Monday, August 11, 2014

Rewind

Today the world is looking at the struggle for power in Baghdad, will Maliki stay or go. Will he fight or run? Who will come next. The day before it was about the American giant finally awakening from his slumber to swat at some flies in the desert, blowing up some pick up trucks and a few useless bases before the wrong kind of ethnic group is massacred in the Middle East. And before that it was about the Israeli war against Gaza, about how Egypt and Saudi Arabia were complicit in a coup de grâce against Hamas. At the same time the world held its breath as tens of thousands of Yazidis were beseiged on a mountain called Sinjar somewhere in the desert between Syria and Iraq. And before that it was about how ISIS was attacking Lebanon, threatening the sovereignty of a state that doesn't know the meaning of the word. And still before that the news was telling the world about how the soldiers of the Islamic state were about to overrun Iraq.

But if you follow this horrible chain of events, if you reverse back like you could in the old days with VCR's, you would see the dead rising from the ground. You would see babies on hospital beds start to breath again, and then put back in the stomachs of mothers that are alive again. Houses and buildings would assemble themselves as if by magic. Fires would implode into themselves and disappear into the tiny puffs of smoke that they started from. Planes would land that had once been in the sky and their deadly payload would be taken back to warehouses across the world. Why do we need to do that? Why do we need to think about what it would be like to rewind all of this? To what beginning are we trying to get to? It's to the one thing that is missing from the news, the one thing that no world leader - and especially President Obama - wants to tackle seriously. The one issue that everybody hopes will go away, because they want it to be too complicated for them to get involved in. If it were too simple then that would mean they must do something about it, and doing something about it involves an effort on their part, an effort they don't want to make.

So the lies are piled up, the complications are piled on top of each other like a pile of corpses, the bombs are taken out of the warehouses and loaded onto the planes, the tanks and the missile launchers fire their deadly payloads in a puff of smoke and the houses and buildings come tumbling down. The pregnant mother dies and then her baby is cut out of her stomach so that it can die a few days later too, so that it can stop breathing on a hospital bed. Those who were once living and breathing drop back down to the ground again. All for the satisfaction of a multitude of digital eyes that together form a single eye for a greedy fly, feeding on the garbage and the human misery. This is the fly that walks unhindered on the lips of a man whose head has been cut off and propped up neatly on his once moving chest by a boy who can barely read but has now been raised on hate and who holds a fury for an enemy he doesn't understand and he's fighting a war that he can't win and that exists only in all of our heads. And the liar sits on his stolen throne in Damascus and licks his lips. Isn't this good? he thinks to himself. Isn't all this just marvellous?

2 comments:

tpopop said...

I'm saddened by your callousness and indifference towards the plight of the yazidis and other minorities in Iraq. This is the sort of ethnic and sectarian hatred that the regime has accused the Syrian people of from day one. I understand your frustration that Syria has been forgotten in favour of the Palestinians and the Yesidis, but your hate towards Assad can't make you forget about the brutal force that is IS and the suffering of people who aren't your own. Afterall, if we (Syrians) turn into sectarian and ethnonationalist idiots, how much better are we than Assad? Don't let your hate of evil strip you of your love for humanity.

Maysaloon said...

Not sure where in this post you see me being callous and indifferent about the plight of Azidis and other minorities in Iraq.

You might want to read it again.