The Angry Arab News Service

More on American students in Syria. Raed sent me this (I use with his permission): "man, what is it with those foreign students your posting letters of? a bit of modesty could be good, in their situation. Why modesty you may ask? well, just to cool of some of their wrongly oriented enthusiasm i may say. i mean, why is it wrong for the syrian lousy regime to make americans wait at the borders? this is maybe the only good thing the lousy syrian regime is doing.
the american and french regime are not humiliating us at their borders because of reasonnable causes. their policy toward foreigners and especially arabs are due to a whole tendency in their political and beauraucratic discourse aiming at putting the arabs in order. its not because the syrian regime is a dictatorship that the american and frnch regimes treat syrian citizens like trash (and other citizens too). Its because od things intimitaly related to post colonial relationship between old colonial states and old colonized ones. In this case, its because of the lousy syrian regime's policy towards israel, cos remember, that even if for you and me, the syrian regime is not doing enought (and even sabotaging) the struggle of the palestinians, it is NEVER enough for the american establishment for exemple. what is the syrian regime was a democracy, and committed to Palestinian struggle. I bet my... that the american regime would treat the syrian citizens in the same way: As inferiors (im not impressed with the whole anti-terrorist pragmatic new arguments). Would it be wrong if the syrian regime, instead of let say bombing innocent american civilians (which they do not do anyway but the americans do, "normally"), made bureaucratic measures for american citizens a bit uneasy. the palestinians are in the same problem: that of having limited resources for retaliation. this is the situation of the weak: What else could they do? anyway, look at how that student interpreted the lousy regime's policy as "taking out their frustrations". what is this? This is what was said about saddam's regime in the lousiest media in the west (france and US anyway), constructing a vision of a whole 3 million state-fonctionnaire (and 20 million citizens) as mere tools of one man's eros. and what does all this got to do with the Golan? 3ayb. The Golan question (that the syrian regime is handling in a lousy way as i like to think) is something deeply tied to the reason why the regime have problems with the US in the first place (and not the regime's industry of enriched uranium). Citing the Golan here is taking the superiority tone to an upper level. some foreign students have to watch out for:
1) orientalism
2) the anti-orientalism sentiments of the indigenous population (like myself) when confronted to someone who made it his business to have a speech on the things the indigenous have a speech on, a thing a bit out of their control (whether they want it or not) but to which they have to give A LOT of thinking (self-sociology is not of my inventions).
3) not everything on the syrian regime's agenda is bad. Some things are inherited since before the regime was born. The regime, since we are in the diabolic essentialist schemes, is "stuck" with the Golan question (and arabism). This is not very sophisticated explanation, it used to be a cliche."