Who Am I?

I am the Iraqi child of Fallujah you exposed to cancer with your depleted uranium.

I am the Palestinian women whose olive tree you uprooted and kids you left starving.

I am the Afghan man who has only seen years of brutal Soviet war and now US occupation.

I am the Iraqi man you shot dead at a checkpoint because you felt like it.

I am the Palestinian family you forcibly removed from their home.

I am the widowed Afghan whose land you continue to occupy and children you continue kill.

I am the Iraqi women you raped in the name of liberation.

I am the prisoner you tortured at Abu Ghraib and Bagram in the name of democracy.

I am the civilian in Iraq you named ‘collateral damage’ and left to rot.

I am the Palestinian school child you prevented from getting to school with your apartheid roads forcing me to wait hours at a checkpoint and miss class.

I am the Afghan woman you so wish to liberate, except you can leave your liberation in the trash can where it belongs.

I am the Muslim man you accused of being a terrorist, water-boarded and locked up in Guantanamo without parole.

I am the victim of your so called war on terror.

I am the shadow that walks alone.

I am the one that haunts your dreams.

How can you go to sleep with the bloody image of me in the back of your mind?

I am Palestine. I am Iraq. I am Afghanistan.

Academics should be on the side of Justice.

My life for the last six weeks has been but a blur of images and words. Sometimes we just get so caught up in things that we actually forget to live; forget to take a step back and just chill out. Today for the first day I am chilling out. But before I chill out I need to have a rant about two things that really got under my skin...

So I was working on an essay for the past couple of days;  of course I had left it to the last minute and was up at early hours of the morning frantically trying to get things together, but whatever; students will never change. So I was reading a chapter of a book, it was a feeble defence of capitalism, when I get to a sentence that said this “It is reasonable to give more weight to the life of a British than an Iraqi soldier. But not to give the Iraqi no weight at all”. Of course at first this enraged me and made want to rip out the page but I thought I would leave it in so whoever was to read it after me would see how much of an idiot the author is. It is really disgusting that people still spout these horrendous arguments as if they are justified. You can never put another human life over another, no matter how imperialistic or superior you think you may be; it is unjustified. It’s just barbaric. And not only is the author placing the British over Iraqis but he had audacity to go as far as to assure us that Iraqi lives have some weighting. PA-LEASE, as if we need him to tell us that we are not worthless in order to be accepted. It’s a dirty game he is playing; the same the occupier plays on a daily basis. Sick, sick minded people.

The second ridiculous thing I read was an argument in favour of a socialist/communitarian society, but this was no ordinary socialist community, it was a community in ISRAEL! Fascist, Apartheid Israel. The Zionist was trying to claim that this community was widely admired for taking on important roles and performing functions such as reclaiming the land, aiding Jewish self-defence and ‘normalizing’ the occupational structure of the Jewish people. I seriously could not believe what I was reading; it was absolutely disgusting! This author was muddying the socialist argument by trying to look to Israel as an exemplar and along the way totally ignoring Israel’s Apartheid laws, siege of gaza and just the utter colonisation and destruction of an entire nation! How do these people go to sleep at night?!

This then made me think about academics and academia as a whole. Being the geek I am I usually hold all books in high regard; after all, the author did take his/her time out to write a couple hundred pages so they must have something worthwhile to say. Even if they are known to be on the wacky side I still think they deserve to be given a chance to be read and have their arguments criticised that way rather than being written off from the outset. (Though, I think I am guilty of writing off Ayan Hirsi Ali without reading her books... but COME ON, can anyone blame me?!?). It is a bit worrying however that a whole lot of academics are not really on the side of Justice though; they are not on the side of the people. They represent an elite, an elite that places itself above all others and assumes it has the end all be all conclusions of the world. And when you go against the grain, take Norman Finkelstein for instance, you are then isolated and stripped of your rights. Norman Finkelstein should be a role model for every academic. Academics should be on the side of justice, on the side of the people. We spend a lot of our time reading their work and they have the power to actually change the way people thing, they should use that. But instead, slowly day by day our ‘free’ education system is being eroded with censorship of what they don’t want the people to read and support of academia that furthers Imperial power and its agenda. I really do fear for what things will be like in the future; if the only academics that are able to succeed are those that fill the status quo the world will be a very, very chilling place. 

What will become of us?...

Dubai is a place that always gets me thinking. Thinking about Arabs, thinking about Muslims and the Ummah, and thinking about what we have all become. This place always opens my eyes up to the depressing realities we are faced with. I made a few observations in Dubai that spoke to a bigger picture, the last being particularly disheartening.


After an extremely long and uncomfortable flight we arrive in Dubai and are about to line up to get our visas/passports stamped. My mother and I were, in a strong Iraqi accent, discussing which line to go and stand in when one of the men working at the airport approaches us and asks what kind of passports we have. He was obviously expecting us to tell him we have Iraqi passports and was quite surprised when I told him our passports were foreign. By foreign, I mean Western. Now, this little occurrence is very telling, it speaks to a broader theme of treatment in airports depending on the type of passport you have, ultimately the nationality you are recognised with. In the Arab world Western passports are privelleged, if you have a Western passport you are treated like a star. Had I told the man we had Iraqi passports and were using these to enter Dubai, it would have been a very different story, our treatment would have been VERY different. There is a huge social stigma around Iraqi's and Iraqi passports at airports. We would have had to wait in a different line and apply for a visa or have had this previously organised, whereas with a Western passport visas are granted on the spot along with a complementary smile and welcome. Now, isn’t it odd for states to treat their fellow muslim or arab brothers and sisters with such disregard, well, you would think so but it happens all too often in most countries in the Middle East. What angers me is the double standard here. Why should I be treated any better than another Iraqi who does not hold a foreign or Western passport, I mean essentially we are the same. We have had this happen in many other countries all over the Middle East, we are treated like stars while other Iraqi's are treated like dirt, but what makes me any better? The flashing of a passport should in no way determine your treatment. If anything Iraqi's who lived through the war should be treated better, those of us who have foreign passports grew up outside and never saw the atrocities they saw.  This, in my opinion, speaks to the bigger issue that the Muslim Ummah is divided and remains to be. We treat those who have othered us and looked down on us with the respect we really should be treating our brothers and sisters with. Not only that, but we try to speak the language of the Empire - the language of violence and exclusion, and this ultimately leads to the othering of our own people. 


Another quick observation which I always make as soon as I touch down in the Middle East, is the way they treat the workers and maids etc. I mean, the men who load your bags into the car at the airport, could you not just be nice to them? Why do Arabs have to put themselves above these people? Is it because the West has looked down on us for so long that we need to look down and ‘other’ others to make up for our treatment? Two wrongs certainly don’t make a right. People don’t realise that God could have easily put them in the other position but he didn’t because he is testing them with the privilege they have been given. The general lifestyle of people in Dubai is very luxurious, way too over the top in my opinion. Am I the only arab that doesn’t like the luxuries of Dubai? Possibly. I really don’t understand why it is so hard for people to understand that I would rather sit and read and write (or even stare at the walls!!) than go out and consume overpriced food, sit in overly fancy restaurants, buy unnecessary things and engage in meaningless conversations when my brothers and sisters all around the world have almost nothing. I am just not interested. Don’t get me wrong, its not that I am anti-social, I would prefer to call myself ‘selectively-social’. Take me to a museum or a good book shop or take me to sit in a park and talk politics and I am so there. But when it’s unnecessary and extravagant - count me out.


During one of these moments in Dubai where we were sitting in a overpriced fancy restaurant engaging in quite pointless small talk, something bigger came up, the issue of boycotting Israel and Starbucks in particular. Now you'd think that people being aware of the issue having grown up on this side of the world wouldnt be so blatant in their indifference. Actually, it was more than indifference, it was almost supportive of starbucks. So obviously I am the one who is going on about the boycotting and Israel and Palestine etc and the most of the adults on the table, after some arguing, were able to acknowledge that starbucks is something to be boycotted but had excuses like 'but their tea is so good' and 'I tried to boycott but I couldn't', you know, typical stuff that people come up with. So the discussion that follwed was what left me dumbfounded. A girl, about 16 years old, said she didnt care where her money was going as long as she gets a good coffee, she expressingly said she didnt care what they used the money for and that she had no part to play because she was buying coffee and only that. Now, not only did this enrage me, but it also worried me, worried me for the future. If we have youth with this sort of mindset now, what will things be like later? The youth are the adults of tomorrow. What will things be like in 10 years time, what will become of us? I really hope the snowball effect is not what we are heading towards, however, sometimes I do get the felling we are heading down that path after having spoken to youth and seen the huge gaps in their knowledge regarding the Palestinian cause. Never in my life have I heard anyone say somethig of such content and with such confidence, I mean there is a huge difference between finding it hard to stop buying coffee from starbucks and straight up not caring about what the money you paid for starbucks is used for. If we let them control our minds and let them convince us that the tea is too good to stop buying or if we start to think that we cant do anything by boycotting then we have lost the battle before its even begun.


I dont know. Right now I am angry, I cant stop sneezing and I haven't slept for a very long time. I dont feel like I am making much sense either. So, with that, I will end here. But in the mean time though we need to encourage people to treat their fellow brothers and sisters with respect no matter what their passport and we need to start treating our workers (if any) with moral respect. Lastly we need to figure out how to open up a coffee place called "Intifada-bucks" and make it just as successful as Zion-bucks, or something...

First post... Hello blogging world!

So I’ve been meaning to start a blog for some time now and I’ve finally managed to find the time and brain space to do so. I have a lot of things to say, things most of which I simply cannot find a circle of people who are genuinely interested in or share similar thoughts, may it be political or apolitical. Hence, thought this would be something beneficial to start. I am yet to find a good handful of people who are on the same wavelength as me in this world, the few who already exist in my life I can count on one hand. Quite disheartening really, the apathy all around me almost makes me want to give up at times.

Why Tears of Tigris? The Tigris River was one of the greatest rivers, part of ancient Mesopotamia, along with the Euphrates River. These rivers were character of a place now long gone – ‘The Cradle of Civilisation’.  All the ancient cities of Mesopotamia were built on the banks of this river and modern day Baghdad is an outcome of this.  Unfortunately this is the same river that flowed with blood during heightened violence in Iraq, a direct result of the illegal and inhumane US war and occupation of Iraq, turning the beautiful blue into a shocking red. But no matter what, it will still continue to hold huge importance in the region as it is part of an inerasable history, a history that imperialism has tried so hard to obliterate. So this is a tribute to the rivers beauty and to all the tears we have shed for lost loved ones caught in the middle of the greedy battle for land, power, money and resources, and to those whose blood has ultimately ended up in this river. This is a dedication to all of the faces in the sea of oppression.

As for who I am, well, it’s not really that important. I am your fellow comrade in humanity. All you really need to know is that I am an Iraqi Muslim woman, born in Iraq but denied the right to live there, however I was lucky enough to be given an opportunity to start a new life abroad. I suppose you will learn more about me as time progresses. As someone who was raised outside of Iraq my thoughts and opinions are of an insider that has not seen the atrocities up front but has lived through them and witnessed from the outside, ultimately adding to the Iraq narrative. I frequently visit family in the Middle East and it just so happens that I will be travelling back home very soon, another reason to start a blog, and so here I will share my experiences with you, whoever you may be. 

I hope that through my words people are able to learn a bit more about Iraqi’s and their suffering, even though I certainly cannot speak for all the Iraqi people.  I also hope this encourages you to want to take action. I implore you to go beyond tears, we should not only stand in solidarity with our fellow people but we must take action, even if the action is simply changing the mind of one person. We have not lost the battle for hearts and minds just yet. We owe it to our brothers and sisters in the struggle. I hope to incorporate stories of the fallen, the forgotten and the brave of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and other groups of oppressed people as ‘Tears of Tigris’ goes on.