Who shall pay for the Dinner ??

a good start , .........
but only the end counts !!

As teenagers one of our hobbies was to play poker ,
whereas at the end of the evening
the winner would invite all of us for a dinner...... ....
a kind of "social-capitalism" ........
invented by me and my secular-multi- confessional- friends
in the end of the 1960's.

We knew that each penny lost on that table, that evening,
would be, by now, in the pocket of the winner.


None of us has had a PhD in economy yet,
but a bit of logic and common-sense helped us
to figure out who must pay and also what to order later ,
according to the size of the profit of that lucky winner.


Now , 40 years later , I see and hear that
the Stock Market has collapsed and that practically
and obviously everybody has lost ....
so I ask myself: when everybody has lost , who has won ??
where did the profit go ?? or where did the capital go ??
the losses must be equal to the profits of someone else !!
or
the profits of the winner, are equal to the losses of all others !!

and who is paying the Dinner , today ??? for the losers.

George Bush , Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarcozy
are offering large sums of money....is that the agreed-upon- Dinner ??
is that a hidden-confession ??
If not , who shall pay for the Dinner ,
where did the profit go ??

Russians-magnates and Saudi-Royals
and even Chinese-officials have all lost immense fortunes...
where did it go ?? who cashed it ??


Eng. Moustafa Roosenbloom
Free-lance-profit- manager

The Kingdom of Heaven .....the film

The Crusaders , or rather ,
the Zionists of the twelth century !

Finally !! and with great delay ,
I saw the film , " Kingdom of Heaven"

and if I may , for a while , become a Film-Critic
I would say that it is the best (historical) film about Jerusalem.

But "best" does not mean "perfect"
and the word perfect is utopian one
and is subject to many and any personal evaluations.

For once the Arabs are not the "bad-guys"
which is a great achievement by
the film-industries-standards .

Secondly , the film shows that there were
good-crusaders and bad-crusaders
and I wonder how could anyone be a "good-crusader" ??
Unless someone would come to Jerusalem unarmed
and would go back home , a month later ....
but that would be a pilgrimage
and not an invasion-robbery-occupation......a crusade.

Never mind this detail , because ,
I cannot re-write history , nor can I design it .

The film has had extremely short dialogues , because,
obviously each word counts ,
in such a controversial and sensitive
part of the East-West-encounters .

One part is deliriously wrong and propagandistic
and probably Zionist also....it is when shortly before
the Armies of Salah ed-Din (Saladin) would break
the walls of Jerusalem to liberate it....
the Hero of that Film.......( a French-man , naturellement !!)
makes a speech to the Europeans inside the city and says :
" none of us was born when this city was taken away from the Muslims
and no soldiers outside those walls (the Arabs) , neither was ......."
if I were the translator of hypocrisy and of hegemony's,
I would translate this text as :
" the descendants of the thieves may keep the stolen-Jerusalem
and the sons of the Jerusalemites have no right to try to repossess it "

As if this film's message were to be :
Zionists of today may keep what the Zionist of yesterday have already stolen
and the Palestinians ought to shut-up and not to try repossess their Palestine"


Who ever wrote the dialogues to this film apparently forgot
that not everybody , on this side of the wall , is an idiot
and that 28% of the Palestinians are anyhow older than the "State of Zion"
and 8% are inside the Walls of Jerusalem itself

and 17% are inside the Stolen-State itself

and 53% are in the Occupied-state
and 56% are outside waiting for Salah ed-Din the second..

Finally , I say , it is the "best" film ever,

but nontheless not perfect !!

What is undeniably significant and beautiful
is the other message of that film ............which says :
The Kingdom of Heaven is inside your minds and hearts,
and not in Jerusalem" !!
This is a film that each Zionist, each Israeli

and each Christian-Zionist must see.


Raja Chemayel
Jerusalem is in my heart
and factualy on my land...too !!

The Dirty , the Clean and the Obelix

the Dirty

the Clean

and the obelix

Lebanon (Phoenicia) was always in the middle
of many Historical happenings and between
many different Empires and Cultures....
nothing new....nothing strange.

Lately two opposed Lebanese leaders
went simultaneously to visit Cairo and Tehran.

Both leaders were Christian-Lebanese
and even from the same sect (Maronites) ,
but as I mentioned, both are enemies to
the unthinkable- extremes.

Cairo without Jamal Abdel Nasser is no more my Cairo
and Tehran without the Shah is today better than Cairo .

So you can figure out who has my sympathies
and which city does not deserve it.

Incidentally and accidentally ,
I remember a spot in the plateau of the Bekaa ,
north East of the Lebanon,
just behind the majestic city of Baalbek..... .
one finds an Obelix dating to the third-century before Christ.


Why and what is than Obelix doing there ???
in the middle of a deserted field ,
among the world's best plantation of cannabis ????


This Obelix was set there , after a peace agreement between
the Pharaohs of Egypt and the Emperors of Persia...... ..
it was a Border-post ( a mile-stone) separating two empires.


Today's Pharaohs are Puppets to the ultimate emperor
residing in the White house....... ..
but the Emperors of Persia are no more emperors.

As an Arab I should prefer the rulers of Cairo
but as an intelligent- Arab , I should not.

Back to the Obelix 15 km north-east of Baalbeck :
it did not move since 300 BC, neither did those borders....
thus Lebanon"s internal-politics is but an international one,
Lebanon is a laboratory's- experimental- test-tube
with even an obelix inside.



Raja Chemayel
on the border lines.....