It’s a website full of crimes and criminals. What’s funny is that it’s trying to murder the crime: I’ll kill you, you stinking crime, then you won’t kill anyone else!
And the website could easily use footage from horror movies with bloody and scary scenes to achieve visual shock, but it adopts a very professional look instead. It also includes a section for job openings. Imagine: Interpol is looking for a travel agency to manage its employees’ flight reservations. This job opening makes no sense to me. I personally go back and forth before choosing an airline and buying a ticket, worrying about my personal safety and fearing hijacking, crashing into the ground, and lost luggage. So how can Interpol make such a difficult decision? Especially when it’s aware, more than most, of all the bad things that could go wrong (in life).
They’re also considering creating “e-passport” for the Interpol’s senior employees.
E for electronic.
So they would have a virtual passport, like the new plane tickets: a picture on a screen that people can print out if they feel better about dealing in hard copies, like me and other old-fashioned people like me.
Cool.
This is the variety of news reports I read last night and which are available to anyone out there.
I read this news on purpose; I attack it head on so it can’t surprise me.
Did you like the idea of e-passports?
Yesterday, I thought about the idea of giving e-passports to the Palestinian refugees. They are citizens of a country that we know very well and taste its wine and oil every day, rest in the arms of its poems, and jump up screaming its name in defense here and abroad. And still, it’s not recognized as an actual country, and all the rights and duties that follow are not recognized either. By the way, the Palestinian director, Elia Suleiman, made a short film a while ago that he titled Cyber Palestine. Have you seen it? I have.
I think of Palestine as a virtual reality until proven otherwise. And the virtual might become a reality one day. And the virtual might become the only reality there is in the future. On Facebook, one can experience Palestine as a whole. A country whose people come from New York, Cairo, Paris, Sweden, Turkey, Venezuela, Canada, Syria, Iran, Berlin, London, and from everywhere. People of all colors and nationalities and inclinations, and they all say Palestine and they constitute Palestine. Those who wear a keffiyeh and those who wear a miniskirt, those who are homosexuals, and those who beat their wives, etc. A country like any other, with its sweetness and bitterness. Like a complete story. And a country without geographical borders, at the moment. But it’s defined, and everyone knows it. E-Palestine. It’s a reality, and it stands. It seems like all the dividing cannot reduce its land, and the killing cannot erase its people, and the wall cannot separate. It is spreading across the world instead.
It has spread across the map now.
E-Palestine.
An e-passport for Interpol could be the beginning of that. An e-passport specifically tailored for Palestinians across the world. For all the Palestinians who belong to Palestine and who hold the land in their hearts. All refugees should have one.
Have I told you what they figured out had happened to the mother and her daughters who were found dead? My night was filled with death yesterday:
“The medical examination and investigations revealed that the wife and three daughters had four dishes of processed fruit and poison. The food was prepared in the kitchen and eaten in the bedroom where they died from poisoning. The husband had come from a six-day business trip from one of the Gulf countries where he works as a trainer for horses and horsemen. He was surprised to find no one there to open the door for him, so he broke it down and found the bodies. The case is still being investigated.”
End of article.
Want to know more? It’s none of your business or mine.
I’d rather stay here, keeping an eye out for death, ready to face it whenever it comes. That way I don’t die in Lebanon or forget about death when I’m outside it.
Email over.
Ufff.
I wish she hadn’t written to me and left me guessing how she’s doing.
My friend, my neighbor growing up, is the same age as me.
Her name: Hayat. Arabic for “life.”
I’m serious; her name means life. She was named after her aunt who was born sick and died a child.
Her fiancé, Qrunful, died a martyr.
A martyr?
No.
Hayat says he’s not a martyr. She insists that he was a victim and refuses to call him anything else. “He didn’t choose to die,” she says. And politics meant nothing to him. “He loved me, and that’s it. He’s not a martyr, he was my fiancé, and he is a victim.” That’s what she yelled on the third day of grieving when a visiting official arrived and proclaimed Qrunful a martyr in front of her and her family. That day everyone treated her like she had a breakdown. Only Qrunful’s mother stood up for Hayat and asked everyone to leave her alone and to stop telling her to go rest in the bedroom. Only Qrunful’s mother stood by her side and asked the visiting official, forcefully but politely, to kindly and quietly get out.
So, Qrunful left this world a victim of a car bomb that targeted a Lebanese minister of Parliament.
And Hayat left for Paris.
That was three years ago.
This story makes my heart ache. And her email hurts more. I had hoped she would send me an email telling me that she has gotten her life back together or started a new one.
Before the engagement and the death, Hayat was a little gloomy, and in that we were a lot alike. But she was determined to devour to the fullest the life she was named for. She insisted on trying everything, especially the sexual and political. She changed mood and political views as much as she changed
