“Why Fewer Young American Jews Share Their Parents’ View of Israel”

This is an interesting article I came across on Time.com

you can find it here

“I’m trembling,” my mother says when I tell her I’m working on an article about how younger and older American Jews are reacting differently to the Palestinians’ bid for statehood at the United Nations. I understand the frustrations of the Palestinians who are dealing with ongoing Israeli settlement construction and sympathize with their decision to approach the U.N., but my mom supports President Obama’s promise to wield the U.S. veto, sharing his view that a two-state solution can be achieved only through negotiations with Israel.

“This is so emotional,” she says as we cautiously discuss our difference of opinion. “It makes me feel absolutely terrible when you stridently voice criticisms of Israel.” (See pictures of the West Bank settlements.)

A lump of guilt and sadness rises in my throat. I’ve written harshly of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and assault on Gaza in 2009, and on civil rights issues in Israel. But speaking my mind on these topics — a very Jewish thing to do — has never been easy. During my childhood in the New York suburbs, support for Israel was as fundamental a family tradition as voting Democratic or lighting the Shabbos candles on Friday night.

My mom has a master’s degree in Jewish history and is the program director of a large synagogue. Her youthful experiences in Israel, volunteering on a kibbutz and meeting descendants of my great-grandmother’s siblings, are part of my own mythology. Raised within the Conservative movement, I learned at Hebrew school that Israel was the “land of milk and honey,” where Holocaust survivors irrigated the deserts and made flowers bloom.

What I didn’t hear much about was the lives of Palestinians. It was only after I went to college, met Muslim friends and enrolled in a Middle Eastern history and politics course that I was challenged to reconcile my liberal, humanist worldview with the fact that the Jewish state of which I was so proud was occupying the land of 4.4 million stateless Palestinians, many of them refugees displaced by Israel’s creation.

Like many young American Jews, during my senior year of college I took the free trip to Israel offered by the Taglit-Birthright program. The bliss I felt floating in the Dead Sea, sampling succulent fruits grown by Jewish farmers and roaming the medieval city of Safed, the historic center of Kabbalah mysticism, was tempered by other experiences: watching the construction of the imposing “security” fence, which not only tamped down terrorist attacks but also separated Palestinian villagers from their land and water supply. I spent hours in hushed conversation with a young Israeli soldier who was horrified by what he said was the routinely rough and contemptuous treatment of Palestinian civilians at Israeli military checkpoints.

That trip deepened my conviction that as an American Jew, I could no longer in good conscience offer Israel unquestioning support. I’m not alone. Polling of young American Jews shows that with the exception of the Orthodox, many of us feel less attached to Israel than do our baby boomer parents, who came of age during the era of the 1967 and 1973 wars, when Israel was less of an aggressor and more a victim.  A 2007 poll by Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis found that although the majority of American Jews of all ages continue to identify as “pro-Israel,” those under 35 are less likely to identify as “Zionist.” Over 40% of American Jews under 35 believe that “Israel occupies land belonging to someone else,” and over 30% report sometimes feeling “ashamed” of Israel’s actions.

Hanna King, an 18-year-old sophomore at Swarthmore College, epitomizes the generational shift. Raised in Seattle as a Conservative Jew, King was part of a group of activists last November who heckled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with slogans against the occupation at a New Orleans meeting of the Jewish Federations General Assembly.

“Netanyahu repeatedly claims himself as a representative of all Jews,” King says. “The protest was an outlet for me to make a clear statement … that those injustices don’t occur in my name. It served as a vehicle for reclaiming my own Judaism.”

A more moderate critique is expressed by J Street, the political action committee launched in 2008 as a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” counterweight to the influence in Washington of the more hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Simone Zimmerman heads J Street’s campus affiliate at the University of California, Berkeley. A graduate of Jewish private schools, she lived in Tel Aviv as an exchange student during high school but never heard the word occupation spoken in relation to Israel until she got to college.

During Zimmerman’s freshman year, Berkeley became embroiled in a contentious debate over whether the university should divest from corporations that do business with the Israeli army. Although Zimmerman opposed divestment, she was profoundly affected by the stories she heard from Palestinian-American activists on campus.

“They were sharing their families’ experiences of life under occupation and life during the war in Gaza,” she remembers. “So much of what they were talking about related to things that I had always been taught to defend, like human rights and social justice, and the value of each individual’s life.”

Even young rabbis are, as a cohort, more likely to be critical of Israel than are older rabbis. Last week, Cohen, the Hebrew Union College researcher, released a survey of rabbinical students at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, the premier institution for training Conservative rabbis. Though current students are just as likely as their elders to have studied and lived in Israel and to believe Israel is “very important” to their Judaism, about 70% of the young prospective rabbis report feeling “disturbed” by Israel’s treatment of Arab Israelis and Palestinians, compared with about half of those ordained between 1980 and 1994.

Benjamin Resnick, 27, is one of the rabbinical students who took the survey. In July, he published an op-ed pointing out the ideological inconsistencies between Zionism, which upholds the principle of Israel as a Jewish state, and American liberal democracy, which emphasizes individual rights regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. “The tragedy,” Resnick says, is that the two worldviews may be “irreconcilable.”

Still, after living in Jerusalem for 10 months and then returning to New York, Resnick continues to consider himself a Zionist. He quotes the Torah in support of his view that American Jews should press Israel to end settlement expansion and help facilitate a Palestinian state: “Love without rebuke,” he says, “is not love.”

The Big Questions – Part II

For the past couple of days I’ve been reading The Big Questions on my way to school in the morning.  I love the feel of it, it’s very open and really makes you contemplate everything it addresses. I think I may have jinxed it because yesterday in Philosophy my teacher asked us to take out our books and a black marker.

We had an assignment due that day so it was kind of weird for him to ask us to take out the books, since we always do the reading at home. So before reaching into my bag, I asked him, “Why?” and he told me “We’re going to censor them.”

“We’re going to do it with our own markers?!” my classmate asked him way-too-excitedly

“Yes we are”

And he put up the page numbers on the board. Entire chapters. Pictures. Questions. Quotes. Single-lined phrases. And he went around to make sure we were all ‘censoring’. The classmate that was very excited about it was doing it with more energy than I had ever seen him putting into his actual work. Every single one of my classmates did it with a black board marker, eliminating the words completely. I cannot describe how much it shocked me. No one hesitated when he said “Censor these pages”. Some looked at them, said “Oh it talks about religion/oh it has a nude picture/oh it talks about sexuality/oh it talks about revolutions” and went on with their task. My excited classmate said it was like being in a KG coloring class. He also said this was like “government appreciation day”…to which I will not comment on. But me, being the odd one out that I am, instead watched everyone marking everything out. The markers were the type that are used with English magazines when celebrities are shown in their bikinis or other ‘inappropriate’ clothing, the type that you couldn’t see past no matter what. Every word, blacked out. No one cared to know what those words were! “The Authority” says they are not meant to be read – therefore they obeyed.

Personally I lied and said I didn’t have my book with me, because I wanted to keep reading the book. You know how there’s always that one student in Biology class that refuses to dissect the frog because he/she thinks it is an act of animal cruelty? I am that one student that refuses to ruin books because I think it is an act of book-torture (which I do think should be a crime)! The result was my teacher giving me another copy, telling me to censor it along with everyone else and give him back the uncensored version later. And after five minutes of watching everyone scribbling at their books, my teacher told me my time was limited and I had to get this done before class ended. So with tentative hands, a heavy heart, and a very light pink pen, I drew thin lines across pages, thin enough for a person to still be able to read the words. Someone seemed to get tired of all the ‘coloring’, and jokingly asked, “Can’t we just rip them out?” to which he was told, “Yes, as long as you throw the pages in the recycling bin and they don’t leave the room when the bell rings.” So he ripped the pages. Crunched them up into little balls. Aimed for the recycling trash like it was a basketball hoop. And went on chatting with his group.

I once read a quote that said, “Where they burn books, they will eventually burn people.” Isn’t ripping out pages and blacking out words essentially a form of burning books? I’m really not lying when I say it hurt my heart to see my 17 and 18 year old classmates mindlessly blacking out extremely thought-provoking words that they would never understand the magnitude of, simply because they didn’t take a few moments to allow their curiosity to get the best of them.

  It wasn’t all blues though. My friend Nawaf particularly enjoyed censoring the picture of the nude woman. I love his version.

The Girl Effect: Blogging Campaign

On October 4th, The Girl Effect will be posting

bloggers’ entries from all over the world on their

views about different issues more and more young

girls are experiencing all over the world, including lack

of education, child prostitution, domestic abuse, child

marriage, and other horrible conditions they are suffering through.

I just heard about this today, so I will definitely start working on mine.

Click on the picture if you would like to participate in this

significant event of voicing our support for girls everywhere 🙂

guys are more than welcome, break the stereotype 😉

 

 

 

 

 

Child marriage, though illegal in India, is very common and is held at night.

The Significance of Names

I am thoroughly enjoying the Language and Culture unit we are doing in English. A few days ago we focused on an integral part of each culture: names. Mot of the time, names reveal a person’s ethnic background. Us Arabs have very obvious names; Fahad, Noor, Bader. Sometimes they reveal religion; Mohammed, Abrar, Abdullah. As for our full names, last names reveal history. It tells strangers where we descended from, what kind of lives our ancestors lived, what conditions they lived through, what struggles they overcame or what luxury they lived in. It tells people what kind of person you are; maybe your parents gave you a name that made you want to live up to its meaning.

My English teacher is originally from Guiana, and told us that the last name she carries is not technically hers. When slaves were still owned, they would take the last name of their ‘owners’. My teacher is proud of her last name because as she said, her people have nothing to be ashamed of, and did nothing to be ashamed of. The ‘owners’, on the other hand–the whites–do. The same people who deem themselves ethical and everyone else to be primitive today, have a long, disgusting history of torture, imperialism, oppressive methods, and establishing supremacy. When my teacher was in school, whites and blacks had recently started attending classes together. But the content they studied, of course, focused solely on white history. When my teacher would ask if they could even sing black music in Music Class, it would be dismissed as “backwards” and “primitive”. Whites would impose their beliefs on the blacks, trying to get them to despise themselves and feel ashamed of their innocent ancestors, imposing their immoral perspective on them, leading to their self-loathing and sadness.
In my Understanding Knowledge class, we looked at a form the U.S. uses for their annual census. I can’t seem to find it online, but one of the things the citizen would have to fill out was identifying his race by putting a check mark next to the options given. The options were extremely limited. “White – Hispanic – Asian – Black – Other – Declined to provide.” Now think about just how many races fall under ‘other’! Are all the other races — including us as Arabs — too insignificant for the officials to be bothered to include them? Or is the point of these options to hurt our pride and make us choose “declined to provide”? Declined to provide could mean three things: 1) we didn’t want to be categorized as “other”. 2) we were too insulted by their racism to actually tell them where we are from. 3) some may actually feel ashamed of their race. Which, again, makes no sense to me, as we do not have a shameful history. At some point we were the most powerful people on Earth, and that is good reason to be proud of our heritage.

I see nothing wrong with embracing certain positive aspects about the Western culture, such as education and a different way of thinking – but I do not think that we should strip ourselves of our own cultures. If we do that we are signing up for our own ethnic cleansing upon our Arab culture – at some point our grandchildren/great grandchildren would not speak Arabic, would not know how Gulf countries reached their current economic statuses, would never read Arabic. Our language is one of the most difficult languages to learn for foreigners who are so fascinated by it and want to learn how to speak, write, and read it so badly. We are privileged enough to have been born as native Arabic speakers. It is an integral part of who we are, and I think it’s vital that we never let that part go – it is in our blood. In honor of all the sacrifices our ancestors have made for us, the least we could do is cherish our cultures. Balance is key.

Post 9/11 America

Mona El Tahawy is one of my favorite Arab journalists. She’s a brilliant Egyptian woman who writes about Arab affairs beautifully and puts justice to perfect words. She wrote this on 9/11/2011:

For most of my life, the US was never anything more than vacation memories. My family visited almost 30 years ago for a vacation that marked the end of our years of living in the UK and which came just before we moved to Saudi Arabia.

New York City dazzled, of course, and a road trip with an uncle and his family from Wyoming through the Rockies to California where Mickey Mouse greeted us in Disneyland, was a lesson in the sheer vastness that is the United States.

But then I fell in love with an American and I flew to NYC to meet him for the millennium celebrations and even though we fought and I gave him back his engagement ring, I agreed to marry him and I did what I vowed I’d never do: I left my job and my home for a man.

The year after I moved to be with him in Seattle, early one Tuesday, his mother called us from her home at the other end of the country – three time zones away in Florida – urging us to turn on the television because something terrible was happening in New York. I rushed to awaken my brother and his wife who were visiting us.

That morning of 11 September 2001 as we watched the twin towers crumble on live television, America and I would develop a bond that has proven deeper and more enduring – for better or worse, through sickness and health – than the one I had with my now ex-husband.

“If this is Muslims, they’re going to round us up,” I told him. He took the day off work and we didn’t leave the apartment for two days, worried that my sister-in-law would be attacked for her headscarf. A drunk unsuccessfully tried to set our local mosque on fire; the neighbourhood stood guard outside the mosque for weeks afterwards holding signs that read “Muslims are Americans”.

“What’s it like to f**k a terrorist?” a group of young men asked the white American husband of a Pakistani-American woman I knew.

I left my husband a year after 9/11. Not because he was an American and I an Egyptian, nothing to do with culture or religion; nothing to do with 9/11. We brought out the worst in each other. But before we separated we visited NYC one more time together for a friend’s engagement and we went to pay our respects at the site of the attacks. I had no words. Just tears and prayers as we took in the gaping hole, the makeshift shrines of teddy bears and notes desperately seeking the whereabouts of loved ones.

Ironically, he now lives in Asia and I’ve stayed in the US. I stayed to fight. To say that’s not my Islam. To yell Muslims weren’t invented on 9/11. Those planes crashing again and again into the towers were the first introduction to Islam and Muslims for too many Americans but we – American Muslims – are sick and tired of explaining. None of those men was an American Muslim and we’re done explaining and apologising. Enough.

I stayed to give my middle finger to Tea Partiers who tried to intimidate a group of us in 2010 because we supported the right of an Islamic community centre to build near the site of the attacks. They came to bully us and I bullied them right back. I wanted them to know Muslims will not be intimidated so think twice before you try to bully another one.

I became an American in April of this year, almost 11 years after I moved here. I could’ve become naturalised earlier but I realised soon after I took the oath and we watched a video of President Obama congratulating us that if it had been President Bush I would’ve probably run out, screaming.

Despite an appearance by Bush at a mosque after 9/11 to show he didn’t hold all Muslims responsible, his administration proceeded to do exactly that: military trials for civilians, secret prisons, the detention of hundreds of Muslim men without charge, the torture and harsh interrogation of detainees and the invasions of two Muslim-majority countries.

And the latest stain on the US civil liberties record: an Associated Press expose in August on ways the CIA and the NYPD are combining forces to spy on Muslims in New York City. The thought that someone could be following me to my favourite book shops or night clubs is as pathetic and sinister as when the Mubarak regime tapped my phone and had me followed when I lived in Egypt.

And I will continue to stay in the US for my nieces and nephews. I have chosen not to have children. I am a happy aunt to two girls and two boys between the ages of three and eight. They were the first Americans in our family and the thought that anyone could question either their nationality or faith – or demand they choose between the two – enrages me.

Over the past 10 years, American Muslims have fought not just the hate and stereotypes and the profiling from those outside the community, we’ve also had major fights within the Muslim community. As a friend described it, 9/11 pushed many Muslims to “come out” as liberals or progressives. For too long, huge, conservative national organisations claimed to speak for all of us but there is a much greater diversity of American Muslim voices now and that benefits everyone. Conservative does not equal authentic.

People think I’m Brazilian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, anything but Muslim because many people equate a Muslim woman with the wearing of a headscarf. So like someone who’s gay who might make sure to tell you soon after you meet, I try to include within the first three sentences of a new meeting that I’m a Muslim.

Before 9/11, some Muslims lived quiet, uneventful suburban lives; the dentists and the accountants and the attorneys. 9/11 robbed them of that boring existence. But in struggling to become boring again, American Muslims have over the past 10 years made our community here the most vibrant of any Muslim community in the world, Tea Party and Bush legacy be damned!

We’re your friends, lovers and spouses, America. We’re your comedians, taxi drivers, chefs, politicians and singers. And we’re your doctors, like my brother and his wife who were visiting me from the midwest in Seattle 10 years ago.

My brother, a cardiologist, was visited by special agents from the FBI in November 2001 who asked him if he knew anyone who celebrated the attacks. His wife is an obstetrician/gynaecologist.

One day she and I were watching one of those medical dramas when she told me an anecdote that neatly sums it all up: “I was delivering a baby the other day and the father was watching via Skype cam. He was a soldier in Afghanistan. And I thought, here I am: a Muslim doctor in a headscarf delivering a baby whose father is an American soldier in Afghanistan, a Muslim country.”

Let’s draw the curtain on 9/11 anniversaries after this 10th one. Every year on 11 September you can taste the grief in NYC. The wound will never heal if every year we scratch the scar off and open the way to hate and prejudice.

Some of the earliest Muslims came to the US across the Atlantic on slave ships from west Africa. Not far from where I live in Harlem, there’s a west African community complete with a mosque, restaurants and French-speaking people. 9/11 changed everything and 9/11 changed nothing at all. America – I’m not going anywhere.

Undeserved Catharsis

Repenting and confessing will not lead to forgiveness, but it will probably offer this guy undeserved catharsis.

PS. The “I’m sorry I won’t do it again” pleading method will only work with your mother.

Cane is Bitter

In English class, we are doing a unit on Language and Culture. Our current focus is on a short story based in Trinidad, called “Cane is Bitter”. The story revolves around a Hindu family with several children, the eldest being their son Romesh. The family is very poor and uneducated, and their source of income totally relies on how much cane they cut. So the children work all day and into the night, and wake up the next morning to do it all over again, their entire lives – and then continue the same lifestyle with their own children. Since education isn’t offered, they don’t really have another alternative. But Romesh’s mother decides to send him to a city nearby where they do offer education. At this point Romesh is a grown man in his early 20s, and goes away for a year to study there. He studies math, English, learns to speak, read, and write in proper grammar, political science, history, poetry, philosophy, and reads a lot of fiction and non-fiction books. He feels like the horizons of his mind have expanded greatly because of the knowledge that has been bestowed upon him, enlightening his existence. He starts to appreciate beauty, romance, manners, words, poetry, and realizes how oppressed the people of his small village really are – especially his own family. When he goes to visit them (which is only on an annual basis), he is a completely different person. Though his mother is extremely proud of him, and glad that she had encouraged him to pursue an education elsewhere, his father is not. His father wants him to get married to a girl from a middle-class family (as the dowry in their culture is given by the girl to the man) and continue with the family ‘business’ of cane-cutting. As Romesh’s father and mother are discussing his future marriage — without his knowledge — a possibility crosses his father’s mind: “What if he’s in love with someone who is from a different culture?” In his case, he meant a black woman; but his wife quickly dismisses the thought from her husband’s mind.

Anyway, so one of the discussion questions had asked us what we would do if we were in Romesh’s situation. In my head, Romesh basically had to choose 1 of the following:

A) Keep his education and marry the girl his family wants, keeping his family happy and embracing the knowledge he had received

B) Keep his education and marry the girl *he* wants, which would end up with him having to give up his family

C) Refuse to get married and risk losing the education he is receiving, since his parents can easily prevent him from going anymore.

Our teacher was more detailed about the question, she wanted to make it more local, more personal. She asked us girls, “If your family said you could study abroad, as long as you would get married, would you?”

And we are talking about university. As in, she was asking us, 17 and 18 year old girls, if we would get married after our high school graduations just for the sake of having a male escort in order for our parents to approve of us going to a good university and getting the education we deserve. She told us that this had, in fact, happened a few years ago. A high school female student of hers got accepted to a university in the U.S. to study medicine, but her family wouldn’t agree unless she was married. Though the girl posed no objection, and did get married, she couldn’t juggle marriage with medicine, since she got pregnant a year into her studies, and had to drop out to care for her husband and her child.

What my teacher said was, that we didn’t even have the same options as Romesh. She pointed out that as Kuwaiti girls, if our families did not approve of the man we loved, that was it for us. It’s not like we can leave our families like Romesh can and choose our soulmates instead. We do not have that option, of walking away and running after the one we love; we let go, which was a really sad but very accurate point that she made.

Two of my classmates shocked me with their answers by saying, “I would find any guy to marry, travel with him abroad, and get a divorce when I’m done.” which is, in my opinion, taking advantage of a guy that doesn’t want to take advantage of you: he’s marrying you, he wants to spend the rest of his life with you! I told them that it wasn’t fair, that was using him. Their response was that “men are always using us, what’s the difference?”

It just got me thinking. Personally I would rather not get married and travel abroad than marry a stranger just for the sake of using him and be stuck with him forever – because I know myself and I wouldn’t leave someone who has been there for me for four years. Marriage is meant to be a commitment, not a way of taking advantage of your partner’s benefits for your own personal needs. I don’t know how my classmates would have the heart to use a man for four years and then leave him. What if, despite it being an arranged marriage, he falls in love with you during those four years? Would you break his heart and leave him anyway? How would the woman be any different than your typical man in that case? The only difference is that the typical man is seeking ways to satisfy his male ego, while apparently the typical woman (since I know two others who have said the same thing, making a total of four) is seeking ways to satisfy her academic dreams – and the trend seems to be that the best way to do that is by finding a man to ‘tolerate’ for 4 years.

I think it’s more than fine, to get married and travel abroad, if it is of the couple’s own free will and it was their own decision. I think that’s great, when two people are in love and decide to be together and support each other through their university years. But when that is the parents’ condition, and the girl marries a stranger with the intention of leaving him, then it isn’t fair to him. And regardless of what everyone says, both ends have feelings, both ends get hurt when their hearts are broken. I don’t think that men are always using women. I’m lucky enough to know a few really good men who would never take advantage of women. Some men do use women. Some women use men. If we were to go by the stereotypes, men love having their ego fed, and women love having their wallets fed. If we were to go by stereotypes, we would never be able to trust each other – not even when we’re married. Personally I think you can’t fully trust the stranger you are marrying if it is an arranged marriage, especially if you are planning to travel abroad with him at 18. Trouble could easily escalate, as mentioned before, pregnancy being one of the concerns, as well as domestic abuse; if you don’t know this man as well as the back of your hand, how do you know how he will behave when he is angry? In a foreign country, away from your family, living only with him, what will you do if he crosses a line? For me, it’s too fishy. I guess it works for some people though.

Boycotting Bu Qtada & Bu Nabeel

Apparently a large number of tweeps have decided to boycott the popular Kuwaiti TV show, Bu Qtada w Bu Nabeel. The show criticizes our society in a humorous way, and is shown annually on Al Watan TV, usually airing 30 episodes — to fit Ramadan. They also have cartoon strips that they publish daily in the Al Watan newspaper, covering whatever is the biggest social or political story on that day. It’s a very clever and light way of addressing serious matters through animation.  The tweeps have decided to boycott anyone that watches the show or reads the comic strips by unfollowing them. Personally I don’t really find that to be a painful blow, I find it silly that these people get huffy whenever someone criticizes them by discussing reality and telling the truth. We all love the country. Denial won’t help us improve it, and it certainly won’t help solve our problems. Once we acknowledge them, and take criticism with an open mind, only then can we progress properly.

بنات الثانوية

3eidkom Mbarak! 🙂

Since today was the first day of Eid, it was also the last day of Ramadan TV shows; most of them aired their finales today. I’ve only been keeping up with two shows, the rest were too dramatic for my liking. It seems like every year, there’s a certain theme that all the directors and writers agree on. Last year it was how men are unfaithful cheaters, the year before it was domestic abuse, and there was that one year where homosexuality and AIDs were pretty popular on TV (of course, Shujoon was the carrier), etc… This year, though, it’s ‘the evil mother’: the mother who won’t let her son marry the girl he loves because of the difference in social status, the divorced mother who won’t allow her children to see their father, and so on. There’s also the middle-aged woman having a midlife crisis by getting involved in a relationship with a man 20 years younger than her (Al-Malika), but that’s another story altogether.

The one show I’ve been consistently keeping up with is Banat Al Thanawiya, and that’s because I’ve read the book before by Mohammed Al Nashmi. The book is sold at Virgin Megastore in Marina Mall, but from what I’ve heard it’s not allowed in public schools; students are punished if a teacher finds a copy of this book with them. I wasn’t all that impressed with the story, I found the plot to be rushed and uninteresting, because the events were very cliche. The main characters, Mohamed and Samar, fell in love way too quickly — in both the book and the series, which were drastically different from one another. In the book, Mohamed holds Samar’s hand the very first moment he meets her. I can see why Kuwaiti channels banned the series, I suppose, but the writer has stated that most of his story’s plot was twisted to suit society’s views. Censorship committees probably considered the book to be breaching certain traditional values, and thought it would spark too much controversy.

Though the novel was very poorly written, with way too many grammatical errors and very simple language, the story itself was a controversial one that, in my opinion, should’ve been aired unedited.

The novel’s story is as follows: Mohamed and Samar meet at a shady ‘gathering’, a double-date of sorts. The moment Mohamed meets Samar, he takes her hand, and she moves away — because she didn’t expect the ‘relationship’ to begin so quickly. Of course, it is conveyed that Mohamed and his buddy do not have ‘pure’ intentions, and that’s proven when Mohamed holds the hand of a perfect stranger the moment he meets her, and scolds her when she moves away. The relationship escalates, and they find themselves falling in love with each other, surprising themselves — they expected it to be nothing more than a fling. Strangely enough, they don’t know each others’ full names; they are on a first name basis for months. They grow physically intimate, and the writer describes these scenes in his book. The couple even rent an apartment on Valentine’s Day for one night. Of course, that would explain why the story was changed; according to Middle-Eastern traditions, physical intimacy before getting married is inappropriate. Samar also takes up smoking, which she picks up from her ‘bad girl friends’ — but this wasn’t shown in the series.

As their relationship develops, Samar starts fantasizing about what it would be like to have children with Mohamed, but doesn’t say so out loud. To her great joy, Mohamed is having the same thoughts; he throws hints at her numerous times, how he’s relying on her to help their son with his homework. At this point, they still aren’t aware of each others’ last names…until one day, Mohamed takes her out for ice-cream at a local ice-cream store. She waits in his car as he goes down to the store to get their ice-cream, and as she’s waiting, curiosity gets the best of her when she sees his civil ID on the floor. She picks it up, and when she reads his last name, it changes everything. She goes home and cries later that night, not telling him what she has just found out.

She finds out that Mohamed comes from a Shiie family, while she comes from a Sunni family. It breaks her heart because she knows they will not be able to marry each other in the future, as the union of Shiia and Sunna in marriage is usually very difficult to convince both families to accept. She can’t hold it in for more than a few nights, and she does end up telling him. He hangs up on her, but only because he’s angry she went through his things rather than just asking him. After they kiss and make up, they sit down and discuss their future plans. Mohamed tells her he plans on speaking to his mother and seeing what she thinks. So he does, and his mother tells him she has no problem with it, and would like to speak to Samar’s mother. Samar’s mother, on the other hand, expresses undeniable rejection of giving away her daughter to a non-Sunni. When the mothers speak, Samar’s mother tells Mohamed’s mother that she would not have a problem with their marriage, as long as Mohamed would ‘convert’. Mohamed and his mother are both open to the idea, but his father strongly opposes it, along with all of his uncles. Long story cut short, he goes against his father and his uncles, and he converts. Mohamed and Samar marry each other, both as Sunna.

On their wedding night, they stay at a hotel. As they are settling in, Mohamed gets a call from his mother and his sisters, saying his father won’t let them in the house until he has seen Mohamed (to basically yell at him and tell him what disgrace he has brought on their family). Mohamed apologizes profusely to Samar, tells her he won’t take more than an hour and he’ll be back. Samar is understanding, tells him it’s fine, she’ll wait for him. He drives over to his house, deals with his father, and gets his mother and sisters in the house. As he’s leaving, he calls Samar, tells her he handled everything, and is on his way to get some knafa for them to have for dinner. An hour later, he still hasn’t returned. Samar calls him, and he doesn’t pick up. She spends the entire night calling him, and his phone is off the whole time. When the morning came, Samar still hadn’t slept, and she hears a knock on the door. Her mother and sisters are there, and they tell her Mohamed died in a car accident. Samar laughs, tells her mother, “No, he’s on his way back, he’s just bringing us some knafa.” Personally I think the knafa was an a w f u l touch. It made the death scene turn into a comedic moment rather than a sad one! Granted, most of these writers absolutely suck at properly creating grievous scenes, but knafa just ruins the whole thing! I was actually telling a friend of mine the book’s story the other day, and he laughed his heart out. Knafa and death should never, ever be on the same page!

I didn’t find the show’s ending to be realistic whatsoever. I understand that they were attempting a ‘happy ending’ sort of deal, but if the happy ending isn’t realistic, kill the main character and get it over with. Mohamed’s mother suddenly turning into a saint and hugging the girl she once referred to as a low-class trashy peasant just doesn’t register in my head. Whatever floats the audience’s boat, I guess…

The Social Pyramid Makes or Breaks You

Sometime in February during my Junior year of high school, my English teacher said something to me that made my classmates laugh — which, of course, made me immediately take what he said as an insult. Later on that day I mentioned it to a friend who said that I shouldn’t have been offended, it was actually a compliment, an honorable one at that. I spent five days a week, two hours a day, and nine months for a whole year with this teacher. He had a good understanding of my personality and my character from the way I behaved in his room and from my opinions during certain discussions we would have as a class. Usually by February, all teachers have a good idea of what kind of person you are. So his comment was a result of several months of observation and contemplation, since he he deemed it fit to say to me.

I don’t remember what exactly caused him to say it, but if my memory serves me correctly, one of my classmates had a slight cold and he sneezed, so I got up and passed him a tissue box. My English teacher looked at me for a few moments and then said, “You’d be a good nurse.”

I was surprised. I’ve been told I’d be a good journalist, a good writer, a good lawyer, a good counselor, and many other career suggestions. But I’ve never been told I’d be a good nurse. The stifled laughs of two or three guys in my class with extremely low IQ’s made me say, “A nurse?” and my teacher persisted, “Yes, you’d be a very good nurse, you’d take good care of patients.” And I didn’t answer, not wanting to pursue the topic in front of my classmates. So we both dropped it.

But now, 6 months later, I have a completely different outlook on this. I’m trying to understand what it was that made me take offense at what was obviously a compliment. What’s wrong with being a nurse? Nurses are the ones who have taken care of our grandparents as they took their last breaths in hospitals, they will care for our parents when they grow old, and they care for us and our families and loved ones when we fall ill. They’re patient, understanding, caring, and gentle; they do everything they can to ensure that you are comfortable even though you are in pain. They don’t just take care of you physically, they take care of you emotionally as well. It’s very common to see nurses calming down scared children if their parents are not around. They do a good job of keeping patients’ fear under control. I think they’re a lot like teachers, underestimated, under-appreciated, and underpaid. They put up with a lot of bullshit too; lots of disrespect and mistreatment is aimed their way as a result of families’ frustration, but they take it with stride. In my opinion, they are every bit as important to the patient as the doctor.

I’m glad my point of view has changed since February, and it was a long, intense process that required me to think twice about a lot of my beliefs, but I’m still wondering what kind of brainwash society puts us through that has conditioned all citizens to having the same views on the same matters. They look down on nurses, garbage-men, street-cleaners, salon workers, and waiters, but not parliament members that steal money and disgrace the country, tarnishing its reputation universally. Is it about status? Is it about money? The more money you make, the more respect you gain? Why isn’t it about honor? Why isn’t honor enough? If a man or a woman is doing something good for society, and he or she is doing it with honor, don’t they deserve as much respect as that trashy parliament member you think so highly of? Where would we be anyway, without these “low-class” workers? I think it’s so wrong that non-Kuwaitis are cleaning the streets of Kuwait. There is no logic or honor behind it. It should be Kuwaitis cleaning up their streets, although they should not be dirty to begin with. But unfortunately, I doubt a great number of Kuwaitis would volunteer to clean up the streets, even though it is our land and our responsibility.

Just something to ponder over.