SpiralDragon's Blog

Money is the root of all evil. Short of sounding like some sort of litany from some sort of obscure religious text, or, more likely, some sort of old cliché. But there is a lot of truth in these words. Money. Currency. We are driven by it all. By this system. Capitalism. Profit. Greed. Every day we wake up and head off to the office, or the field, or whatever, and we try to make a living within a system that is anything but egalitarian. Just to pay the bills. To survive. To live the way we like. Some have it easy. Some have it hard. Some have it in ludicrous quantities. Some have nothing of it at all. In a world where poverty still exits. In a world where it all makes perfect sense when expressed in terms of currency. In a world where we have to struggle with this system to feel human. What madness is this? We do not need money to live. We need food. We need shelter. We need comfort. We do not need money to evolve. We need know age. We need awareness. We need understanding.  S...

When a tyrannical regime begins torturing and killing children as young as 13 years old, accusing them of being agents of terrorist organisations, one begins to wonder how sane that regime is. Hamza al Khateeb was a decent young man who embodied the kindness and hospitality of the Arab youth.  Hamza, put others, even strangers and especially those less fortunate, before himself. a 13 year old who shamed his parents in to giving a homeless person $2, not a fortune by western standards but for Syrians $2 can mean a descent meal. for a long time we, the Arab people, have been told of the atrocities committed by the Israeli armed forces; the slaughter of children, women and elderly at the hands of the "zionists". Tal al Zaatar. Sabra and Shatila. Qana. the first and second Lebanon War. there is no doubt that the Israelis have killed mercilessly.  The imag...

I have been reading Israeli news papers for a while now. long enough to know and understand that they, like us, have had enough of the war and wish for real peace . we need more mutual efforts like this from both sides.  people standing up for what is right without resorting to violent means. peace is the only defensible option for both the Palestinians and the Israelis....... nothing is black and white.... between these two diametrically oposed colors lies and ocean made up of the shades of gray that run between them

so the mighty US has spoken and, for once, I agree in principle with this thought. Right now, the best thing Hamas could do for the cause of the Palestinian people is to actually recognize Israel, as there is no logical or realistic way that Israel is going to cease to exists, the proverbial ignored pink elephant flying all around the room, must now be faced. with honesty and honor. condoning and conducting the murder of innocent children, women and elderly citizens of Israel is no better than the merciless slaughter of Palestinian children, women, and elderly citizens. Hamas would be no better than the IDF and certianly very un-Islamic if it contijnues to condone and conduct such barberous acts. it is time to face the facts; Israel is not going to go away; killing inocent children, women and elderly is unjustifiable and will never acomplish anything significant what soever. it is time for Hamas to wake up and realize that the now hav...

Arabs revolutionariness are no longer alone. slowly but surly there is a world movement made up of the youth and of freethinking liberal people. Jewish people are standing up and protesting  Israeli defence policy against the Palestinians   people are not afraid anymore and people have had enough of the lies that govern our world. the world of freethinkers want positive change and a move away from the appalling clock and dagger politics that have ruined the lives of many innocent people. Anonymous , the internet group is slowly growing and i think no one is taking them seriously yet... what they will evolve into is a good question but i like the direction they are going.. i may disagree with some of their ideas but i understand why those ideas are in place... for instance... i am not against a centralized bank of information on all our activities. ...

I did not expect anything spectacular from President Obama’s speech today. Nor was I impressed with his words unsupported by actions in the direction of those words. But what amused me was the reaction of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Calling the idea of borders based on the pre 1967 war “indefensible”. As if the Palestinians have any sort of military significance! against rock throwing, home cooked rocket lunching, humiliated population. Has Netanyahu forgotten the history of his own people that he should impose a similar kind of indignity against the Palestinians? Granted that the methods employed by the Palestinians are crude and barbaric at best, but let us be honest and look at the facts; These are a people who were displaced and denied their homeland. Why does that sound familiar? These where a people who were of the salt of the earth. Driven from their homes, denied their identity, and denied their dignity, murdered, slaughtered, children women and elderly...

As a human being, I can never condone what has been done against the Jewish sematic people over the past two thousand years, culminating in the demonically atrocious holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis against them during the second world war. Equally, I cannot condone the Israeli nation’s atrocities that have perpetrated against the sematic Palestinian people. Just as I can equally not condone the atrocities carried out by the Palestinians and Hezbollah against Israel and the West. Just as I can never condone the west’s atrocities, under the falls guise of the war against terrorism, against the eastern world. Violence begets violence begets violence begets more violence, a never ending spiral of despair and desolation. Militant Hezbollah must go and they must go peacefully rather than at the end of a gun. If Hezbollah does not relinquish its militancy then they will be guilty of dragging, unwillingly, the entire region into a war that will dwarf the atrocities of the Second World War....

I have never agreed with Hezbollah, especially not with their militant reason d'etre, I have never even sympathized with Hezbollah, always maintaining that they should be disarmed, regardless of the Israeli occupation. For to allow a faction in Lebanon to be the only one that bares arms is an invitation for that faction the right to impose its hegemony. Especially when dealing with the other feudal lords.  However, I have, or had, respected Hezbollah, because they, at least politically, where far less corrupt, and far more honest than all the other pseudo Lebanese politicians, aka feudal lords.  That however, does not mean that I ever agreed with their principles or that I would have allowed myself to follow them.  I did however, respect them, because they were to only force that stood in the way of Israeli aggression and championed the cause of the underdog, the David, manifested in Palestinians, against the goliath, manifested in the Israelis.  But I never had ...

Most Lebanese where not happy with the fact that there still existed a relic of the civil war, armed to the teeth, governing its own territory despite the existence of a national and sovereign Lebanese government, by principle, even amidst the current power vacuum. But we accepted it because the Lebanese military, after the divisive civil war, had been made week and a non-entity and could not face the Israeli or Syrian occupiers. This is not to say that the other factions, the feudal lords of the Christians, Druze or Muslims, where any better. They were corrupt to the core and did not do much for the nation. They were still a menace; it’s just that they were no longer armed. Only Hezbollah remained armed. And only Hezbollah remained standing in the face of a brutal invader who killed, heedlessly, children, women and unarmed civilians under the guise of defense against those who would “drive them in to the sea”, and that is how they sold their war to the west, and especially to the A...

Before I can begin to talk about Hezbollah I should put things in to historical context. Drawing the circumstances that led to the birth of such an entity and the events surrounding it and the Lebanese civil war. Its inevitable relationship to the Arab-Israeli conflict.  But before I begin that I feel compelled to explain my stance on the subject of the entity called Hezbollah. To all western readers; understand that this is a rather complicated subject and that I will not delve in to deeply, because if I do, I will end up writing a multi volume book about the subject. Suffice to say that this is the view and opinion of someone who has lived the civil war and born witness to many of the atrocities of that time and the subsequent distortion of time that followed the politics of these events. For us, the Lebanese, Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization. Rather, Hezbollah is a dangerous relic of the civil war and the greater Arab-Israeli conflict.  It is a historical fact...

A man called Bashir used to walk our street. In the middle of a bombardment, he would start walking the streets laughing, the distinct laugh of a man who had lost it. Lost his mind. gone stark raving mad to walk the street under heavy bombardment, laughing at it as if he were a kid enjoying fireworks. He was such a pitiful site, yet he survived the bombardment and the civil war that ravaged our country, Lebanon, alive, mad as he is. Many called his survival an act of “god”. But why do you think this man went stark raving mad in first place? He survived his family, his wife, his children; they all died in one of the many bombings we were subjected too. They died needlessly, this family which he belonged to in such trying times. He survived while they died. He lost all that he had and loved and cherished and belonged to in such a frightening time, ceased to exist, for no humanly possible valid reason whatsoever. All that this man knew and cared for in this life had ceased to exist. Was...