Opinion Editorials, November 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
Human Price of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine
Israeli daily aggression on the Palestinian people
Mission and meaning of Al-Jazeerah
Cities, localities, and tourist attractions
‘Information’ and ‘Culture’
By Dr. Mohammad T. Al-Rasheed
Arab News, 11/27/03
There is something very strange going on in the Arab world. After decades and decades of information handed over to us by trusty ministries of information, not a single government today is willing to be caught dead with a ministry with such a title. They have either been scrapped altogether or the word “culture” has been added to their appellations.
As your average Arab citizen, I find myself having to deal with yet another trauma. I don’t know about you, but I am reaching the limits of my tolerance. Irony is not a strong local characteristic, so the thought of information going out of the window in an age of information is not really the answer. Or is it the thought of starving us of the information in the said age that is eating me up?
Westerners will probably be baffled by this attitude, but consider that we have been breastfed information from a trusty bosom for so many years. Now that it is not there — at least officially — the lot of us are having withdrawal symptoms.
What is going on? Are we not worth “informing” anymore? Have we been weaned by officialdom without prior warning? How am I (and millions of Arabs) to understand that republicanism is really hereditary in form and substance? Even Plato falls flat on his ancient face on this one.
We have been abruptly weaned and sent into the wilderness of the Net’s landscape for our information. Being of the conspiracy theory generation (more or less unending in the Arab world) I know that conspiracies on the Net mutate faster than bacteria in a piece of rotten French cheese. Now is the time to keep your mental guardian I should think.
Add to all this the mayhem that will be caused by the holy matrimony between “information” and “culture.” Is Picasso’s bawdy personal life, for example, information to be withheld or culture to be disseminated? In the good old days, things were clear and simple. We could, for example, get a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s racy novel “Women in Love” but not a certain copy of The Wall Street Journal. Things were divided, and happily so.
The golden age of “information” has come to an “official” end. I will have to recount its beauty to my grandchildren as I tell them about my favorite subjects: Roman emperors. Rome was a one-off in its madness and purpose in human history.
They might not have had the Net, but they certainly had the web. One such emperor, running dangerously short of money, asked his henchman to go and conduct a new census and bring back the results within 24 hours. He wanted more taxes of course. The resourceful henchman went to the Coliseum and counted spider webs. He multiplied them by the emperor’s years and brought back the number. The emperor got his taxes and his money and the web, as such, has been with us ever since.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03). |
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