I bet these two vehicles, which I saw parked about 100 meters apart from each other in Palermo, belong together.
To those of you who have always seen through the Egyptian military junta, this doesn’t come as a surprise of course. After all, why should a military dictatorship which abuses men and women stop short of abusing children?
To those Egyptians who believed that the military takeover in July 2013 was a good idea or that it would only be temporary, and to those Egyptians who strangely admire of a military which doesn’t really have a track record of success and which relies on foreign aid to maintain its equipment, maybe this propaganda video will open your eyes.
Little children in military uniforms between tanks and artillery singing “I love you [General] Sisi” (at 2:30) is something which I have until now only seen in fascist regimes. When they sing “If I would be a martyr, I’ll be one on the borders,” I wonder whom the Egyptian military is planning to attack – and why they need the help of little girls. But maybe General Sisi is too much of a sissy himself. Putting little girls into uniforms and forcing them to sing about martyrdom is not only fascist, it’s child abuse.
The Arabist calls it “Sisi’s Kindersturm”, which is an appropriate term for it. (Thanks also to Wronging Rights, where I found the video.)
“We need to build a new cemetery in Palermo,” ordered King Ferdinand II. “This bloody cholera is killing people faster than we can dig graves.” Chewing tobacco and speaking in his typical mumble, the king pronounced it “cemet’ry”. The architect, too shy to ask, was unsure whether he had understood “cemetery” or “symmetry”, so he decided to build both in one.
(Photos of Cimitero di Santa Maria dei Rotoli taken from dangerously close to the cliff of Monte Pellegrino.)
I spent New Year’s Eve and the first couple of days of January 2014 in Palermo, the capital city of Sicily. I only made one New Year’s resolution (although I had previously dismissed those kind of resolutions as bunk) and that was to earnestly try to make a move into writing and/or journalism in 2014. A career change from time to time keeps life interesting.
As luck would have it, I stumbled right into a scoop during my stay in Palermo. While the world was watching Syria, South Sudan and Iraq, I discovered that the new global troublespot in 2014 will be Palermo. Almost as soon as I had set foot in the city, shooting and fighting erupted. I had spent previous New Years in Beirut, Damascus, Tehran and the West Bank, but I had never witnessed fighting as intense and frightening as this.
But watch for yourself:
Yes, it was dangerous. Yes, it was scary. But somebody had to walk right into the action, make that report and get it back to safety, so that you, my esteemed readers, are fully informed about what’s happening.
If you are CNN or Al-Jazeera, I modestly suggest that you hire me right away.
You could almost feel sorry for Al-Qaeda. Ten years ago, these terrorists were able to make the world tremble with shock and awe (which you can’t really blame them for, because what else would be the purpose of a terrorist organization), get long-established democracies to throw their principles over board (for which these countries could very well be blamed) and to seduce NATO into a lengthy military campaign far from its original geographical domain.
Already in the years after their large-scale attacks with planes, the weaknesses of Al-Qaeda became obvious. As is so often the case, the problem originated with the human resources department. Nobody will be scared of a “shoe-bomber” who has 6 hours time during a transatlantic flight but only manages to set his shoelaces alight or of an “underwear-bomber” who causes the most embarrassing injuries only to himself, in the process also earning the most embarrassing nickname of all the graduates of his year at Terrorism High School. In 2010 Al-Qaeda was lacking personnel so severely that they mailed packages with bombs to Jewish organisations in the US in the hope that the recipients would detonate the bombs themselves. Which they didn’t.
By then, the guys with the long beards should have learnt from the history of the guys with the long hair and should have dissolved themselves just like the Red Army Faction in Germany did. But like most megalomaniacs before them, Al-Qaeda missed the right time for retirement.
The final evidence for their demise is provided by the terror organization in its own English-language magazine Inspire. Earlier editions had included instructions on how to blow up skyscrapers, but the Spring 2013 edition suggests a completely different form of jihad: Muslims are encouraged to pour oil on the highway to cause accidents, to set fire to parked cars and to put boards with nails on the road.
The section on setting fire to parked cars explains how a match becomes a weapon of jihad: “While the Kuffar are deluded into thinking that their superior technology will defeat us, we put forth that we will defeat you even if it is by a matchstick.” The young terrorists are explicitly admonished to ensure that they don’t set fire to the cars of Muslims (a precautionary measure which most suicide bombers overlook). If you ever received one of those free copies of the Koran, you can now leave it on the dashboard. It’s a better protection against terrorism than all the NSA snooping could ever provide.
The instructions for building the board with nails to be placed on the road read like an assembly instruction from IKEA. The editors of Inspire have taken into account that the latest generation of terrorists is not too bright, as they have to spell out the warning against leaving any incriminating evidence, like ID cards or schoolbooks, at the scene of the attack.
The funniest thing of the whole magazine is the reason provided for the attacks on cars: “The goal is inshallah that if enough Muslims fulfil their obligations of Jihad, the Kuffar and their insurance companies will be so sick of the terror caused and money wasted by these simple operations that they will press their government to stop the tyranny against Muslims.”
This background puts the report on the recent traffic accident of German Chancellor Angela Merkel into a far more dangerous perspective. I hope that the German counter-terrorism community is on full alert and will finally press for a speed limit on the Autobahn.
(Dieser Artikel ist auch auf Deutsch erschienen.)
Waking up and getting up early is something I usually enjoy, but on a cool December morning, 5:20 is a bit too early. Even according to the rigid regiment of my alarm clock, I would had another 70 minutes of sleep; not counting the encore I can wrest from it on good days.
But on 23 December 2013 I am woken up at that time in a manner I have never been woken up before. It feels like someone is easily pushing my heavy bed from left to right and back again several times. From one second to the next, I am awake and notice that not only the bed is moving. The bedroom, actually the whole house, is being pushed back and forth in a steady rhythm, accompanied by a slight rumbling. After a few seconds it’s over. Complete silence. Although I have never had any experience with it, there can be no doubt: this was an earthquake.
Immediately I get up and go out onto the rear balcony, expecting to see the village ablaze and the streets filled with people in panic. Nothing. It’s already light, but completely quiet. No sound from the rooster who sometimes accompanies my alarm clock. No whining cat. I don’t hear a single car alarm, although they usually even go off when a squirrel scurries across the car or an overripe orange falls from the tree.
I am getting uncertain whether I may have classified the events as an earthquake too prematurely. Quickly I go through the other possible explanations for a strongly vibrating house, but I have to discard them one by one: an explosion would have been much louder and wouldn’t lead to this rhythmic back-and-forth shaking. The same if I was under attack with heavy weapons. Due to how the house is situated towards the street, it is unlikely that it was hit by a truck. With a tank, I would hear the engine, with a helicopter I would hear the rotor blades. Without any prior warning, it is unlikely that the bailiff comes early in the morning on the day before Christmas to wrap up the house and carry it away. No, an earthquake remains the only possibly explanation.
To obtain verification of my amateurish analysis, I switch on Rai News 24, the Italian news channel. They are reviewing the newspapers of the day, then there is a report on Angela Merkel’s opinion about something related to Italy. The news in Italy carry comments by Angela Merkel on almost so many things that one could come to the belief she was the President of Europe. Then of course football. The news channel still has no mentioning of the earthquake in the own country even 15 minutes after it happened.
Thus I look up the Italian word for earthquake: terremoto, and search for it on Twitter. Indeed, there are a few messages about an earthquake, with the epicentre alternatively in Reggio Calabria (the tip of the Italian boot), in Messina (the city in Sicily closest to mainland Italy) or in the strait between the two. I live about 20 km west of Messina. The earthquake registered with 4 points on the Richter scale.
With this confirmation I go out onto the road to look for visible damage to the house and the environment. Except for a broken flower pot in the middle of the road, I cannot detect any signs of a natural catastrophe. And something like this woke me up.
During the day, anyone whom I meet in this Sicilian village talks about Christmas first and about the earthquake second. Even then it’s not about today’s earthquake, but about the one from 1908. Back then there was a much stronger earthquake in Messina (7.2 on the Richter scale) which caused a tsunami that destroyed almost the whole city and killed about 70,000 people in Messina alone. It was one of the most devastating natural catastrophes in the history of Europe. Eerily, that earthquake also happened around Christmas, on 28 December 1908. Even more eerily, it took place at exactly the same time of the day, at 5:20 in the morning. Whenever I use the word coincidenza in this context today, I am being stared at incredulously as if I represent a new and totally absurd theory.
In the evening, the earthquake has moved down on the websites even of Sicilian newspapers: the top story now is about a cold front to reach northern Italy in the coming days. The prospect of snow over Christmas is already more newsworthy than an earthquake.
Not quite as bad as in 1908.
(Von diesem Artikel gibt es auch eine deutsche Version.)
Lipari, Salina, Vulcano, Alicudi, Filicudi, Panarea. Don’t worry if you can’t immediately pin down these names on a map. Until two months ago, I couldn’t either. Then I moved to Sicily. If I add the name of the seventh and best-known island – Stromboli -, that may at least ring a distant bell. These seven and a few more uninhabited islands together are the Aeolian Islands off the north coast of Sicily.
My endeavour to explore at least some of these islands began with a failure. In mid-November I wanted to travel to Salina, but due to rough seas (the day before 16 people had died in a storm in Sardinia), neither ferries nor the even more weather-prone hydrofoils left the port of Milazzo.
But two days later I could embark on the ferry to Lipari, the largest of the seven islands. On the large ferry I seem totally forlorn next to the only three other passengers. In the ferry’s belly, only one car and one van are being lashed. Such an almost empty belly won’t make the shipping company full, but luckily for them there will be the streams of tourists in summer, congesting islands and driving up prices. I prefer to travel counter-cyclically. Keynes would be happy.
Slowly, the ferry steams out of the port of Milazzo, past the long green cape which pushes north into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Behind the city, and imposing and (at this time of the year) green mountain ridge comes into view, and after sailing for a few miles the crown of Sicily becomes visible: Mount Etna. The sky is blue, the sea is even more blue and so calm that it’s hard to imagine how it had been roaring just two days ago. The ship’s bar doesn’t bother to open for the few passengers. With my stomach just as empty as that of the ferry, I doze off.
I only wake up when the rhythmic up and down of the ship abruptly slows down. To my left I see a green mountain pushing itself out of the sea, as we glide past. It is much greener than I would have expected a volcanic island to be. This is Vulcano, a short stopover on the way to Lipari. In a few days I will visit this island as well, and what I can see now already whets my appetite: smoke rises from the volcano’s active crater, the port is framed by saw-toothed rock formations higher than any building on the island, palm trees line the few lowlands. An image as I had last seen it in Australia. But we’re already continuing towards Lipari.
Having arrived in the port of Lipari, those whose livelihood is based on tourism assail the four newcomers: trips around the island, hiring a scooter, renting a room. In November the supply clearly outstrips the demand. Because I am not too fond of this obtrusiveness, I decline even the most alluring offers.
With a population of around 5,000, Lipari is the only place in all the Aeolian Islands to deserve to be called a city. There is a hospital, a school and all the shops that tourists or islanders (those living on the other islands come here if they need something which is not stocked on their island) might need. Yet the main shopping street is so empty that dogs are racing through the streets unhindered. The well-fed cats have become so accustomed to the dogs chasing each other, that they don’t move an inch, whether canine or humans walk past. Calm and quiet pervade the steep and narrow alleys. A newsagent offers newspapers, battered by the wind and five days old.
I walk into the cemetery, both for its location on a slope outside the city centre not far from the harbour from where one has a good view across the whole town, and out of a general interest in these gardens of final rest. But this one is not a real garden. It consists almost exclusively of stones and bricks. It is still interesting though: apparently due to the shortage of space, several graves are stacked on top of each other. They look like large bookshelves, the walls of brick and concrete into which the coffins are pushed. Up to six storeys high are these wall graves. There are ladders with wheels which one has to climb in order to deposit some flowers on a relative’s grave. Some of the compartments are still empty, for the time being only occupied by birds. Lizards scurry across the warm stone.
But now it’s time to get out into the nature, towards the Geophysical Observatory at the southern tip of the island. A mistake in my guidebook, just one “right” where it should have read “left”, leads me along ever steeper and narrower paths into the wilderness. My admiration for this suggested route is surpassed by the green nature and the wonderful view back towards the bay of Lipari and Lipari City with its dominating castle hill. The sea is of the dark blue that children use to paint the sea. My hike only comes to a temporary end when I face an insurmountable wall of rock covered with cacti and I finally have to admit that I got lost. Luckily, there is an abandoned house there which has fallen into disrepair, but which still has a beautiful terrace where I can devour the two arancini that I brought. These are fried rice balls filled with peas and minced meat and a filling Sicilian delicacy. I linger and enjoy the seclusion, but sooner or later I have to walk the whole way back. To be on the safe side, I then walk along the road to the observatory. Less beautiful, but at least it will take me to my destination.
The observatory lies only at an altitude of maybe 400 meters, but from sea level that’s still an ascent of 400 meters. When I finally reach the top, I am exhausted and thirsty. The road comes to an end at the observatory, but a path continues through the brushwood all the way to the coast. What a fantastic view! From high above I look down on the neighbouring island of Vulcano and its peninsula of Vulcanello, both shaped by clearly distinguishable craters. The great crater is emitting smoke, not only from the crater’s maw, but also from cracks in the mountain. Except for the great crater, Vulcano is however surprisingly green. With its cliffy coast, the rock formations thrown out by the volcano and solidified in the sea, the island looks like it has been made for adventure films.
I had only planned to stay here a little while, so that I could return to Lipari before darkness will set in. I estimate that it will take me two hours to walk back, so I should get going soon. But it is too beautiful. A paradisical place. Thus I remain and climb around the cliffs, stimulated and adrenalized by landscape and panorama. Only a stone tablet in one of the rocks which commemorates three climbers who died here in summer slows me down in my climbing.
The question of how to return to Lipari City resolves itself. Meanwhile, a car with three teenagers or young adults who apparently also want to enjoy the sunset (and possibly something else) has arrived at the observatory. Although they don’t really have enough space next to all their musical instruments, they take me with them and drop me off at the port in Lipari.
At one of the ports in Lipari, I should say, because although the town is not large, it has three of them. Marina Corta is the southernmost port and the prettiest of them all. It’s not equipped for large ferries, but for smaller tour boats, mothballed for the winter, and fishing boats. The picturesque harbour is adorned with a bridge, the statue of the island’s patron saint Bartolomeo, which several islanders proudly point out to me, and two churches, one of them in the middle of the harbour on one of the quay walls. You can go into the church almost directly from the boat, which is either practical for fishermen or romantic for couples getting married. Due to the light in the harbour and the small bridge, I feel reminded of Venice.
And we continue with Lipari – Day 2.
(Diesen Reisebericht gibt es auch auf Deutsch.)
When I went to the Google search today, I saw this
and thought “oh, it must be International Women’s Day“, because what else could the knitting of a scarf with a glove symbolize.
To my surprise, Google had something else in mind: they use this doodle to celebrate the first day of winter. I was briefly ashamed because of my stereotypical thinking about the activities of women in their spare time. But only very briefly, so don’t worry.
Thanksgiving pardon in the USA:
Christmas pre-Olympic pardon in Russia:
The Happy Hermit 