Just a personal update :)

January 2009 is over. The first month of 2009, which I intend to make an awesome year, has been up to par so far, and I'm fairly happy. Exams went well, I'm growing my profile as an MC or Host or Stage Manager, am starting to work in Dad's company more and all around progress in all fields. School reopens on the 8th, so I've got that long to relax before I get back to the University grind.

Unfortunately for me, earlier this month my hard drive was damaged by a dear friend of mine, and the data was unrecoverable and the hard drive was fried. My friend was deeply apologetic, and was sweet enough to reimburse me with a brand new hard drive with the same capacity. Albeit I lost all my data (AND MY MUSIC WTF!!!!) but she's really decent and I couldn't thank her enough. I went to the beach yesterday and gave my old hard drive a burial. The whole nine yards. Toy spade, rocks to mark the grave, sea shells to decorate and everything. T'was an awesome night.

Here is picture of above mentioned grave.


For reasons yet unexplained, the picture refuses to load the right way up, so you're gonna have to tilt your head to your right so see it from the angle that the picture was taken.

So that was yesterday. A lot of guests coming down in the next few days. My eldest brother will be leaving the UAE and heading back to USA for a few years. so we've got a bunch of folks goming down here from all around the place to see him off. My brother from Egypt, an aunt from India, my brother's in-laws, his friends etc etc. A flurry of activity around the house really, and February's probably going to be a busy busy month. A busy and crowded month. Bright side is I get to see the kids and that's always a good thing.

The fact that the kids have grown, means I will have to hide a lot of my stuff. Stuff that can be broken. Stuff that can be dangerous. Stuff that I only have one of and so can't share it with the kids. All these things will have to be hidden if I am to avoid any damages/losses to or of these items as well as to prevent fights amongst the kids.

the 26th of January is the Indian Republic Day, and on that night, I hosted a fashion show at the house of the Consil General of India. It was a part charity part university promortion fashion show, but it was a good one. Met a lot of interesting people there, including the Consul General of India Venu Rajamony, the Consul General of Britain, France, Guineau, China, South Korea, Thailand and many other dignitaries. Also met a fellow Tweeter PKGulati and his wife. Was nice to run into them.

I also took part in a little blogging experiment that T held, and submitted a guest post on the topic of change on his blog. If you haven't already read it, give it a read here.

Either way, that was January 2009 for me. Moving in to February in a couple of minutes or so. Let's keep it going, shall we?

M


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MaliZOMG's guest post.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I've submitted a guest post at one of my favourite blogger's pages, It's As Simple As Putting The Biscuit In The Basket. Click here to read it!

Feel free to check it out. It's part of his project called 7 Posts in 7 Days, where he has 2 different guest posts per day. Quite a genius, eh?

Cheers!

M


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The other problem...

As promised here is the other side of the big debate that is, 'How to help Gaza.' In the earlier post I spoke thoroughly about how people can try and bring Israel down to earth by cutting off it's supply of money and arms from the USA. Not that the USA is a bad guy, NO, but just possible solutions of slowing down the pace of a war machine. In this post I'm going to focus on the Arab/Muslim/non-Israeli/non-USA side of it all, the benefits and the problems.

It's quite plain to see that the oil rich countries here in the Middle East have never hesitated to offer any kind of financial aid to the Palestinians. Ideally I wanted to give you a statistic of how much Palestine had received in donations (to help rebuild Gaza). I tried to find some ready data, but what I found was mostly older articles on how much some of these nations promised to give, how much they gave individually, or how much they gave in single events. There were far too many for me to try and compile the data, so suffice to say that, yes, financial aid has almost never been a problem.

Unfortunately, I'm of the opinion that throwing money at the Palestinians is not the only kind of support they need. My main issue with some people is not that they don't want to help the Palestinians. My main issue is that many people are far too close-minded now to figure out a solution to a problem that's been more than half a century in the making, in recent history, and for hundreds of years throughout history (Jerusalem has been a religious and related issues hotspot for centuries) [but yeah you guys knew that already I'll just go on now shall I..]

I guess it'd be easier for me to relay I'm trying to say with an example. It's a personal experience that I had, and it was the single moment where I saw what I was doing wrong to help improve this crisis. In 2005 I attended the Global Young Leaders Conference in New York & Washington DC. Throughout it, we had various workshops and attended various lectures by fairly influential people in the political circles of the USA and the UN. It was at this conference that I became an alumnus of the Congressional Youth Leadership Council, which is the same council that invited me to President Barack Obama's Inauguration, 6 days ago. Pity I couldn't go :(

One of the lectures was at a hotel where the speakers were an Israeli Advocate, a Palestinian Peace worker and a moderator to prevent anything from going terribly wrong. The way things were run, once both speakers had finished speaking, the students were allowed a question and answer session with the speakers. Back then I had a lot more josh in me. Moment the QnA session popped up, I ran down to the front of the queue, and I was one of the mid-line questioners. When it was my turn, I strutted right up to the mic and said, "Hi my name is Muhammed Ali. I'm a Muslim from India, living in the Middle East, and my question is directed to the Israeli Advocate. How can you consider your country a legitimate body if, in the pure essence of it all, you dropped your bags in Palestinian territory and decided to set up shop? Is the Accord of Camp David really your excuse?"

In my defence I was an angry young kid, who wanted to get back at the big bully.

To my surprise, the Palestinian Peace worker spoke up, and boy, was he mad. I'm going to try and remember exactly what he said, for more emphasis.

"What is the point of bringing that up over and over again? We are beyond that stage and crying over spilt milk isn't going to help anyone, not us or the Israelis. Forget what happened and now focus on stopping the war and the killing."

I'm sure he said more, because I remember when he was done, I felt like an idiot. I guess what he was trying to say that the best way to approach this sitiuation is like a doctor would (my cousin also said the same thing). If a doctor sees an illness, he'll administer medicine and treatment and will wait to see if your symptoms disappear. If what he gives doesn't work, he'll switch to something else. If that also doesn't work, he'll switch to something else, and will continue doing so until he's found something that works. So many countries here in the Middle East still refuse to accept Israel as a nation. Maybe they think it will help, but on the grand scale of things, if you want your neighbour to stop being a certain way, you have to stop giving it the cold stare. I'm not saying Israel is justified in it's actions, but we've tried and seen that what we've been doing for so many years does not work. So then why not try something different? Sure there are extremists in Israel who won't settle for anything less than complete domination of all Palestinian territory, but then aren't there extremists on this side of the fence too, who won't even acknowledge this country's existence? How can a country apply political pressure on another country that it refuses to even acknowledge? How can any Arab country expect peace from Israel, when all you see is them throwing mud on them, calling it names, and refusing any dialogue with them?

Yes, the Israeli army and some of it's leaders are doing terrible things. But what if they were given no reason to be bitter anymore? Simple example, if Hamas stopped firing rockets into Israel, then, on paper, Israel would have no reason to attack anyone or anywhere inside Gaza. They would not attack Hamas Headquarters or the like, because they now have no reason to. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this won't happen because through generations and generations of hate breeding, and witnessing the massacres first hand, many Palestinians won't even want to see it any other way. Sad part is, you can't even blame them. That's what sucks though. The Palestinians refuse to learn from their mistakes and keep throwing bombs into Israel and then when Israel hits back (albeit responding tenfold) they get all whiny and mopey.

Another thing that really upsets me is the spiff between Hamas and Fatah. It's RIDICULOUS. If BOTH these parties want the same thing in essence, ie peace, then HOW IS ATTACKING EACH OTHER GOING TO MAKE IT HAPPEN?! Gosh, the infighting amongst these two parties is so stupid at times. There were rumours floating around that Fatah would leak info to the Israeli Army to help them attach Hamas. I hope they were just that, because if they weren't then that's just low. Very very low.

Moving past the Palestinians, I just want top see some pro active steps from the countries here in the Middle East in trying to attain a sustainable peace in Israel. You've tried the cold shoulder technique and it BOMBED (no pun intended). And I understand that it might be against our morals or ethics or even pride to accept Israel, but maybe that's one way to start a process that might lead to a self-sustaining era of peace for the people in BOTH Palestine and Israel. It's the mindset that has to change, on both sides.

More importantly, the problems of today can not be solved by those who created them. The problems of today can only be solved by the leaders of tomorrow. That's why I think the best way to do this is to educate the Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Jewish and Israeli youth into believing that a vocal and acceptance approach is more likely to attain peace than guns and rockets.

I don't know. Maybe I'm still as naive as I was 4 years ago. I just really, really think that education of the youth, allowing them to change their predefined emotions towards the other races will really help make that difference that peace still needs.


M


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A Letter to President Barack Obama

(I realize this may be a really stupid idea, but I'm gonna do it anyway so shoot me.)

Dear Mr. President,

I initially wanted this letter to be a formal, welcoming sorta letter, for your new job at the White House and all that. But I think it's safe to say you've had enough of that already.

(Either way Congratulations dude!)

Errm, my name's Muhammed Ali J., and I'm a Muslim from India, born and bred in the Middle East, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I first heard about you in 2005 when you were elected into the Senate in Illinois. Surely the news of someone with 'Hussein,' becoming a US Senator was big news over here. Soon after that in 2007, when you announced that you were running for Democratic Nominee, ears perked all over this part of the world (Yours Truly's included). Since then I followed your whirlwind campaign that stretched two years and now you're sitting in the Oval Office. Whoo!

I had a whole bunch of ideas that I wanted to say. I was gonna quote big words stuff like, sacrifice, hope, leadership, divine redemption, so on and so forth. However, now that I'm here I guess it's eventually of no end and I might as well speak from the heart (and brain). President Obama, I don't need to tell you that there are a lot of expectations on your shoulders. You know it better than anyone else, and it's what you built your campaign to the top job on. You know that every citizen (Well maybe besides some of the Republicans. And Ralph Nader) is celebrating your every move and every critic is just sitting around waiting for you to slip up.

Here's hoping you never do, big guy! (Slip up, I mean....)

Now, forgive me for being ignorant but this letter isn't about the change that you promised your countrymen IN your country. This letter is about the rest of us. As the only superpower in the world, your actions in some way or another affect a lot of people, especially those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Pakistan, even Israel. Those and a lot of other countries, if not most. Mr. President for the past 8 years people in many countries have suffered ridiculous atrocities due to the selfish, ignorant and terribly biased actions of your predecessor. Sure your fellow citizens look at you with eyes full of expectations for jobs, tax cuts and whatnot. But just as every American looks to you with hope, the eyes and minds of every Iraqi, Afghani, Palestinian are maxxed out on optimism. Believe you me when I say that on the 4th of November 2008, the folk in this part of the world breathed a unanimous "OH THANK GOD." We're all rooting for you. Some more than others.

Mr. President there's nothing I can say now that you don't already know. And the big truth is you probably won't read this letter ever and it'll just be up on my blog collecting cyber dust. But if by some chance you happen to come across this, PLEASE know that the rest of the world really needs you to keep your promises. The people in Iraq, Afghanistan and both Palestine and Israel are all fed up with genocide. There's no pro-Palestinian side or pro-Israeli side to this anymore. Ask anyone what they want and you have my word, the top reply is, 'Peace.'

This letter is in it's essence a plea to please do what those who are suffering on all sides, expect you to do. You are now at the precipice of what will soon become your legacy. Soon you'll be taking that plunge, and we all hope you soar. Don't let us down. We need you to be everything you said you would.


Long story short: Please, don't screw up.


Sincerely,

Muhammed Ali J.

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Boycott American Cars!

Ok that title was just to attract more visitors..


Either way, this post has been long overdue and I'm surprised that it took me so long to actually get to writing it. I will now speak of the atrocities in Gaza and the American sit-on-my-butt attitude towards Israeli genocide. BUT, before you draw conclusions, this is the first of two posts about the topic. The second topic shows the equally stupid non-helping Arab countries. So don't be that quick to draw your conclusions. On GFWMG I try to be as unbiased as possible.

THIS post however, is for those who want to help Gaza and anyone else oppressed by the American (Read: Bush) War Machine and the Bush Administration's foreign policies, that will soon be rendered obsolete once BO is in power. But just to be safe.

Whenever I spoke to anyone regarding Gaza, even though the conversation was full of heightened emotions and opinions, there was always this lingering aftertaste of helplessness. Sitting at our coffee shops, cafes, pool bars, bars (for a few), there was only that much bitching and moaning that one could do before you just ran out of excuses and this horrible feeling of dread would take over you as you realized that there really was nothing much you could do. And I'm sure we've all been through it, both pro-Palestinians and pro-Israeli (ie, in terms of pro-peace) people alike.

However, my brother mentioned this to me and at the time I did not think of it as much of a deal. On his saying, I did some research and it turns out there's a pretty decent way to make a difference. You know how everyone keeps rambling on about "Boycott *insert random country* Goods!" Well, that really does make a difference with regards to the American Economy. Let's start with a little background.

Want to help Gaza? Want Israel to stop it's atrocities? If you want to kill a snake (Being totally metaphorical here) cut off the head. The first country to recognise the State of Israel in 1948 was the United States Of America, under the leadership of Harry S. Truman. The country that gives the most in terms of foreign aid, both direct and indirect, military and non-military is the United States of America. What I'm trying to establish is, that if people were to apply decent amounts of pressure on the government of the USA, we would actually be able to take a step towards helping the people of Gaza.

Lemme give you some numbers. American fiscal aid to Israel began in 1948 itself with Harry Truman setting the bar. Every president since, the bar's only gone higher. Since WWII Israel has been the largest overall recipient of American aid.

• Between 1948 - 2006 Israel has received more than$156 billion in Direct Financial Aid.
• Until 2003, Israel received a third of the annual US Foreign Aid Budget.
• The US also 'loaned' money to Israel, but waived them before repayments even began. The tally of waived loans only stands at $45 billion, up to 2003.
• During 1996 - 2006 Israel received more the $24 billion in Financial Military Aid from the USA.
• 50% of the USA's Foreign Military Financing (FMF) budget is directly allocated to Israel, who can spend more than 26% of that in buying weapons produced by Israeli arms manufacturers, keeping that percentage of money in their economy.
• In August of 2007 a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the USA and Israel, guaranteeing them $30 billion over the next 10 years in military aid via the FMF.

I could go on about these facts. A lot of them are easily available over the internet, from reliable sources. One such source summarised it like this, "The Real Cost of US Aid to Israel: $3 Trillion."

I'd take that with a pinch of salt, but it's still quite a number.

Now it's safe to assume that poking and prodding at the American economy could cause ripples big enough to affect Israel.

Disclaimer: I understand that Barack Obama's term as President may not see the same support, and would hereby render this post obsolete, but these are the facts. If, in the coming months, you see no difference in American Foreign Policy towards Israel and the Middle East, I don't see why not.

Let's get straight to the point. 1 out of every 10 American jobs is directly linked to the automobile industry. If Detroit, America's autmobile manufacturing stronghold, were to fall, as many as 3 million jobs would be affected. Now while the number of jobs lost due to GM, Chrysler and Ford's deaths could be cancelled out by the aggressive capture of the market by Japanese giants Toyota, Nissan, Honda and even Hyundai, it is not the jobs that would kill the American Economy.

GM, Ford and Chrysler control about 40% of the global automobile industry, worth $450 billion, and control over 60% of the domestic market, worth roughly $300 billion. I'm going to say this part slowly. The size of the domestic US auto industry controlled by foreign brands is the same as the share controlled by American auto manufacturers in the global market. ie, American auto manufacturers sell enough cars overseas to counter balance money lost to the sales of foreign cars (ie imports) in the USA. If Detroit were to fall, this dynamic economic balance would die with it and the American economy would have a direct negative effect of roughly $450 billion. And when the entire cookie crumbles and all the bits have fallen off, the cascading effect of this fall could shave of well over a trillion dollars of the American GDP annually.

This void left by GM, Chrysler and Ford, will soon be filled by foreign manufacturers and more sooner than later, foreign companies will have the largest influence on American economy in history. Eventually, the American auto industry would sputter and die, expedited by the new found power for foreign brands in economy of scales, marking it as the most tragic event in US economic history.

NOW, while the result is assumption based on facts, it still is quite possible. If you really want to start trying to help people of Gaza or any other country oppressed by the American war machine, stop talking and start doing. Stop buying Ford Explorers. Stop purchasing Mustangs. No more 300Cs. No more Tahoes or Suburbans. Buy Japanese. Their airconditioners wont die out on you.


xx


M



Ps.
I don't want the USA to die off. Really. I want to go to Harvard. But I do want to put enough pressure on them, so that they stop directly helping the genocidists that sit in powerful places in the Israeli government. The next part of this series will show how some countries *cough*middleeasternoilrich*cough* sit back and do nothing save for talk. My next post will be on that. Look out for it.


Sources:

1. http://www.wrmea.com/html/us_aid_to_israel.htm
2. http://knol.google.com/k/mic-mac/the-financial-cost-of-american-support/1xmk75xoq251y/2#
3. What To Do With Detroit Is MoreA National Strategic Decision by A. D. Amar, Strategy & Policy Professor, Stillman School of Business.
   

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