Year of the Tiger

BLOG POST posted on January 20, 2010 by isaac

They keep telling me that each new decade brings new things. The last one started with the bang that was 9/11. This one feels the continuing effects of precisely that event.

Over at subMedia, I wrote a piece about one of the more well-known CIA-trained commanders that is now a thorn in the occupiers' arse. The man now has a $5 million bounty on his head. Just to show how little this mattered, he did an interview with Al J this week. The money reward is all well and good, but whoever takes him in and collects that reward will need a plane ticket to some remote part of hell that can hide him/her from retribution.

The Americans also fudged on creating a poster of their former lover Osama bin Laden. For some reason the FBI used the photo of a Spaniard to show what Osama would look like now. The Spaniard is angry.

Just as rights violations here in BC landed the Bacon brothers in hot water, a bunch of legal rambling finally put Chemical Ali in front of the hangman (they still hang people in Iraq, right?).

Government officials being held accountable decades after their acts: it almost makes one feel that things are changing in the Middle East.

That is, of course, a mirage. Iraq is still far worse than it was under Saddam. Here's a joke they tell there these days:

An Iraqi insurgent and an American soldier are in a firefight in which both die. They end up in hell, where they are told they can get one call each before they get their sentence. The American soldier is charged ten dollars and the Iraqi nothing. The American is incensed and asks why. One of satan's minions replies, because a call to Iraq is local.

Nearby in the UAE, my horse-shaped birthplace where incidentally child jockeys became illegal only in 2004, thing remain much the same for the royals. Dubai unleashed its tallest building in the world, but had to rename it after the fella from Abu Dhabi that bailed it out. But in Abu Dhabi the king's brother got away with torture, claiming that he had been drugged while he shot at, ran over, cattle-prodded and hit an Afghani merchant whom he thought had cheated him. Sheikh Issa has for years had the reputation of a man who drugs; I'd be surprised to meet anyone with the gall to try and drug him. I mean, look at what happened to the guy that was accused of cheating him.

Things are still tough for the common man though: in Jordan a man got thrown in jail for saying horrible things about the Egyptian president.

In Yemen things are going evermore into the toilet. Whilst the US paints itself as being ready to make Yeminis endure some freedom, and as American media cheers it on and screams Al Q, cooler heads are bringing the ineptitude of the Yemeni administration into question. Yemen is now asking for Canada's backing. I'd have grinned had I heard this a year ago; but with the information I now have on this dear country's propping up of bloody dictators across the globe, I'm sure it'd oblige if there were some kind of resource that could be mined out of there.

Apparently al-Shabaab is coming to Kenya. Somalia is not enough. And if Somali pirates were a corporation, they'd be showing record profits this quarter.

And real journalism is still thankless: Zimbabwe just threw another poor fella into jail.

Enjoy the new year. It promises much of the same. I think it all gets encapsulated well by this review of an overly allegorical film which I recently subjected myself to:

Avatar is a phenomenon you can't ignore, monumentally imposing and done with extraordinary expertise – but the same could be said of the Dubai skyline, and I'm not sure that represents any future worth investing in.