"Should I Leave Without A Past?"
An Iraqi blogger recalls the restrictions on the use of cameras under Saddam, and laments that nothing has changed:
But where do I take pictures? I was thinking two days ago about places to which I would connect; some spot on the Tigris bank, where my friends and I used to barbeque in the old days? No, I can’t, because if I want to do so, I have to go to Adhamiya or Kadhimiya neighborhoods. I can’t go to both, the first is a Sunni neighborhood where insurgents find feather pillows and silky bed sheets to rest after a long day of killing people. And the second is a Shiite neighborhood, where the idea of being arrested as a man called Omar [a Sunni name] and for taking pictures on the river bank is just terrifying. Ok then, I should go to take pictures near a monument? No, because if I want to do so the monuments would be either inside the Green Zone, where I cant take pictures even if I enter it, or outside the Green Zone but near Iraqi forces checkpoints, where I cant take pictures.Read the rest here.
I was thinking; I miss my city when I am living in it. And I don’t have anything to remind me of it when I leave! Is that possible? I mean should I leave without a past? Why? When I want to flashback my last 27 years, I can’t?
posted by The Cunning Realist at Sunday, May 14, 2006
3 Comments:
I read the rest of his post, and I read the comments. Some of the stuff in there, especially the stuff about the libraries burning, is enough to make one cry. History will judge the Bush Administration harshly, but it will judge us, who sat idly by and let it happen, harsher still.
Libraries with manuscripts dating back to the Ottoman Empire burned. Libraries burned! I can't put into to words how sad, and angry that makes me. Innocent people dead, history up in smoke... Bush's Iraq seems no better than Saddam's Iraq...
May I respectfully suggest the blogger quit worrying about taking pictures and concentrate instead on building the new Iraq that accepts Israel?
Hmm... I think the blogger's issues were deeper than taking pictures. The inability to take pictures is, I think, a symptom of the problem. Furthermore, Israel would be accepted far easier by its neighbours if it started treating all of the people within its borders as equals.
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