A Tale of Two Bookshops

This time around I ventured into Daunt Books, which had caught my attention on an early stroll towards the Wallace Collection. Inside the 'olde worlde' bookshop the first thing I noticed were the new Nabokovs neatly placed on the counter, giving me ample opportunity to leaf through it before the event in the evening. Downstairs they had a good travel section which featured no Daniel Metcalfe but the magazine which featured an article by Bijan Omrani and one by Alexander Morrison. I thought I'd discovered something rather extraordinary but when I opened the door to Alice's place, the issue was staring at me from the armchair- she'd placed it there, she said later, thinking I would enjoy seeing it. I am an open book! Daunt also had what looked like locals with their travel cases on wheels, doing their last minute book-shopping. There was no Nicholas Coleridge to be had.

At the Hatchard's next day I first asked for the Nabokov with renewed interest and all the staff lifted up their heads to look at me like meerkats and said sadly that it had not yet come in. I resolved to buy some Bennett and indeed, another lady was asking for him at the counter. There were a good number of signed copies of books- including Coleridge's Deadly Sins (which I bought) and William Dalrymple (which I thought was too expensive at 20 pounds). Downstairs Adam Thirlwell's Politics was there where I'd left it summer 2008, and there were two ladies talking about the wretched estate agents that harassed them about their 'houses'. One of them was going to some (important) one's house and said proudly that she was 'dining there on 5th December'. Upstairs I sat and read Rory's introduction to Arabian Sands in which he says that only as an Etonian can he understand what Thesiger says when he says 'First Field Colours'. There were also some copies of Metcalfe's book.

Oh my prophetic soul!

A much belated introduction to Robert Byron after my summer 'travel-reading'. Here's an excerpt from his First Russia, Then Tibet, from the first chapter ''The New Jerusalem'

"Should any echo of the laughter provoked by my journeys reach the ears of my Russian friends, they will be able to ignore, or at best pity, such irreverence. Levity is the music that accompanies the European's whoring after false gods, gods which, in fact- and all fact is Marxist- do not exist."

The Spectre of England

The Spectre of England (apres Walcott)

Down the Abrahamic stones of the distant past,
by the mulberry trees that shade the graves that hardly ask for it,
to the sound of thunder that comes from across the border,
he waits, for the sepoy to say something, to divulge
and looks lost into the distance, thinking, building an empire here
destroying one there, vertical like one of the seven pillars
of that proverbial wisdom
(ah, that room above the arch, the arch, the arch, the quad)
fearing he may let pass a word that could
heal.
He passes zebra crossings, watches the traffic lights
until he has come to a table where he can order
strong coffee, mineral water
with a view of a train station long abandoned
in this town of past wrongs beyond repair.
I almost missed him, but there he is
his hand with the up and down motion
of sipping coffe, and in the background
the noise of a hesitant rush hour
his dark blue suit and inner jumper
sensing rain with the coming gale, he stands up to go
this young looking old old man.
II
Walking the washed out walk ways, holding something precious in his breast pocket,
unreachable in his silence
he does not care about the carnage,
his travel companions are talking about. This figure
not quite a man, but this walking stick, this tall straight-line
this tower
from his city of sleeping spires.
The mist is his master, within which
he grew to like, to dislike, to keep silent
- the mist that nurtured him to be vague, in all appearance
and yet be true to his colours.
He enters a church that is blackened with the soot of candles,
and wonders how many said their prayers there.
III
The locals are dark and merry, the library is
in disrepair, his need to read is something palpable, and in the heat
he rushes to the market to find a second-hand shop
that soothes his nerves.
He grabs Anna Karenina in Russian and walks to a cafe
The youths are smiling under their brilliantined hair, the girls are dressed to the nines
The waiters are listless as they offer delicacies, the policemen stroll about
He sits there and shuts out everything,
indifferent to a world that tries to impress.
His postcards home are one-liners
as they have taught him not to care,
not to take to heart much what one sees
On his way to his rooms
he watches the traffic revolving around the opera house
and thinks he hears a familiar note
reaching him from within the closed shutters
His is an innate music of the mind that needs no strings.
Entering his room he sees the poster he bought in London sometime ago
Thinking it perfect for his kind of digs
His paper kinsmen stare at him from across the room
All is well with the world.
Think of the worlds torn apart, burnt, destroyed
Think of the splatters of blood, ash caused
By all this well-ness that fills your room
With the power he no longer has he looks at me askance
“Really N! I am not the beast you make me out to be”
IV
His forehead creased and be-freckled
He envisions the gorge, the river bed
The poplars bending over it, the little caravan
swifts flying overhead in concert.
The old Greek temple stands, full of tourist
And forever, that girl with the flower-tiara
It is as it should be, girls, hair and flowers
All this he sees in his mind’s eye
And now it comes to him as an aftermath, an afterthought
of the pillage, of the spoils of his silent war.
He picks and chooses
The figures that decorate his memory
And himself, vertical, on a straight path, not wavering
one wee bit.
The forehead creases- it is sometimes to much of a strain
To record images without a word to tag
To turn into some kind of story.
A vast sea of unseen sights stretch before him
As he plans his next foray into the wild
Silently, swiftly, he builds another frame, another altar
To his unfathomable gods.

Good Old Muscle Power

So, a friend of mine has returned to university after she'd abandoned it ten years ago because of the headscarf ban- in the interim she married and had two children. Now, the ban is still in place in some universities, sometimes only in some buildings of some universities- evidence of the arbitrary nature of the whole thing. So my friend takes a couple of exams and yesterday as she is about to sit another, the janitor stands in her way with a no pasaran. She tells him he has no authority to stop her as he is not of administrative stock. But he is keen to make his citizen's arrest. Luckily, my friend's husband is with her and he physically pushes the janitor aside. The janitor can't now do aught and my friend sits the exam. I am now thinking taekwando can largely improve the educational lives of Turkish Muslim girls.

Confederacy of Asses- or the Cult of the Communicative Bums- or Ode to Pitless Bottoms

From Baburname:
"On reaching Khwaja Sih-yaran there was a wine-party. Today orders were written and despatched by Kich-kina, the night watch, to the Begs North of the Hindu Kush. Giving them a rendezvous and saying 'An army is being got to horse, take thought, and come to the rendezvous fixed"

When all else fails, blame the Germans

The Coalition Forces (or is that the name they assume in Iraq?) have massacred 70 Afghans in Kunduz. The BBC has been running the news with pictures of American military personnel visiting the wounded in the hospital, all the while re-iterating that it was the Germans who gave the order to 'exterminate'. Oh what a lovely war!

Vereschagin- Samarqand

almost looks Art Nouveau

Journeying in Arabian Deserts

The ides of August finds me translating a chapter on Prophet Muhammad's (p.b.u.h.) hijrat - journey from Mecca to Madina- and reading Thesiger's travels in the 'empty quarter'. It is very interesting to read similar descriptions- waterskins covered with cloth, milking strangers' camels or goats, and again strangers appearing from nowhere to inform you about the road or your enemy's movements.
Not long before Ramadan now.

Here's a fresh look on Rory

This is on his Places in Between. The arguments may come in handy if for some reason I start disliking him at one point:

The argument of this book is that the people of Afghanistan are aggressive, primitive savages, something less than real people, animals who need the civilising hand of foreign domination to bring them to the promised land - which seems to amount to something like the mid-Victorian British empire.

Stewart travels to 'unknown' places that writers have been describing for decades, and produces cliches in ranks - they only appear fresh to us because the writing style he copies is itself so dated that nobody else writes like that any more.

Cricket

It was always difficult to get another women's team to play and that day our luck had turned- almost. The other college's team was a woman short and so we had technically won, but there was going to be a friendly anyway. So our captain looked through the ranks to, possibly, give the other one what she considered a liability. The least sporty of the team were me and a girl with an Irish accent 'Nagihan can bowl pretty well, she should go for it' she said all of a sudden. I was rather happy to be playing at all, and so I went over to the other team.

As it is, what the girl was saying turned out to be true- sort of. When it was my turn to bowl I gave it my all and yet when the ball hit the ground, it had no life left in it, and it sort of sauntered towards the wicket and I wondered whether it would even make it to the line. But then, taken unawares by this slow progress the batswoman lost sight of it and pop it went to the wicket under her very nose and hit it! The other college's team couldn't quite believe their luck and they all came to me and did the whole cricket tap on the shoulder, 'Good show' sort of thing. I protested that I wasn't good at all and that it was a freak incident, the ball hadn't even bounced. The captain of the team said assuredly "Bouncing is overrated".

Then my 'trick' repeated itself a number of times, because really, I had no armpower whatsoever. After securing the team's 'friendly' victory I was out and I approached the boys who were keeping the score. All our coaches (who were all male) had gathered together on this day- I had never seen them so all together and they were quite a sight with their public school boy
(h)airs and cricket sweaters. They had enormous smirks on their faces and were laughing totally absorbed with themselves. They had not seen me coming. When I approached them in order to get into the pavillion for water I heard one of them say sarcastically "Whatever you say, cricket's the winner". Then he lifted his head up from the score log where he was scribbling beside my name and saw me and for a moment his face froze with guilt. The others first looked at him and then at me. I smiled and said 'I should say it is'.

Past Imperfect

Reading about Fellowes' account of his characters' infamous night somewhere between Estoril and Cascais, I felt the obligation to write down my own not so scandalous but memorable evening on the very same shores. Nostalgia is a terribly contagious thing.

It was, naturally, another conference, my very first in fact. As is the tradition with conferences that run a week long there is a climax that usually comes midweek- an outing, a dinner that the hosts provide. Our Portuguese hosts had thought that this should be a dinner at the Estoril Casino. We took the slow train from Cascais - on the way back we'd realized it was quite within walking distance- and got off at Estoril, and the casino was quite unmissable, at the end of a park that sprawled all the way to the rail tracks which were right by the rocky shore. We took photographs in the fading light as everyone had dressed up more or less and we wanted to have documents to prove it later I suppose. As we approached the grand entrance I felt upbeat and said something to the effect of 'It could be interesting. We could see someone famous or something.' 'The Devil?' J interjected gleefully as he always liked to check how much the ways of European heathens gave me discomfort. As usual, I only smiled.

Passing the ever so sorry looking slot machines we moved into the great salon and were seated in some sort of balcony. It was pretty dark as the first course arrived- some kind of onion soup. We had contrived to sit across a very funny English academic and were trying our best to bring the 'absent-minded professor' in him. Then there was light on the stage and a boring array of men and women appeared dressed as tropical fruits. In the din, there was no way I could ask the waiter whether they had a vegetarian option and with the English prof's performance rather dull this evening I considered making an early exit, though I had no idea how I would go back to Cascais on my own at that hour. I looked at the slobs of meat the others were eating and then turned right to see that the female dancers were taking their tops off. I took this to be my exit cue and excused myself promptly and when I turned my back to the table to go J was trying to shout from behind 'But how are you going to....' Indeed, I did not know, but it was nice to get out into the fresh air. I loitered a bit in the park, and then decided I should brave the walk to Cascais. Once I had taken that decision I saw another group leaving the place and a rather worried J said 'We looked everywhere for you!' and another one of them added 'Yes, well, there was mass exodus after the second course, I don't think the entertainment helped'.
And so we all merrily walked back to our hotel in Cascais.

The Empire Does NOT Stop Here

So I have been spending quite a bit of time on amazon lately and it keeps throwing writers at me, and this evening it's Philip Parker. I google to get to know him better and there's a guardian podcast. Excellent. The startled interviewer asks 'I did not know, for instance, that Romania was part of the Roman Empire' (come off it whatever substance it is you are on- look at the name woman!) Anyhow, she has presence enough to ask the million dollar question 'Could you compare the Roman Empire with any examples we know of today?' Philip toys with the idea of China when it comes to population but then concedes: 'The British Empire at its height would be something comparable". And on that note the podcast ends. Gimme a break.
Bring on the Gibbon.

Reporting from Antandrus, the Aegean Coast

Having recently read in the Tatler that when it comes to beachwear you cannot beat the triangular bikini (market research I was carrying out for a friend of a friend) I headed down to the Aegean with my family who had packed up my beach-bag for me because I was otherwise engaged in northern climes. This is our first experience at a mixed-beach, and strangely one that caters to practicing Muslims. Which means there are a lot of what has been named 'burqinis' on the ground.
What my mother chose to buy for me is a very orange affair that no doubt would qualify me for the national Indian hijabi swimming team. Baggy trousers and a loose long sleeved top with a zipper that looks like a footballer's training suit- which, it turns out, is very last year, or very last decade as I discovered on the beach when I saw all manner of burquinis, from the very sporty looking to the dandy.

The Horror, The Horror

An American journalist describes the refugee camps she has seen in 'Witness to War' on CNN (a programme whose short trailer that appears every five minutes contains three mosques in Istanbul interspersed with ruined Afghan monuments. Sloppy journalism? Hey, here are some pictures of nice mosques, let's use them!) She describes "acres and acres of makeshifT tents with children crying and having no one to turn to..." (and even some more melodramatic jargon I can't remember now) to the accompaniment of pictures of children scrambling for food.

Here's what Jean Rhys has to say about it all:

"Let’s say that you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple – no, that I think you haven’t got. And that’s the right you hold most dearly, isn’t it? You must be able to despise the people you exploit. "

Deformation Professionelle

"The protagonist herself does not know where to place her own body in the social order so that it may have meaning. She starts to perceive herself through the eyes of the others as '(re)presenting a problem', is forced to relinquish her status as a legitimate subject and perceives herself as an object"

ooops! this is supposed to be chapter 3 of my thesis, not a diary

Afghanistan and Englishmen

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."

- Rudyard Kipling, extract from the poem "A Young British Soldier" published in "Barrack Room Ballads", 1892.

Cambridge

I was thoroughly ill. It must have been the same year as Chawton, I can't even begin to calculate the year. I arrived in the town in mist, the conference was a bit of a blur, and then the clearest moment of the whole day was actually the evening meal at the I believe Thai restaurant. There was an Irish prof trying to chat up an Austrian postdoc. There was a lovely elegant Southafrican professor who was telling me about Muslims in Johannesburg. And then my concoction arrived. I had never, nor ever have later, tasted such scorchingly bitter ginger tea before. I am sure it did me a world of good. And then to catch the train (was I really returning to Bromley? Good Grief!) I had the people at the reception call a taxi for me. I don't remember whether the taxi arrived at all. But I remember getting out of the restaurant and being hit by the cold winter night, huddled in my wool scarf, I remember making my way through narrow streets with tunnels of car lights darting this way and that. And I remember the sense of utter lostness- I was just going the direction most people seemed to be going and some compass in me seemed to be saying this was the general direction towards the station. I do not know what made me so reckless. But I seem to have picture of myself from the outside, keeping close to a stone wall as I am half illuminated by a passing car, my head bowed in what seems to be a still from some black and white comic book. Strange tricks of memory.

Ode to the Swivel Chair, a-la-Nicholson Baker

After my mid-morning walk I was thinking of writing an ode to the horse chestnut tree as they are now in full beautiful bloom in Etiler (and many was the day when we used the horse chestnuts as ammunition or tennis balls as dictated by our fancy) but here's an ode to the swivel chair.
A screw has, yet again, come undone, this time from the side facing the table. Now Baker would have calculated the number of hours spent on the chair, which side one was more likely to shift one's weight more, whether the position towards the table or the window would be more susceptible to coming undone.
I have already lost one of the screws, so the chair is surviving on three, I am guessing two is also managable, but when it is one, the chair is probably non-useable.
So goes Baker's Mezzanine, which is a very clever book, but which also takes forever to read, do not be misled by the slender volume. I have interspersed it with Zizek, Asad, Soueif and what not, and the last 30 pages are still quite resistant. I have already embarked on Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate.

Vereschagin - Russia and The East

Delivering a paper on Russia and the East, I did not even know about the existence of Vereschagin, whose painting you see above has little to do with his eastern themes, except for the tromp d'oeil effect he likes to go for. In the Tretyakov Gallery I realized only after listening to the commentary that on the painting that stands to the right of this one, the Tashkent scene he depicts has a number of severed heads stuck on poles as a 'mullah' is giving a speech surrounded by them. The hand itches for another paper!

German Faces, Russian Faces

"There are genocides happening today, and they are being shot off the front pages by Nazi cows - Nazi cows! - and interviews with Mortensen talking about playing a depressed Nazi: "I spent a lot of time in Germany just looking at people." Really? Five million have died in the Congo in the last 10 years, in a war for the minerals that we use. And Heil Honey I'm Home! has nothing to say about that."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/23/nazi-culture-film-hitler

what an oppurtune article that speaks to my disparate observations in Moscow.
Mortensen- I was talking about his Eastern Promises at the conference, and as I was listening to another participant giving his paper about how Russian nationalism fared in the face of the Russian adoration of all things French, he seemed strangely familiar to me (and I know no Russians) and then I realized some of his facial gestures were exactly like the Mortensen character I'd been talking about. I'm guessing Mortensen also spent a lot of time in Russia just looking at people. Hats off! Now I'll have to go an see his depressed Nazi.

THE Embittered Marxist

On the sunniest day of my visit to Moscow I was at a conference where I could follow only half of what was going on. But I could follow the man in the picture alright, with rebuttals in Russian and English to everyone who spoke. His remark to my paper about 'everyone having their own East' was "I think the Muslims and the Orthodox are no where comparable, I don't think you'll find our youth, Orthodox youth protesting on the streets of Paris even twenty years from now". But the Marxist in him came out when I picked one of the above seen bottles of water to fill out a glass. He said I should take the whole bottle, and I said one glass was enough to which he retorted "Oh please, take the whole bottle by all means (he did have occasional English mannerisms), now if it was our American friend who needed the water, he would have taken the whole bottle without asking." The American, one of the three people who gave their papers in English, simply smiled. I could only say "Do you mean to say that I have also failed in etiquette by not properly asking you? (which I really hadn't)" to at least try to make myself as culpable as the American (Moscow makes strange bedfellows) But then the silly conversation stopped, and when it was his time to give his paper, a number of younger Russian students challenged him, which my lovely translator summarized at the end as "They have just had a very interesting discussion about nationalism" Excellent. Now I know what I missed.

An Unexpected Find

A Russian dissident sits across from me in the park.
He must be a dissident because
he's Russian, and he's
here
in New York City.
Does he know that Central Park
is
muggers only
after dark?

(Ahdaf Soueif)

A Boston Encounter

Ecce Polis! We are riding a tram, huddled into a wintercoats, and we're returning from seeing a nice play in a nice university town. There are a group of girls frolicking at the back, singing, dancing and my companion asks me whether I remember a time being so carefree and doing such things. "Well, a couple of weeks ago when I was in London..." I start to tell her. She is an established psychologist and has been telling me about her patients half of whom happen to be musicians - professional or amateur. She sees one of them at the metro station now and then. By this time the girls have turned up their volume and the Rabindranath Marx looking guy sitting in front of me who has been listening to our conversation revolving around the play (Beckett's End Game) since we got on the tram with eager interest now starts to make eyes at me. No, of course not that way, he's got his girlfriend by his side but Rabindranath, let's call him Ed, with his Marxist beard and grey tweed coat suggesting the 1930's thinks me, for some reason, equally inconvenienced as he is by the girls. He probably has guessed that I have been sending Embittered Marxists left and right on facebook and wants to capitalize on this familiarity.
Then the girls leave. He takes a theatrical sigh of relief, clasps his master of the revels hands together and announces, bass "Now, our next act..."
"Yourself maybe" I venture.
At the next stop, taking a half bow, he gets off the tram.

An Atlanta Encounter

Since there is not much to be seen in Atlanta (except for Stone Mountain of course where we went to encounter a plantation but managed only to see the back seat of an American police car, more of that maybe later) I spent most of my time socializing, almost Oxford-style, bench hopping and trying to raise my voice above the din. At one dinner party with a German-language poster like Democles's sword over us, we ate, we discussed Iraq, Vietnam and Israel. And right after everyone had managed to upset everyone else, a number of us took their leave and one among us with a decidedly public school education (no matter which or where) and one that had tried to calm everyone during the debate retired to a darker corner of the room and asked the gentleman of the house "We shall smoke?" We had not quite realized that the event was black tie.
I met the same public school graduate, whom we shall call Snap's Master, at another party whose themes this time ranged from food-poisoning death to whether as a child one had been oiled and massaged. Love, too, came up, and as one of those present was sort of lamenting that his brother was in love with a Pakistani girl Snap's Master asked like nothing "Is she brown?" and then told us about the various nannies he had had, named after various fruits and flowers.

A New York Encounter

What better way to spend the one Sunday you have in New York than to buy yourself a camera which should enable you to shoot your own news reports, thought my cousin. She had thought the same about the Saturday, but she had been recommended to go and shop at the B&H which, she found out later, was run by orthodox Jews and so no luck on Saturday. And so I come in fresh from Atlanta and so it is Sunday morning with us and a shop full of kippa wearing salesmen- men, of course. There's also a Metropolis like pulley and train system right above our heads, carrying I don't know what I don't know where.
So we munch on our kosher sweets, and two of the salesmen are very keen to get my cousin the best deal, when the sickly looking one disappers, we get into a convo with the healthy looking one, he asks where we are from and says 'So, reporting live from Turkey, eh?" "Eh" my cousin concurs. "Reporting more, like, from New York, from a shop that closes on Saturdays" I say. He laughs and adds "Well, you know, not only is the shop closed on Saturdays, but the website is down as well". Hats, kippas, headscarves off. The Spanish tourists are watching our conversation with hidden glee. Then the sickly salesman appears. He wants in on the conversation. "So where are you from?" he asks.
This time we want to play it. "Guess" we tell him. First he smiles signifying impossibility. My cousin says the inevitable cliche "Somewhere between the East and the West". He smiles impossibility for one more second, but then the cliché has worked and he says "Turkey?" We are now in a full-blown conversation. We want to take it somewhere but we don't know where. I venture "So where are you from?" "New York" he says. I try to push it a little to find some common ground and ask "And your people?" . "New York" he says again. In the sociality of the moment I loose grip of the situation and ask as I do any American "How about in Europe? Where are they from in Europe?" His look tells me before he says anything that I am touché. "Germany and Poland".
Silence.
"Interesting, I spent two years in Heidelberg" is not going to cut it this time.

An Exegesis of Shoe Throwing

Yesterday a secular crowd gathered in Taksim to bid farewell to Bush. Turkish Communist Party among them. They had pictures of Bush and they were throwing their shoes at his likeness.
Now this makes me think of a recent debate on Turkish television. You have to know that Turks are religion obsessed. Some spend their life fearing it. Some spend their life defending it. But most spend their life asking incredibly creative questions like "So if I chew gum with no flavour when I fast, do I have to re-fast one day after Ramadan?". The latest debate revolved around the question of whether the ritual of 'throwing stones' at the 'likeness of the devil' (which happens to be a stone wall) was an essential part of the Hajj. The reformists were saying No, the traditionalists were saying Yes.
I think last night's scene provides argument for the Yea-sayers, secular or religious, throwing things at something you don't like seems to be a genetic tendency in human kind, and its therapeutic effects cannot be underestimated.

The Fight Against Terrorism, The Fight Against Wind Mills

As Cervantes would've said, this story is not mine. So there will be similar errors and subfuscations in my telling. A friend just came back from a 'Gulf State' where they had a meeting of sorts for muslims, of sorts. A group wanted to add a paragraph about condemning Israel's actions in Gaza to the final declaration, but they were told, by the American (of sorts - Muslim) organizing committee that the meeting - a meeting that had the title ''Is political Islam a threat to the West?" for one of its panels - was NOT a political gathering and so it wasn't appropriate to speak about Palestine. There was much food and drink, the whole thing was a great Hollywood production of exquisite script followed to the letter, one that could put Obama's inauguration in the shade (bear with me). She also met a certain American Abraham (religious persuasion insignificant) who ended up in the same plane with her heading, let's say, to the most beautiful city in the world (yes, you can read into my partiality).
This Abraham had 5 hours to spend in the most beautiful city in the world before he took another plane to the US and asked my friend whether she had time to show him around. My friend did not, and her refusal probably set the tone for the rest of the day's events. We will never know what happened to Abe in those 5 hours. But by the time he got to the airport he was very tense, so tense that once he boarded the plane he decided he didn't like the look of one passanger. Later in the police station his excuse was that this particular man had a coat on - oh horror of horrors!- although the weather was warm. He insisted on getting off the plane. The plane was searched and nothing found. The flight was delayed for two hours.

In the greater scheme of things, I think Abe, corresponds to the Harlequin in The Heart of Darkness, flailing his arms about, his mind 'enlarged' by all the conferences he attends about political Islam that are not political.

The Book of Numbers

Srebrenica. 8200...
Gaza. 1203...

Heart of Israel

A former Israeli minister says that unlike Hamas, Israel is 'not trying to target civilians'. It is the 'idea' that counts, he tells us, not the actual 900 people dead.
What redeems it is the idea only.

Mistah Kurtz, he not dead
a penny for the old guy

Pestilence

UrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfaGazzeUrfa

La Question Humaine (or please leave Europe to its own demons)

A nostalgic film about how all evil in Europe can be neatly traced back to the Nazis. One of the comments on the imdb website says that the viewer has understood 'why EU was launched and why we need it now more than ever'. So that executives from good European families can come together to form their own orchestras to play Schubert? Capital reason! And also so that black illegal workers can be efficiently picked up from Turkish bistros (interesting detaille) and put into custody so that intellectuals have enough space to do the serious business of gestating over the second world war. Another bout of psychose europeenne.

Joyeux Noel!