Bloggerabia...

I remember years ago, when Disney channel launched their Arabic Disney cartoon channel. They had a rather interesting ad that featured a dark skinned teen, wearing a baseball cap flipped to the back of his head, and FULL of 12-years-old-boy attitude. I remember him saying in a Saudi accent;
"أنا بتكلم عربي. أنا بدرس بالعربي. وبحلم عربي. ودحين، أنا بشوف كرتون بالعربي!"
Just like that, hundreds of Egyptian actors and actresses were blessed with new jobs dubbing Disney's cartoon movies and some other Disney shows.

Today, as most of you Blogger users, I read the announcement of launching Blogger in Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian.

"Besides localizing the Blogger interface into these three languages, we have right-to-left templates and have added new tool bar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor."



"The effort was worth it, however, and we’re tremendously happy to be a part of the growing Arabic-, Hebrew-, and Persian-language blogging communities."

This is not an unexpected move at all, considering the growth of the blogging community in the Middle East area. This comes as a classic market respond case.

What I intended to rant about today is this Arabic Blogger is going to introduce us to other enlighten minds, that happened to speak the Arabic language. With all do respect to the Arabic blogging community, your strong existence on the "blog-sphere" is not solely due to the fact that you are more educated, or more interesting than the rest of the world. This strong existence is solely due to the privilege of speaking the English language, which has made the blogging process easier for you than the rest of the off-line community. I admit that my experience in blogging is very limited, and is still very young. But I have been around to see that most of the English Jordanian blogs are read by other Jordanians, who happen to speak the language. Blogger will provide a more independent voice for this segment, as most of the Arabic operated blogs I read, at least during my blogging life, are part of influential entities such as Imad Hajjaj's blogs or al-Jazeera's blogs.
I am very ecstatic about reading about political issues and social trend from a very different point of view. Especially looking forward for reading more Jordanian blogs with a fresh perspective.

I just had to say something about that...RIP kiddo

A Mississauga 16 years old female was murdered by her father last week. The instant and most surfacing motive to the killing per many sources is her refusal to wear the ‘Hijab’ or the traditional Islamic headscarf which has led her father to snap...and KILL his own daughter.
This is a case of domestic violence, which always re-occurs in what seems like a peaceful town like Mississauga. It is not a case of oppression of Islamic traditions for women, and most importantly, it is not a Muslim life style issue.
The case is purely an issue of violence against women, and a case of poor guidance toward integration for new Canadian families.
Aqsa was failed by the school system, and by the Muslim community centers in Mississauga to guide her and her family through their ordeal. Our MANY mosques and community centers are failing many young Muslim Canadians by not teaching them how to integrate and interact with this new society to them or their parents, without losing their identity. Aqsa has lived a double life as a Hijabi at home, and as a more ‘Westernized version’ at school. Not being able to achieve a balance of both, has led to clash with her family, just like many young Muslim Canadians. *I have seen this happen in Jordan and Saudi, Idont recall someone being killed over it!*
I am NOT trying to defend the father, simply because nothing JUSTIFIES the killing of his OWN child. I am also not trying to blame our Islamic Centers, as they are always lacking the resources for most similar projects. But I can not help it but think how things would have been different if some kind of counseling was seeked by the school, the family, or the child who was killed.