Phillip’s Blog

In May 23^rd to 28^th, a traveling cultural road show, Palestine Festival of Literature is happening in the West Bank, inside the Palestine territory. The festival’s main goal is to invite writers and artists to their Palestine. The reason for this is also because Palestinians cannot easily travel because of the military of Israel. When they have this festival, then it will bring the audience to them. Even though it was planned carefully and smoothly, festival was shut down even before it was started by Israel army who were armed with weapons. Dan-Chyi Chua, from China is one of the people who joined this festival. After this event, Dan-Chyi Chua wrote specifically about how armed Israel army came to the festival and shut the festival down.

I believe that this wasn’t the best action that Israel could do. First of all, Israel have gave West Bank to Palestine, which will mean that anything that Palestinians do inside West Bank, Israel should not affect their decision. Not only about the property, after this action, people all around the world started to tweet about this event. Through this Israel could have some bad influence toward the country itself now known to be more violent than they used to be known as before. Even though it is not my place to judge what is right or wrong, which should have been done, I believe that Israel should have been more careful about sending army to close down a festival that also included people from other countries.

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/05/26/palestine-israeli-armed-police-disrupt-literature-festival/

The Egypt government has given orders that all the pigs inside Egypt are to be culled, in order to stop the spreading of the Swine flu. Just as it is hard to make peace, this rule has many uproars but also has many agreement in fears of Swine flu.

There are huge numbers of uproars from a place inside Egypt called Ezbet el-Nakhl. These uproars were from pig farmers and garbage collectors who did not approve the government in culling all the pigs. Not only farmers and garbage collectors are protesting, but also bloggers and media are disagreeing with the new rule. A blogger quoted that, even though she is not allowed to eat pigs due to her Muslim religion rule, she mentioned that Muslim religion prohibits to hunt or kill animals without a reason. Also an Egyptian doctor has said that the swine flu is likely to come through the borders rather than coming from pigs. He also quoted that the funds that go in hurting the pig farmers should rather go for helping the pig farmers to protect their pigs.

Even though there are uproars toward the culling for the pigs, there are people who agree with culling all the pigs inside the Egypt. For example, AbdelRahman Ayyash a writer have written that if the swine flu came inside Egypt then it would be a total pandemic and will cause a catastrophe especially in a city like Egypt. Then there was one blogger named Zeinobia have posted that “all pigs should be culled”. His reasons were that the pigs were grown without single medical care and grown eating only garbage. Also she explained that if the pigs were infected to Swine flu, then the farmers and the kids near the pigs will also be infected. Then she has said that after these people are infected, then gradually and slowly, millions of people will be infected to Swine flu.

When I first read this article I could understand why the government of Egypt declared their decision about culling all the pigs. At first, I also believed that slaughtering all the pigs would be a fastest way to stop the spreading of this horrible disease. However, as I continued to think about it, I had a question to myself, ‘ Is killing all the innocent pigs the only way to prevent Egypt from Swine Flu?’. I think that there will be different ways to separate the infected pigs from the healthy pigs. Slaughtering innocent pigs will be a crime. And it will be hurting the lives of pig farmers and their family. Would you also think thatkilling all the pigs are the only way to protect a country from swine flu?

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/05/02/egypt-combating-h1n1-with-pigs-culling/

In Kuwait, there was an election bringing a change to Kuwait’s history. Although Kuwait citizens expected that they will have only one or two female candidates to make it to Parliament, surprisingly, four made the Parliament.

In this particular blog article, more than ten comments and quotes were made to show their supports for the results of the Kuwait elections. For example, one blogger had said “Kuwait broke the rusted tradition, where the population voted overwhelmingly in May 16th elections for four women candidates and voted them into the parliament.”

I believe that Kuwait had shown and given more rights to women of Kuwait than before by selecting females as Parliament. This comment tells how much Kuwait finally succeeded to make a difference after trying to change a tradition and give more rights to women. Through this one election, Kuwait have thrown away their old, unfair and rusted tradition and started to look at the modern rules. I personally believe that this election have made good choices because I believe that girls should have as much freedom and rights as a male would have. This election will change the history of Kuwait just like Obama have changed the history of USA for being the first black president.

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/05/19/kuwait-election-history-four-women-win-parliament-seats/

Every year, millions of Muslims travel to Mecca in order to perform Hajj, their Pilgrimage, one of the five pillars of Islam. This year, people are wondering whether the tradition of Hajj will be canceled or postponed in order to stop a huge outbreak of H1n1 or Swine Flu virus. John Burgess points out “Similar concerns were raised a few years ago, when bird flu (H5N1) was threatening. One Saudi scholar called for Hajj to be canceled if there were a severe outbreak, but that proposal was shot down by others. The argument was that Hajj had never been canceled on public health grounds and that to do so would be counter to Islam. Rather, those who are ill are morally obliged to not perform Hajj.” Not only that he have explained that there are many records of outbreaks of diseases during the time of Hajj, killing thousands of people. However, some people have pointed out that the Hajj should not be canceled because this even will not actually begin until November. Also, Hajj have never been postponed or canceled, and you will need at least one infected person to justify the postponing and canceling. There is no case of Swine Flu in Middle East except Israel, but none anywhere near Muslim areas.

I believe that it may be a better idea to wait a little bit more until October in order to see if the Swine Flu is spread in the Middle East. If the Swine Flu becomes stronger and kills a lot of people, then it might be a better idea to postpone or cancel the Hajj this year. Through postponing or canceling Hajj this year, it may be possible to save people’s lives being taken from the swine flu. Even though this is my idea to cancel the Hajj if the pandemic alert grows higher than 5 or 6, but because this is such an important event for the Muslims, I believe the Muslim counsel should discuss about this problem with Hajj in the future.

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/05/15/saudi-arabia-will-swine-flu-threaten-hajj/

The campaigners in the Iran elections chose to use YouTube as a way to promote their favorite candidate. One of these videos compared former Prime Minister with the former president with a Broadway musical song, ‘Anything you can do’. Not only these videos compare the candidates, there are some videos that actually target candidates to convince people to not vote for certain candidates. For example, using the very popular joke, the candidate Khatami’s video showed how Azeri as someone who did something stupid. After this video was posted, hundreds of students of Azeri protested against Khatami.

I chose to use this article because it showed how people now use internet for everything, even to for promoting their political campaigns. As a personal fan of YouTube, I thought it was very good way to use YouTube to promote and show their favorite candidates. However, I think we should remember that there can be a lot of confusion and anger from using YouTube. It is because people can create false videos to decrease the popularity of opponent candidates. This can be very disrespectful.

So, I think YouTube will be a great way to advertise a candidate if it is use properly.

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/05/30/iran-youtube-broadway-music-and-the-election/

Can music help bring us closer together? This was the hope of Mira Awad and Noa when they decided to sing a duet in Eurovision Song Contest. Mira Awad is a Palestinian-Israeli actress-singer and Noa is a Jewish-Israeli singer. Through singning, they hope to convince the people in the Middle East such as Israel and Palestine to find other ways to find peace in the region. Their duet is the first time Israeli and Arabic duet to sing in the Eurovision Song Contest. Noa said, “Art and music cannot solve the world’s problems, but we can help. And we MUST help. We must do our part in the GLOBAL effort for peace and reconciliation that must include EVERY human being and every organization, each playing his part.”

Through singing, Mira and Noa send a message to the audience that they should all find different ways to find peace rather than fighting violently. I believe that this due showed that how well Israel and Palestine can get along each other very well even though they had fought for decades.

Another important reason that I chose this article to discuss is because I myself am a musician. Though I may not be a professional musician, I believe that art and music can help solve problems such as making two fighting countries to get along together. I believe in infinite possibility of what music can do, because music have done a lot of things in the past and also have changed me completely. For example, during the Cold War, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra played pieces in order to reduce the tension of the war. For me, I was able to change how I thought, how I felt when I played cello in concerts. Whenever I was angry, playing cello helped me to calm down. Whenever I was sad, playing bright music with cello cheered me up. I even could see in the audiences’ eyes during the concerts that somehow I have changed them a little bit. Likely, I think that these two singers Noa and Mira Awad may have a high possibility to change the way Israeli and Palestine people think about each other and may be possible to solve their problem.

For more recent events about music and peace visit http://www.playingforchange.com/ .

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/05/18/israel-eurovision-peace-duo-push-for-another-way/

My name is Phillip and I am the creater of this blog. I attend to international School and enjoy to play Cello, Guitar, listening to music. I also enjoy to play basketball, volleyball, golf and playing games either on computer or PS2. This blog is my project, but there is another reason why I made the blog. The purpose of the blog is to help me and also other readers to understand more about Middle East.

First, I thought that the blog was a little bit too challenging, but now, it seems better and easier to accomplish. The hardest part I decided was the constantly updating the blog part. Before, I misunderstood that I had to update something in the blog every single week. Since now it had changed into an Average and minimum of 6 posts I believe that is easier and can be accomplished. I think that it was changed well, because now students can actually go for getting 4, while still busy at working on other activities.