STORIES MY EDITORS CHOOSE NOT TO RUN

It's horrific what you can find on Google news lately if you type in Gaza. I did it this morning. Well ya, I cheated cause I saw the footage yesterday too. And, man! It made me feel like turning on happy music and close my eyes and imagine I am on another planet. Five children killed on a football field on an Israeli attack. A six moth old child killed yesterday in another Israeli attack.

Boy wounded in a „militant missile attack” on Sderot. And one headline I liked „ Child victims of Gaza war lie close, but apart”. A story about the Israeli child and a Palestinian child both wounded in the attacks recovering in the same Israeli hospital near Tel Aviv.

The images are pretty shocking, and yet most of the people I showed them to answered carelessly „So what? It happens everyday.” The editor I'm working with decided not to run the footage of the baby killed in Gaza. I insisted. He kept saying no. Well, the footage is shocking but it doesn't show the child ripped apart, does it? „'Cause that's what people want to see.” Like people care to see what bull shit Hillary Clinton has to say in the electoral campaign or the way Barack Obama is dressed in a muslim outfit and why his name is Hussein (oh, yeah, he is REALLY guilty of that). But we still have to write and feed the viewers that shit.

Ya, I guess it does happen everyday. I'm sure it happens everyday in other parts of the world too. Parts of the world we don't CARE about. Like THIS part of the world.

It makes me remember another story that actually seemed to me taken from a cheap horror sci-fi book. A story about Tigris river. It lately is a GRAVEYARD.
Every day local police haul bodies from the Tigris bearing signs of torture. Locals who live near the river constantly see floating bodies. The situation is even worse in Suwayrah, a southern area of the capital, where the government has built barriers with huge iron nets to trap plants and garbage dropped in the river but now THEY TRAP BODIES. Well I remember the answer I got from the editor. Laughter. „This is not a story! This is a stuck sewage problem in Iraq.” Well, yeah, people normally die in a war. But that doesn't mean that war is normal. When did it become so normal that we don't care to notice it?

Well, there was a story yesterday about war that made it to the headlines and made everybody run it and get the audience they crave. Stupid prince Harry „fighting” in Afghanistan. Yeah, like really fighting! Um, seen him dressed as a soldier, weapon in his hand walking around near a wall, actually touching the dust. Isn't that pretty! CNN had an hour long special report on the event. I loved the fact Adriana, the evening newscast editor chose not to run it. That woman has principles.

Well I guess Condi Rice is worried. And she told Ehud Olmert she is W.O.R.R.I.E.D. She's worried about children being killed. Let's just wait until the children grow up and turn like maybe 17. Then, ok, you can kill them. That's the age when they suddenly become „militants”. (BTW, pictures belong to Reuters).

THE WORLD STARTED TO SMELL BLOOD

I told you nothing was going to happen today. Well ya, it was spectacular. Some 300 000 people carrying the Lebanese flag and as many pictures of late Hariri in the Martyrs Square. All done at about 1 pm.
Then the funeral. Nasrallah made one of his lately rare public apearances. It seems he wasn't afraid he'd be assassinated. He had nothing to fear with all the army in the area.
Well, yeah, nothing was to happen today. It was after all a funeral, lots of people were there, even the Iranian Foreign Minister - he had to come, he's the guy with the money, right? Nasrallah declared open war to Israel. Yeah, so? Israel brought more troups to the Lebanese border. "Tension in the Middle East, Lebanon devided". The world started to smell blood. And it IS going to be blood. But not Nasrallah's , who's actually selling cheap rose perfume, his own brand, and pictures of himself. Some stupid young infatuated militant is gonna bow himself up, or launch some cheap missile into Israel and then it all starts again.

THE SITUATION SUCKS

My Lebanon is boiling again. Tomorrow will be a very difficult day. Not that other days were not difficult. I always laugh when my friends complain about "THE SITUATION" in their country. Beirut seemed nice to me, quite peaceful acually. I used to be European chick who just fell in love with the glittering lights of the city seen from the plane. But then I was off the plane and on my way to the hotel on the highway and I saw the armed soldiers and went through the filters, and the cab driver turned on the light inside the car every five minutes. This is THE SITUATION everybody mentions in Lebanon. It means living with the feeling that you might, just might, pass by a car bomb meant to kill some "naughty politician" or "naughty journalist".
Yeah, tomorrow's gonna be difficult. They -I'm saying "they" cause nobody knows who did it, and as I already understood by now, nobody will try to find out and tell the world - killed one of the Hezbollah leaders in Syria. Imad Mughniyeh's death in Damascus, a car bomb assassination of course, brought the spark back in Southern Lebanon. cause the gunb powder was always there. Israel was the first to blame, of course. ''We call on the leadership of the Islamic Resistance to respond totheir treacherous operation with a painful blow to the Zionist entity, The Israeli hand has reached one of the pillars of the resistance and it shouldget a strong response and this is not hard for the mujahideen", one shiite cleric told the Hezbollah militants on Al Manar TV. Syria called the assasination a terrorist act. They avoided saying anything about Israel. The US are happy. Happiest about it. It turns out the guy was the most wanted terrorist, deadliest they say, after Ossama Bin Laden.
Mughniyehwas suspected of the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut. 63 people died there. He also was suspected in the truck bombing that year of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, an attack that killed 241 people and preceded the U.S. military withdrawal from Lebanon. He escaped american intelligence by changing his appearance.
Tomorrow they will burry the guy.
Tomorrow they expect thousands of people to come to the shrine of Rafik Hariri, the prime minister who was assassinated in 2005. They still count the days since the assassination - of course, they investigated it, but, of course again, didn't find his killers. What's gonna happen? Well, it might just be a day like any other day. Lots of tension, people not going out for fear of THE SITUATION, but in fact nothing really happening.

Mama

Mama and grandpa, a long time ago. They took the picture when I was still a baby

I used to call her mama. That's what she was to me. Mama. My memories of my grandmother seem blurry to me now. But I remember the feeling of her around the old house, cooking, washing and yelling at me to get down from the top of one of the quince tree near the gate, where I used to hang out when I was a blond blue eyed 5 year old brat.

I have never seen mama without a scarf. I only remember the few strands of hair making way from under her colored scarf which became greyer and greyer and greyer. She was small, former stunning brunette. I know that from the old pictures grandpa still has stashed in some corner in the old house I haven't stepped foot in for so long. 10 years fly fast when you want to keep moving in a huge dirty city. I used to play with those pictures when I was 4 or 5. Mama was beautiful when she was young and I wished she had been a lady from the colored books I had hidden under my bed. But mama wasn't a lady. Not that classic beauty of the 1930s you see in the old black and white movies. Her father, my great grandfather, was a very tough man. His two girls, mama and her little sister, only went to school until they finished the fourth grade. Then he needed them to take care of the garden and the animals. It was the 1930s in a small, very small town in eastern Romania, frozen in time. That town seems always frozen in time, although it changes. You can see the changes every time you get there, but you're still fooled, still get the feeling that everything had stopped moving, or that time somehow moves on a different pattern, a pattern yet undiscovered, stuck somewhere between the past, present and your feelings.

My mama married my grandpa. I don't remember much of their love story. My mind links her more to myself than to other people. I have this huge inclination of jealousy when it comes to my mama, a jealousy I've never felt regarding my mother. Mama was always mine. I had slept with her ever since I was a baby, I had heard her voice constantly in my ear, singing me to sleep, telling me stories to sleep, chasing away the two scary Muppets, Statler and Waldorf, that used to creep me out in my nightmares. Mama used to sit me on the porch in front of the house in summer the summer afternoon when grandpa wasn't retired yet and still went to work and she used to tell me stories. Very strange stories I haven't heard from anybody else. I don't know if she made them up on the spot, I don't think so. She told them to me again and again. I don't know who could have told her those stories, but they fascinated me. I remember one in particular, that always made me cry and made me wonder. The story of a common girl, an orphan girl who was hungry and went into a garden and ate some grapes. The garden belonged to a stone hearted prince who ordered his guards to cut the girl's hands for stealing. And they did. And she wandered without hands in the garden and she met Mother Mary one day. And she gave her her hands back, made her beautiful and she turned the prince's heart in to a kind one and when he saw that girl wandering in his gardens, he fell in love with her and they got married.

I never had the the classic grandmother, the grey-haired small lady with a warm smiling face knitting in a comfortable armchair near the fireplace. When I was a child I used to think that's where all children put their grandmothers and I used to be very sad that mine was not from that fairytale place. But I had mama. I didn't want to see her when she died. I was 17 and felt like a stranger to her. When my mother came back one morning and woke me up to tell me mama was gone I didn't even blink. I had to clean the house. I cleaned all 4 rooms. I had never cleaned the house before. I cried for the first time after a few months. I was doing some homework. And suddenly I missed her. I realized she wasn't around anymore. And I clicked. And it was painful.

Coffee, Bombs and Happiness

Jounieh Bay on a Sunday night

Well, I've been to Lebanon again. Some of the happiest four days of my life. I love that country and everything in it. The whole glittering country seen from the plane window, the palm trees,the Jounieh Bay at night, which is something you just can't capture in a picture, even subtle difference between a night club and a super night club (where the Russian, Romanian and Moldovan girls actually "work", Bassem told me), the way they called this huge super night club Hipopotame (i'm really sorry I missed the 100 chances to take a picture of it), the strong huge thunder over the sea, the little curly haired children who only speak French or English and no Arabic, the beach, although it's full of garbage all the time and nobody cares about that, the coffeshop in Byblos old souk where they actually serve real coffee instead of Nescafe 3 in 1 and where you can take a book from the shelf and read a few things while you're drinking your cappuccino and eat your sandwich, the hotel manager who brings you a glass of his own wine just to ask you for an opinion and doesn't get angry when you say it's crap and it's almost vinegar.


Most of all I love the people. Even when they're a bit upset and they tell you about the cluster bombs left behind unexploded by the 2006 war. Struggling to be happy. No, not to survive among the bombings and protests and snipers, but to actually be happy among these things. Something that people coming from countries like mine, where there hasn't been any turmoil for a long time, would find difficult to understand.

I got that feeling from a few friends I went out with on Saturday night. I had a terrible cold and didn't say much but I listened a lot.
Our meeting was the day after a bomb went off on a busy bridge at a morning rush hour. The car bomb killed one of Lebanon's top terrorism investigators who was probing assassinations of prominent anti-Syrian figures and a series of other attacks in recent years. Wissam Eid had survived two previous assassination attempts. Not this one. The attack also killed his bodyguard and three passers-by and wounded 37 people. At least these are the official numbers.

My friend, Lina, who's been covering the war in Lebanon for Reuters was upset. The Lebanese are used to political assassinations. „But here, there was a very thin line between assassination and terrorism. One of the people who died was going to work and realized he had forgotten his sandwich at home. He went back to get it.” Lina's Beirut is pure chaos and she acts like she's almost proud of it. Most Lebanese probably act the same. They are struggling to be happy in that chaos. They go out, they meet in coffee shops. „Oh, there's smoke! Nooo, not today, not when we are going out!”, my Lina goes.

My question makes Lina and her friends smile. I never saw on any news wire any news story about the Lebanese security forces actually arresting somebody for a car bombing.”That's because they never do. Whoever sticks his head out of the crowd gets killed”.