Nermeen Murad
The Jordan Times
I really suggest that the entire Jordanian population declare national mourning, cancel all entertainment activities and weddings, and close all fun-centred venues for children and adults.
National sermons should be blared from all radio channels and schools should be open all year round without holidays, while Jordanians should work day and night without annual leave. More importantly, I suggest that Jordanians should ban all satellite channels and allow only news channels.
National sermons should be blared from all radio channels and schools should be open all year round without holidays, while Jordanians should work day and night without annual leave. More importantly, I suggest that Jordanians should ban all satellite channels and allow only news channels.
We should absolutely become true to our gloomy nature and forget about any attempted campaign to lift our spirits. In fact, I suggest that newspapers everyday continue to carry banners about the increase in prices, unnecessary killing in surrounding countries and never allow the Jordanian population a break from the gloomy predictions of our collective "political instability" or increasing "economic burden".
Sounds too drastic? Not if we allow every Nayef, Zuheir and Shaher (Arabic for every Tom, Dick and Harry) to blow out and destroy every national effort to bring culture or fun to this country under the three now famous arguments of normalisation with Israel, loose morals and economic burden.
I don't want to discuss the cancelling of Jerash Festival or replacing it with the Jordan Festival. I have no opinion on the management of either festival nor do I really care who gets to be the boss of festivals in Jordan. I do care, however, that every time the country organises an internationally respected event of the standards of Placido Domingo or even "homosexual" Mika, the otherwise dormant civil society institutions wake up and start terrorising the overseers of these activities and in turn terrorise us, those who want to go to these events.
By labelling us as "normalisers" or "Westernised/liberals" and even "bourgeois", the so-called "nationalists" terrorise us into hiding our interests just because we cannot claim that they are born out of an Arab Islamic culture or because the more Westernised Israel also sampled some of those events.
We are forced to make excuses for our tastes or our artistic or moral choices, as if we were trying to ward off some stigma that is attached to enjoying cultural activities or seeking to alleviate some of life's pressures by listening to music or watching a play.
It also invites those who don't understand the events to think that it is all right to attack the people who attend concerts and label them, if not even going as far as physically harming them.
We must remember that it is precisely these types of arguments that encouraged Al Qaeda to send its suicide bombers into what it saw as gathering places of the rich and morally lose population in Amman's hotels to unleash its indiscriminate wrath on them killing and maiming innocent people.
I am against normalisation of ties with the state of Israel and will commend anyone who fights the infiltration of our markets with Israeli products or the welcoming of anti-Arab Zionists into our homes because that would be the normal exchange of friendly states and people.
The campaign against the Jordan Festival, however, does not fall under the normalisation category. None of the performers are Israeli and none propagates the occupation of Palestine. The possibility that one of the agencies that proposed to organise events has a CEO who personally has sympathies with Israel does not mean the people of Jordan have normalised relations with Israelis.
The possibility that one of the performers is homosexual does not mean that the performance will propagate such behaviour in our midst. The performance has to be assessed for its artistic value and not for the personal morals of the performer.
As for the statement that called on the premier to cancel the festival, which apparently does not represent the people of Jordan who "shoulder several economic burdens", I suggest you go back to the beginning of this column.
