Let’s spring out of the dark pond

Last week was yet another shock in a 2015 which is a bit too rich in tragedies. However, what do we call a tragedy? A killing which involves Europeans or Westerners? Human Rights seem to have a universal value only insofar as it concerns us…And as long as this is the case, the barbarians who commit these crimes will be fuelled by our own indignation and will keep perpetrating their other crimes without much media coverage.

We are Charlie, We are the Kosher Supermarket, We are the Bardo indeed, but when the hell are we the Baga victims of Nigeria, the Christian Syrians and the Dalit women being raped by rule of birth…? When are we discriminated gays in Indiana? When are we these working girls from French suburbs who have to leave home covered with a hijab and dress like a human being in a café to go working without being afraid of the hooligans in their neighbourhood? I saw a very sincere Canadian lady cry over the menace of Quebec law on secularity….How could we indeed be so cruel as not to let a woman out of her free will decide to cover herself totally? What such dedicated scholars forget is simply the feminine dignity which is being offended whenever a woman has to hide. For the sake of human rights, we are forgetting women rights.

I was asked by a friend to react on the posting of the interview at the Bardo of Tunisian President who claimed that Israel was outside the legal international law…How am I supposed to react?

As a Jew, I’d like to say this is nonsense, but is it? The continued reinforcement of settlements, the fact that Palestinians are confined in a highly militarized territory, the inscription of the ethnic identity on Israeli passports, the double-standard of citizenship of Palestinians and Israelis in the recognized Israel boundaries…are these things, we Jews could ever identify with?

This is not the judaism I was brought up into. I was made to believe that having suffered over 2000 years of discrimination made us more permeable to other peoples’ sufferings. What I see today in Israel are wonderful individuals whom I dearly love and who openly agree there needs to be a two-state solution, yet a majority of them vote for someone who, in order to win the last elections, specifically promised not to achieve this solution.

We are one world, with many different colours, way of life and beliefs, but isn’t it high time we all agreed that men and women are equal? that Israelis and Palestinians have the same blood groups, bones and respiratory system? that we Jews have a right to exist and love Israel with all its shortcomings?

I feel more cosmopolitan than ever and no one will ever be able to corner me into a single identity and most of you reading me are exactly the same. No matter how far you are rooted in a territory, you have ancestors who travelled and yourself travelled if only by the grace of digitality and are uprooted now. In any case, if you read me now, it means you are a world citizen and thing globally. I feel hit when Palestinians throw missiles over Tel-Aviv, when Terrorists hit Charlie or the kosher supermarket and when they attack my forefathers’ country Tunisia, but I also feel hit when other populations are hit as we are one world.

So let’s just spring out of this darkness and rejoice at the world’s beauty and complexity. No answer can be unilateral except to terror which has no excuse, no BUT, Mr. Ramadan.

In researching for a photo of the Bardo, I found out there’s another one in Algiers…I visited

the Tunisian one but not the latter. I wonder how come both have the same name and suspect it has something to do with their location. If some linguist or anyone really has an explanation, I’d love to hear about it as given the large coverage of Wednesday March 18th massacre, I couldn’t find it.

Let’s turn to our common humanity, talk about cooking and enjoying to be together for the upcoming Passover and Easter….indeed, let’s pass over our small and unfortunately too meaningful differences and realize how close we are in reality as this video which I owe to my friend Laurence, depicts so clearly…

Looks like they blocked the video so here is the link: 

http://m.demotivateur.fr/article-buzz/deux-squelettes-s-embrassent-et-dansent-devant-une-foule-quand-ils-sortent-de-derri-re-l-cran-je-n-ai-pas-pu-m-emp-cher-de-sourire–2024

 I’d like to conclude this rather moody paper on a commonsense remark that media are blood thursty. See what happened when the cyclone devastated the Vanuatu archipelago on March 14th, not even ten days ago yet totally forgotten by us all….When it was meant to have killed thousands, it was at the front page. When we discovered that thanks to the Indigenous People’s way to build their houses and knowledge of cataclysms, there were “only” 6 casualties most of whom happened in structures we, westerners, had implemented on the archipelago, it stopped being front page. But why? isn’t it extraordinary that the First Nations do have a knowledge we, the so-called civilised, have forgotten? Shouldn’t it be celebrated and praised? So in their honor and for the sake of traditional Shan People of Burma, let me give you some sense of beauty and tradition….promising more…next time -)