very open and very interested in sharing; they want to be a part of things. It's sweet, once you know what's going on.


I had the strange experience throughout this day (there was lunch afterward) of being the Most Knowledgeable Foreigner, which really brought into focus how long I've been here and how soon I'm leaving. The rather strong culture shock I was experiencing (I was listening to people speak about their very wealthy lifestyles back home in London/Greece/New York and all I wanted to do was go smoke a cigarette with the waiters and chat in Arabic) made me even more reluctant to leave.

Oh well. It is what it is.

Travel

I don't have anything intellectual and fascinating to say about Syria, but for the sake of recollection here are things I've written to inquiring people:

Damascus does indeed stand; it's full of interesting people as well as crazy people. (Same as anywhere, to an extent, but just wait.) The foreigners here are almost uniformly awesome people, since I think you have to be a bit odd and thus a bit interesting to come here. I'm sitting next to a Portuguese woman who has been a poet and ballet dancer and is now a singer of Arab music and a Muslim convert; my best friends here are mostly American students, but I've also got a British Iraqi optometrist, an American who was once an I-banker in Dubai, sundry Brits, a German guy studying Turkish education, and on and on. It's a fun time.

The crazies are mostly Arab. When you make friends with a Syrian, they think it means you're best friends forever and they can immediately start calling you all the time and hanging out every day. I have a good friend who has actually started just hanging out at my house and my friends' houses whether I'm there or not. I rolled out of my room at like 8 last night after a nap and he was just sitting there in my courtyard. And he's one of the more chilled out ones. I have recieved a few insanely poetic text messages full of stars and moons from people (plural, yes) I have never expressed any romantic interest in. Another one complains every time I go somewhere without them that I never invite them anywhere, and I have been offered $20,000 for my hand in marriage. One of my male British friends has said that Syrian girls just say "I love you" to him on the street every five minutes. It's all a bit mad. (This is not to imply that all Syrians are nuts or anything; some of it is cultural difference, and, as anywhere, the crazies stand out.)

But nonetheless, it's fun. People here make friends quickly and easily, so every time you go out you never know what will happen. I met one of my best Syrian friends because he worked in a cafe I went to to study in. I met a Syrian girl because she was at the next table. I met a Greek guy at my Syrian friend's house and a couple Syrian guys at a club last night. Today I met two Syrians and a Moroccan who are starting an art collective and wanted me and my friends to come to their show August 10th.

That's the other thing: this city is full of art. A Syrian alcoholic painter moved into my house two days ago.

I don't really have a point, but that's what's up, I guess. I had my final yesterday and inshallah I passed enough to go on to the next level. (If they make me do level three again I may shoot myself in the face. It was boring enough the first time.) My Arabic has improved massively, hamdulillah (thank god), and hopefully by the end of my time here I'll be pretty good. I didn't expect to have come as far as I have already by this point.

I don't want to seem like I care about material things

Like a social status...



But seriously. Animal Collective aside, last night I had a really sort of bizarre social experience.

The Old City is really varied: there are women going around in tight jeans and low-cut tops with their hair uncovered, women in the abaya, even women in full chador or niqab. There are men in traditional dress, men in shiny button-down shirts, men with beards, men who are clean-shaven. But there are a few constants. All women that I've seen, even if their clothes are tight, keep most of their skin covered; all men have short hair (nearly all women have long hair). Genders don't really interact on the street. You avoid eye contact; or if men or boys are staring at you (as a chick and all), you look away to avoid giving the appearance of being forward or "loose," as it were. If I need directions, I ask a woman unless a man offers, and even then I use my judgement.

I've gotten mostly used to this (obviously it's different if you're sitting at a cafe with a friend of yours), so last night was really odd. We went out to this small hotel in the New City, near the Cham Palace (biiiig hotel in the middle of town), where every night they have open mic poetry. Poetry, as I think most people know, is a huge deal in Arab culture. The experience was fascinating just on that level, but what was specifically weird about it was how gender was suddenly no longer an issue.

We were a large, almost entirely female group of foreigners, and rather than just staring from afar a good ten Arab young men came over and started chatting up a storm. The two older guys sitting near me were really nice, helped me understand some poetry a little better, and shared their bar snacks. The woman who brought us there--one of my friend Ben's housemates--was sitting there in a tank top (which already looks weird and overly naked to me) and just chatting with her male friends that she knows from going there every week. And for the first time I think an Arab guy was flirting with me. That has not happened at all--flirting is different from catcalling--and I just had no idea what to do with it. It was fine, he's a nice guy and he wasn't pushy or anything, but it was just so strange after the last week to have some guy in a smoky lounge setting just get up and buy me a beer because he wanted to.

Plus, for the first time I saw men--lots of them--with long hair, and women smoking cigarettes and wearing shorter sleeves. Obviously this was partly due to the fact that we were in the basement bar of a hotel in the New City. Some of the people there were pretty clearly higher class. But not all of them were, and I'm certain not all of them (or even most of them) were guests of the hotel. You could find a similar scene in the Old City, probably, but it would be composed of almost exclusively expats, not Arabs.

So I think what I'm trying to say is that clearly I need to explore the New City some more. It was interesting by contrast.

Syria on Iran

I think this is something people have been curious about: how is the conflict in Iran playing in Syria? How is it presented? What are people saying? The answer is not as exciting as one might hope. Here are a couple paragraphs I just wrote to a friend, lightly edited in retrospect:

As for coverage: not really sure, frankly. I haven't heard much about it. I got one guy to talk about it, and he sort of talked generally about what he thinks of Ahmedinejad but not the situation. I haven't seen anything on the Syrian blog I read (I need moooooore) or even the Lebanese ones. It seems like it's mostly American intellectuals and journalists who are feverishly covering this; Arabs, I think, are sticking to their own issues and waiting to see what happens. Every Arab in America or Britain I've talked to is highly skeptical that anything will come of it, and it seems quite possible that that's the prevailing attitude around here. Nobody wants to be left high and dry with dicey political statements.

In fact, Syria was one of the first political entities to congratulate Ahmedinejad on his victory (along with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizballah, among others). Politics is a subject that most people avoid here or speak of in generalities; if the official position is "Congrats, Ahmadi Najad," I'd be surprised if people were running around with green armbands, you know?

I will add that at least on the TV in the hostel where I used to stay you can get Al Jazeera and Al Jazeera English as well as the BBC. Al Jazeera English has been covering it in a fashion that seems mostly neutral but occasionally seems to fall ever so subtly one way or the other. Sometimes they make prognoses for the revolutionaries that are perhaps a little more negative than they should be; sometimes, like when they were doing a history segment on the 1979 Iranian revolution, they show really unflattering pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini (not Khameini). My Arabic isn't good enough (YET) to understand straight up Al Jazeera.

That's all I got, really. Further bulletins as events warrant and all that.

ETA: Check out Citizen Tube for the latest videos coming out of Iran.

Travel notes

Two days ago, I came back to the hostel at a reasonable hour for once and then got caught up in a conversation with two people staying there and Nora, my sometime roommate, for a really long time. Everyone had eventually gone to bed except for me and my friend Muhammad (or Mohammed, or any number of spellings--I don't know) when we heard the call to prayer (at about 3:45 am). We ended up going to the mosque, because he wanted to pray and I wanted to go.

We spent a long time being lost, and then we figured out where we were and got lost again, and then we found it. It was really...peaceful. I sat in the women's section, with mostly Iranian women swathed in black, and just watched and listened. There were birds flying in the rafters and they kept dropping small down feathers around me. I understood small parts of the sermon, but not most of it.

Eventually we walked back, got lost again, and finally made it home around 4:30 or 5.

The next day I moved into an apartment; the only housemates I've really met are two very studious but nice guys who are great about telling me words in Arabic and speaking slowly when I ask them to. They actually both speak good English but I've only really heard one of them speak: he says he has to speak English at work all day (he works at UNHCR) and doesn't like speaking it at home.

Yesterday was the first day I really got to use Arabic and by the end of it I felt like my brain had been stretched two sizes. I went to visit Nora at her apartment and made friends with several of her housemates--three Syrians, two with great English and one with almost none (though he does have a hookah, or arghileh as it's called here, named Shakira)--a Brit, who may be organizing some sort of local wine tasting for an article he wants to write, and a Belgian guy who's been here for two and a half years and is doing his Ph.D. in Arabic poetry. They all spoke lots of Arabic to me and got me to speak it. Then I spoke it at the cafe. Then I spoke it at Nora's house again. Then I spoke it when I got home.

I was doing pretty well by the end. I got told four times that my Arabic was good (granted, three of those by the same person) and once that my accent was good. It was a good feeling. I hardly remember any of the new words I was told, though. Oh, well. Progress by slow inches. I think I may have agreed to do a language exchange with Ahmed, one of Nora's housemates who's an Arabic teacher and is learning English.

Finally: I have gotten sick at last. Nora went first, with the typical traveler's sickness; then Merritt got some sort of horrible bug that made her throw up every 20 minutes for like two days; Ben got travel belly too; and finally, today, it's me. Woooo. I feel awful. At least I've been through this before.

I have pictures of my house and will post them as soon as I get around to putting them on my computer. EVERYONE STAY CALM.

Also links

Connectivity ftw:

Some people are crazy:

Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance -- No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review -- her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.

One of them is Pat Buchanan.

Really cool interactive word cloud of Iranian opposition on Twitter.

Sullivan on why Iran matters

Gotta go!

Legacies

Colonialism is complicated. It was a pretty unequivocally bad thing. Even if it had economic and technological ramifications without which I could not be sitting here in Damascus using the Internet, from a justice-oriented point of view it just sucked all around.

But lots of bad things have romantic trappings in hindsight. So as unequivocally opposed as I am to colonialism in the past and to soft colonization in the present, I can still find myself playing a drunken game of croquet in someone's backyard at four in the morning, smoking a cigarette and yelling about quinine because those two things seem to fit with the situation and I find that enjoyable.

Similar experiences can happen sometimes when, as an economically privileged traveler, one goes to a historically colonized (or Mandated) country. Sometimes, you find yourself eating a delicious French-inspired lunch with your family in Phnom Penh in the wood-paneled room where European journalists used to hang out. (Still do.) Sometimes, like yesterday, you find yourself and your new acquaintances being lunched at a very fancy restaurant in a gorgeous courtyard by a charming Brit, receiving rather obsequious service from people whose skin is darker than yours and who were born here.

And what's difficult is that while that experience is problematic and a little uncomfortable, there's also something romantic about it. Maybe it's because I'm a somewhat lapsed Anglophile. Certainly privilege is at work--the enormous and lavish lunch cost maybe $10 per person, and that's an unusually large expense--but there's something else, too. It's something I think I'll be wrestling with a lot over the next couple of months.

It does help that many of the other customers were Arab, and that the restaurant is owned by a Damascene family that lives just next door. But all the trappings were more or less in place and I don't know what to think about it yet. Maybe I've already thought too much.

Well, I'm here.

I have nothing particularly interesting to say yet. I'm in Damascus, which is beautiful, an odd mix of dirty and spotless, and very hot. As happens in this sort of environment, I've already made "oh wow we're here" friends with five other Anglophone students in the last two days, eaten a lot of hummus and mhammara, and smoked a decent amount of shisha. Our hostel is a sort of hippie enclave of foreign students, run by a Palestinian and Australian couple and full of animals (a rabbit and some tortoises) and characters. They're super helpful and the location (somewhere in the Jewish or Christian quarters of the Old City--not sure where the boundary is) is lovely.

Speaking of borders, we visited a friend's apartment today and happened to be out on the roof when the adhan went up from the many, many mosques nearby (he's right near the Ummayad Mosque, for one thing). It occurred to us that we'd never heard this in the area where we live. That, in turn, occurred to me, at least, as odd. It's not odd, of course, it makes perfect sense; it just surprised me that in the Old City, a small area, it was possible to that separated in terms of simple sounds.

At any rate, the multiple calls all going up together were beautiful. They were actually in harmony for a while until the last guy started and ruined it.


On a much less poetic note, the amount of paperwork required to do just about anything is surprising. Getting a cellphone requires your passport and your fingerprint. The most efficient thing that happened today was getting some passport-size photos taken (for the AIDS test we have to take before enrolling in the University and for when we have to reapply for residency) and getting photocopies of our passports.

Tea is a constant, which I expected. I'm surprised at how not-smokey the environment seems to be so far--I expected a sort of smog of shisha and cigarettes, which I really haven't encountered. Also unexpected was the sheer heterogeneity of the way people dress here. The men seem more uniform; the women range from full niqab to tight jeans with sleeveless tops. I was told as much before I got here but somehow was not prepared for the visual experience and the total uncertainty it would cause me in terms of how to present myself. One moment I feel extremely overexposed and the next I'm wishing I'd brought more of my "normal" clothes.

I don't have much of a concluding note. Facebook appears in Arabic, which makes you type backwards. It's bizarre. I've since figured out how to switch it to English but I almost miss the weirdness.

Public Service Announcement

This space has generally been fairly non-personal. The thoughts are personal, but the data and the material has generally been garnered from other people.

Well, my summer studying in Damascus starts tomorrow; I'm leaving tonight. I've decided not to make a separate travel blog or journal because 1) it strikes me as a slightly wanker move when I've already got a blog, 2) it's not like the material is irrelevant, and 3) this is my nefarious plan to make more people who know me read the blog.

Plus, frankly, I hope to be spending less time surfing the blogosphere and more time, you know, experiencing the place I'll be in. I'd rather this particular field not lie fallow all summer.

So just a heads up: I don't know how often I'll get internet (frequently, no doubt, but not continuously as it has been), and the nature of the content is about to change.

You have been warned.

Huzzah!

I was approved for a Foreign Language Acquisition Grant!

This means that the University has agreed to grant me $3,000 to put toward living in Damascus and studying Arabic this summer.


Now, this award is still subject to the Risk Assessment Committee. Since Syria bears a State Department travel warning, the University automatically has to evaluate all student travel there and may withhold funds if they deem my plans too dangerous for them to support (i.e. they wouldn't be able to cover their asses if something happened to me). So the grant could still be taken away.

Still, I'm very happy about this. If nothing else, it's been a while since I've filled out a good old-fashioned application for an established program and it feels good to know I can still make myself look good on paper.

But far beyond that, uh, Damascus for the summer. HI.

Bits and bobs about Gaza

Indonesian reactions to the renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It's worth noting here that Indonesia boasts the largest population of Muslims in the world.


Islam is not an Arab religion; it is a religion. We must remember that, both to avoid counterproductive racialization of the religion and our conflicts with Muslim nations, and to understand the full ramifications of our foreign policies. The Middle East+ (i.e. ME plus Afghanistan, Pakistan) is not the only site of Islam by a long shot.

Meanwhile, Syria sends humanitarian aid to Gaza through a totally reputable Syrian humanitarian organization.

This is, er, not good political news for Israel.

Dammit, when will people learn to privilege their long-term interests over their short-term interests?