Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Tuesday No-Newsday

Tuesday. Oh how I love that mundane name to the most underappreciated day of the week, so snuggly situated between Unforgiving Mondays and Oh-Crap-It’s-Due-Today Wednesdays. So today, while I procrastinate on life, I will simply reflect on the events of last weekend, also known as, politics galore. No, this post will not be discussing Obama’s win, albeit exciting, but this blog will be about the even that my student organization sponsored. Being the Vice President of the Arab Student Organization at my University, I had to select a movie to screen for one of our events this semester. Being the diligent leader, trying to pick a perfect movie to showcase our culture and not get tangled up in politics, I chose a documentary about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. You say trouble? Why how did you know? Well in my defense, I picked the fairest, least biased documentary out there—I wish I could say the same about the audience. The documentary is titled “Promises” and is about the conflict from the perspective of Palestinian and Israeli children. While the documentary really was as unbiased as humanely possibly (and I urge you to verify my claim by watching it,) I did, as a precaution, preface the screening with a brief speech encouraging viewers to focus on how the children have been affected by this war, instead of focusing on who to blame. I do not remember verbatim but I am certain I stressed the fact that although we will have a discussion after the screening, it will not be a political, but rather a sociological discussion with an objective sharing of ideas about the situation. Oh you guessed it again, what was I thinking? Even I can safely say that the majority of the attendees enjoyed the documentary, many of them seemed so eager to discuss who’s right and who’s wrong. To my pleasure, there were Wahabi fundamentalists, radicals, Zionists, clueless Americans, and angry Arabs in the audience. Now I am completely comfortable about being put in such situations, as I truly enjoy voicing my controversial opinions (more on that when I discuss Darfur in the future,) but what I did not appreciate was how inert the entire organizations executive board became, most of whom are either Palestinians or from neighboring countries. None of them stepped up to the plate and spoke their minds. Dare I say this was reminiscent of a real life political situation?
I just did.

1 comment:

Reem said...

About your comment,
you can't impose an Arab identity on a whole country. There is no national identity in Sudan and a national identity is difficult, but you are free to chose an identity.
Identity in Sudan is the most contested aspect of our society