A question

Any reason why the man who killed 32 students in Virginia Tech has yet to be referred to by any reputable news media as a terrorist?

He had firearms, he was deliberate and systematic, he had a clear social agenda that he outlined in written documents, and he committed suicide after finishing his crimes.

Usually when that happens, the perpetrator is automatically labelled a terrorist and treated as such.

Instead, a scant two days after the catastrophe, we already have compassion for this person. This morning as I was watched CNN World, one of the students who was a first-hand witness to the rampage was being interviewed. This student was in one of the classrooms that the gunman entered, and had somehow managed to survive with minor injuries only, although not before he witnessed with his own eyes multiple killings. During the course of his interview, the student voluntarily and without any prompting said that he’s forgiven the South Korean gunman for his crimes. Answering his interviewer’s surprised look, he said the gunman was obviously disturbed and that he felt bad for him, that he needed to be helped. Only two days after the crimes, I found this kind of open-heartedness remarkable, but at the same time a little unsettling in its implicit double-standard.

I’ll clarify what I mean by rephrasing my initial question. Is there a particular ethnicity or religion or set of politics that one must have in order for media and the public to think it suitable to connect him to terror?

Because it seems to me that unless you’re Arab, Muslim or a little lukewarm to Western political ideology, even killing 33 people doesn’t make you a terrorist.

A quick pictorial tour of Riyadh

I have been in Riyadh, the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for almost 4 weeks now. I have not written about it yet except in emails and postcards. Today I will try to correct that by starting with a quick pictorial tour. (Click on the thumbnails for a larger photo.)

This is the entrance to my workplace at the National Guard Health Affairs, in Riyadh. Manicured trees, landscaped lawns, and a fire truck to add to the lego city feel. I’m not sure if you can tell the weather by a still as well as you can tell it from a forecast, but the weather here is hot. But hot in a pleasant way. Riyadh is a landlocked city, so there is none of the humidity that you get in coastal towns like Jeddah (located directly on the Red Sea), for instance.

A different view of the same entrance. This view is taken from the in-hospital bank branch, where I can be frequently be found attempting to extract some money, usually without success.

This is the view I see from my window at my residence, a Western complex designed for expat employees at the National Guard Hospital. Not pictured behind the wall is a security bulwark of barbed wire, movable barriers and slight, soft-bodied security guards. Behind that in the horizon you can see a smattering of villas in the desert. The silver sedan in the foreground is illegally occupying my own parking space, which would be infuriating if I had a car.

 

This is the basketball gym where I spend much of my free time after work. It’s an excellent, FIBA-compliant court, and I hurl bricks at the rims mercilessly every day from 5pm until 6. In the complex there are also facilities for soccer, tennis, squash, badminton, swimming, aerobics and weight training.  I have even discovered a tiny lending library, tucked away on a desolate floor somewhere, and have stolen away from it with some Turgenev, some Wilde, and some Leonard (Elmore, sadly, not Cohen).

 

A street view from a minor shopping street in Faisaliah. I only have a little point-and-shoot camera with me here in the Kingdom, so taking in some of the larger scenery and locales is a bit of a challenge (that I may attempt in the future). About the most you can get from this picture is the understanding that, yes, there are indeed some very bright lights here. Very bright. Yes.

 

The eternal question. Sweets vs. Dental Care. The sweets are more easily accessible on the street level, so I’ll take those.

 

For non-Arabic speakers, this sign says “The Place for Kissing”. They have special locations for that here, where a rootless couple may exchange a few riyals for a chance to kiss in private behind a solid brick wall. No, that’s not true, I am only joking. Although it does say “The Place for Kissing” on that thing; I’m not lying about that.

This is one of the dominant features of the Riyadh skyline, a pyramidal building known as the Faisaliah Center. Again, my equipment fails me here, as the picture is awful and also, curiously, tilted on its side. This is particularly curious because I just rotated it. I don’t know what’s going on here. Anyway, commerce of some sort takes place at that building, I assume. Commerce takes place everywhere in the Kingdom, and with great vigor.

 

My son Leith. He is not actually with me in Riyadh. But he is.

Ab buster

There is an interesting feature in the September 4th issue of the New Yorker concerning Jordan’s King Abdullah’s ongoing quixotic quest to build a New England-style boarding school in Madaba, Jordan, a mission that seems to be driven by little other than sentimentalism about his own formative years studying and acting like a doofus at Deerfield Academy in Massachusettes. The design and execution of this little pet project of Abdullah’s (or “Ab” as his American friends call him), is so focused on replicating the Deerfield experience–an experience that, from what I can tell, holds unique value only to privileged Americans and, evidently, Arab autocrats who wish they were–that he not only recruited Deerfield’s retiring headmaster, Eric Widmer, but he also rejected interior decor suggestions because they did not sufficiently evoke his old school to him.

Nonetheless, Deerfield’s student populace appears to not really have been very psyched about all this attention from the Jordanian monarchy. This past year, headmaster Widmer wanted to get King Abdullah to be the commencement speaker for this past year at the school. The student body had other ideas.

When Widmer had mentioned this possibility to the seniors, earlier in the school year, the class president had pushed instead for his uncle Steve Carell, the star of “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.” “Carell turned out to be unavailable, Widmer explained. “So we were left with His Majesty, which was our wish all along.”

And I have to say, I am totally with the students on this one. Given the choice of this guy:

…versus this guy:

I’d take the hilarious Steve Carell over the Trekkie shrimp with a hereditary kingdom for my class’s commencement speech any day, thanks very much.

A Good Reason

From as long as I can remember, I have had one very bothersome habit. This habit takes place primarily when I am seated upright, although it has also been known to rear its ugly head when I am prone or lying down. This habit has been pointed out to me by many people in many different contexts ranging from curiosity to irritation to exasperation to anger. The habit is this: one of my legs, typically the right, is, even when I am perfectly relaxed and at ease, often alert and moving up and down rapidly, bouncing forcefully against the fulcrum of the ball of my foot. My leg does this of its own accord; I don’t have to think for this to happen, I only realize it has been happening if someone alerts me to it.

When I was young, my family often went out for visits to the houses and properties of other families, visits on which I was expected to sit, quiet and prim with my hair combed over neatly to one side, and observe the adults talking. Almost always, I was seated next to my father, the firstborn cub osmosing, if only by proximity, from the charismatic and loquacious lion. Within minutes of being seated, my father would tap my knee, a tacit gesture telling me to curtail the whirring. Minutes later, my mind would lapse into some dream or other, far from the adult conversation about Palestine or healthcare or whatever, and, again, another tap would arrive at my knee, this time more pointed and forceful. Stop with the goddamn moving, is what the expression on my dad’s face would say, or at least it would have had I dared to look up at him after such a tap. Sometimes, I would triumph over my base legs and my dad would forget anything happened by the time we went home. Other times I would be such a flagrant repeat offender that, on the car drive back to our house, I would get chewed out for it at length.

Over the years, I have caused whole sofas, dinner tables, queen beds, cars, trucks, outdoor patios to shake. Fathers, mothers, siblings, relatives, wives, teachers, friends, coworkers, teammates and sometimes even little children have requested that I stop vibrating. Whatever city I am in takes on a tinge of San Francisco, an undertone of trembliness. It’s not a big thing, but it’s definitely a thing. I haven’t seen a professional for it, exactly, but I have not been above medicalizing my frisky leg. Using very half-baked medical information, I tried to pass it off as a genial case of self-diagnosed “hyperthyroidism”. This strategy proved to be effective almost never, since, sadly, most of the people I know are fairly well-educated and cannot be fooled that easily.

I never understood what drives this indefatigable activity in my legs. As constant as it was, it was also pointless. There was no use for it, it bothered everybody, it did not bring me any particular enjoyment, and I found it almost impossible to get rid of without paying my full attention to it at all times.

Well, now, finally, I understand why my leg has always done that.

My son Leith, who is almost 3 months old now, sometimes gets tired and cranky, as all babies do. In those times, he cries so wretchedly and intensely, a cry that nothing–not milk nor a fresh change nor a toy–can soothe. In those times, I now know what I can do.

I take my inconsolable Leithy and put him on my lap.

Howdy, The Stranger

Why is George Bush reading Camus on his summer vacation on his ranch in Crawford, TX? Perhaps, as many have pointed out, the universal literary idea of killing an Arab and not feeling any remorse for it appealed to him? But if so, why shouldn’t the famously book-averse Bush not start with something geared a bit more towards his level of readership, perhaps something out of an Israeli grade schooler’s curriculum?

Castro may be dying…

…but a better man continues to live.

Hugo Chavez, America’s next great pest.

Health care crisis? Still on

This weekend, should a pregnant woman in Ontario deliver a child that requires the use of a neonatal intensive care unit, the newborn child would have to be shipped out of the province to receive this fairly basic care. They'd have to be shipped to Buffalo or Quebec, to be specific. All NICUs in Toronto, Kingston, Hamilton and Ottawa are currently at full capacity. While the newborn would be delivered via airplane or helicopter from the hospital in which it was born on the province's tab, the family of the newborn, including the recuperating mother, would have to find their own way to the destination NICU, and would have to find and pay for accomodations in a new city.

Minor ball

My nascent coaching career came to a quick conclusion this past weekend in the championship game of the first ever Toronto Arabic Sunday School tournament. It was also the only game of the Toronto Arabic Sunday School tournament.

We won silver.

It was an action packed game, final score 17-15. After scoring only 4 points and getting pummelled in the first half, our team roared back for 11 in the second half, led by this one kid whose name I keep forgetting, and who scored all of our points. Anyway, he was pretty good, although if he had hit all four of his free throws instead of just one, we would’ve won the game, so really, he sucked. Our best player was Danial, a 9-year-old, 3′11″ dynamo, who, after getting his jumper blocked twice by the big baddies on the other team, came up to his coach, tugged on his jeans, and said, “Uncle Coach, I’m not going to shoot any more, I promise. Just leave me on the floor to play defense.” I looked at my bench, noticed only two boys, one of whom was panting like a dog and the other of whom was waving to his camcorder-toting mom, and I shrugged my shoulders. Sure enough, Dany spent the rest of the game squirting between people’s legs, somehow stealing the ball from their hands, then passing it right away to that one good player we had whose name I still can’t remember. I think Danial’s final stat-line looked like this: 0 points, 0 rebounds, 0 blocks, 342 steals.

After the game, everyone was ticked off at the referee, who was also the coach of the opposing team. Also, they accused me of not being man enough to stand up to him and tell him to call some fouls on the other team. Dany in particular was quite jaded by the whole experience. He sat on the floor by the water fountain and steamed. When I asked him what was wrong, he simply stared into the distance and muttered, “we should’ve won, we should’ve won…”

Another CUPE Strike!

Well, not a strike exactly, more like a body blow.

Broken code

Caught a screening of the Da Vinci Code over the weekend. (By the way, I just had a very hard time stopping myself from typing The Vinci Code.) It was a heavy-handed affair, with poor pacing and flat acting from everyone not named Ian McKellan. (I would go so far as to say that Tom Hanks dialed into some rarified late-era Robert DeNiro territory with this performance, the whole thing was so thoroughly mailed in.) But that doesn't really bother me–all of these are the sort of ho-hum failures that 99% of modern movies have. The biggest irritant came at the end, in the form of a lecture delivered by Hanks, a discourse mainly on how it doesn't really matter whether Jesus' divinity (the chief focus of the movie) is a myth or not, because really, it's having faith in anything at all that is really important. So yeah, it was a tear-jerker alright, although I don't think my eyes were watering for the intended reasons.

It's worth noting that I had not read Dan Brown's novel before seeing this one, although I could easily see how this a story would be better suited to a subtler medium.