Expect freezing cold nights in the coming two days, probably sub zero temperatures.
Cold north easterly winds, and by virtue of its origin, it shall be dry.
This will make feel like much colder as well
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Let your shoes do the talking
No, I am not going to talk about the size 10 shoe that barely missed President Bush's head, nor about the dilemma that this event would cause security agents all over the world as metal detectors cannot detect your metal-free shoes. Or trying to imagine a future presidential press meeting attended by shoeless attendees on a hot summer day afternoon. I will, on the other hand, show u a joke that I received some time back
Ammar Sajdi
www.realsoft-me.com
www.e-ammar.net
Monday, December 08, 2008
كل سنة وانتم طيبين
I just cannot find anything better than what Al-mutanbi said
عيد بأي حال عدت يا عيد بما مضى آم بأمر فيك تغيير
I also must say that i am distressed about the new of the accident that claimed the life of 4 young people in Aqaba (12 graders), may their souls rest is piece and may god empower their parents and loved ones with patience.
عيد بأي حال عدت يا عيد بما مضى آم بأمر فيك تغيير
I also must say that i am distressed about the new of the accident that claimed the life of 4 young people in Aqaba (12 graders), may their souls rest is piece and may god empower their parents and loved ones with patience.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
One giant leap towards safe Driving
Car manufacturer strive fiercely to yield ever safer driving experiences. Millions of Dollars are spent in research and development towards this end. Cutting Edge technology has been currently devoted to come up with the state-of-the-art-technology in making our driving experience safer than ever. Finally, the panacea for safety, watch this seat belt in your future car
Saturday, November 22, 2008
ban on Alcohol? a myth or a reality
In many occasions, i find myself debating why i am a no-no guy when it comes to alcohol consumption. of course, to many i am just NOT COOL, BORING. lack progressive thinking! And my mind is simply rendered incapacitated by some disputable religious doctrines! in other words , i am simply متخلف.
Well in an article published today by By GREGORY KATZ, Associated Press Writer,
Britain is considering imposing restriction on alcohol drinking as drink related death is on the rise. This is mainly due to liver problems among young people and such condition is signaling a future epidemic. As a first step, a ban on HAPPY HOURS (discounted drinking hour at bars and rest) is considered. The government is also planning to spend 10 million pounds (15 Million USD) on awareness campaign and enforcement laws against under age drinking.
I would not have personally dared to be a health advocate against alcohol drinking, because, given the above perception, people would immediately think that i am being biased, and as such driven into defending my beliefs in any way. This time, it is Gregory Katz of the associated press that you need to argue with
Well in an article published today by By GREGORY KATZ, Associated Press Writer,
Britain is considering imposing restriction on alcohol drinking as drink related death is on the rise. This is mainly due to liver problems among young people and such condition is signaling a future epidemic. As a first step, a ban on HAPPY HOURS (discounted drinking hour at bars and rest) is considered. The government is also planning to spend 10 million pounds (15 Million USD) on awareness campaign and enforcement laws against under age drinking.
I would not have personally dared to be a health advocate against alcohol drinking, because, given the above perception, people would immediately think that i am being biased, and as such driven into defending my beliefs in any way. This time, it is Gregory Katz of the associated press that you need to argue with
Friday, November 14, 2008
Cool
Jennifer Aniston,on Oprah Show was cool
the charming 50 years old Michelle Pfeiffer in "I could never be your woman was also cool"
the charming 50 years old Michelle Pfeiffer in "I could never be your woman was also cool"
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Engineers of Jihad
Which academic pursuit has been the most prevalent among Islamic Jihadis?
An interesting article appeared in IEEE spectrum magazine September issue Volume 45 number 9 which exactly answers this question
Steffen Hertog and Diego Gambetta studied files of 404 people Jihad activist from 30 countries, only to find that the most prevalent academic pursuit is ENGINEERING.
out of the 404 people, the study could only confirm the academic standing of 178 people. 44% were engineers - most of them Electrical , Civil and Computer Engineers.
The paper submitted by these two gentlemen (no 2007-10, University of Oxford) revealed the following figure for fields of study
Engineers 78
Islamic Studies 34
Medicine 14
Business/Economics 12
Education 5
others 28
Subject Unknown 18
Interesting!
Ammar Sajdi
www.e-ammar.com
www.realsoft-me.com
An interesting article appeared in IEEE spectrum magazine September issue Volume 45 number 9 which exactly answers this question
Steffen Hertog and Diego Gambetta studied files of 404 people Jihad activist from 30 countries, only to find that the most prevalent academic pursuit is ENGINEERING.
out of the 404 people, the study could only confirm the academic standing of 178 people. 44% were engineers - most of them Electrical , Civil and Computer Engineers.
The paper submitted by these two gentlemen (no 2007-10, University of Oxford) revealed the following figure for fields of study
Engineers 78
Islamic Studies 34
Medicine 14
Business/Economics 12
Education 5
others 28
Subject Unknown 18
Interesting!
Ammar Sajdi
www.e-ammar.com
www.realsoft-me.com
Sunday, November 02, 2008
وشهد شاهد من اهلة
A best seller written by the Jewish historian and a professor at Tel Aviv University shlomo sand, aserting that the Jewish people as we know them now do not necesserly descent from the origial jewish people who lived in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This URL links you to an article in Haaretz newspaper
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html
this is also an article wrote by Jonathan Cook
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081006/FOREIGN/279853798
Copied and pasted below, these two article are very important as they are written by a Jewish shcolar and therefore, it cannot be taken as biased.
Book refuting Jewish taboo on Israel’s bestseller list
Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent
Last Updated: October 06. 2008 10:38PM UAE / October 6. 2008 6:38PM GMT
TEL AVIV // No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel’s bestseller list – and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel’s biggest taboo.
Dr Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation – whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel – is a myth invented little more than a century ago. An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr Sand drew on extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this claim but several more – all equally controversial.In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today’s Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel and that the only political solution to the country’s conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.
The success of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? looks likely to be repeated around the world. A French edition, launched last month, is selling so fast that it has already had three print runs.Translations are under way into a dozen languages, including Arabic and English. But he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched by his English publisher, Verso, in the United States next year. In contrast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly supportive, at least curious about his argument. Tom Segev, one of the country’s leading journalists, has called the book “fascinating and challenging”.
Surprisingly, Dr Sand said, most of his academic colleagues in Israel have shied away from tackling his arguments. One exception is Israel Bartal, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Writing in Haaretz, the Israeli daily newspaper, Dr Bartal made little effort to rebut Dr Sand’s claims. Paradoxically, he dedicated much of his article instead to defending his profession. He suggested that Israeli historians were not as ignorant about the invented nature of Jewish history as Dr Sand contends.
The idea for the book had come to him many years ago, Dr Sand said, but he waited until recently to start working on it. “I cannot claim to be particularly courageous in publishing the book now,” he said. “I waited until I was a full professor. There is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort.”Dr Sand’s main argument is that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion.
Equally, the modern Zionist idea of Jews being obligated to return from exile to the Promised Land was entirely alien to Judaism, he added.“Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem. Before, the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be lived in. For 2,000 years Jews stayed away from Jerusalem not because they could not return but because their religion forbade them from returning until the messiah came.”
The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking at the archaeological evidence from the biblical era.“I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD.“But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends. “Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can’t explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldn’t find any. Not one.
“That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelming peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands.” Instead, he believes an alternative theory is more plausible: the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. “Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God.”
So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up scattered around the globe before the modern state of Israel began encouraging them to “return”?Dr Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytising religion, desperate for converts. “This is mentioned in the Roman literature of the time.”Jews travelled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen and among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the people of the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia, would convert en masse to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe.
Dr Sand pointed to the strange state of denial in which most Israelis live, noting that papers offered extensive coverage recently to the discovery of the capital of the Khazar kingdom next to the Caspian Sea. Ynet, the website of Israel’s most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, headlined the story: “Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital.” And yet none of the papers, he added, had considered the significance of this find to standard accounts of Jewish history.
One further question is prompted by Dr Sand’s account, as he himself notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?“It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area’s original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam.”
Dr Sand attributed his colleagues’ reticence to engage with him to an implicit acknowledgement by many that the whole edifice of “Jewish history” taught at Israeli universities is built like a house of cards. The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Dr Sand said, dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two disciplines: general history and Jewish history. Jewish history was assumed to need its own field of study because Jewish experience was considered unique.
“There’s no Jewish department of politics or sociology at the universities. Only history is taught in this way, and it has allowed specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative world where they are not touched by modern developments in historical research. “I’ve been criticised in Israel for writing about Jewish history when European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html
this is also an article wrote by Jonathan Cook
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081006/FOREIGN/279853798
Copied and pasted below, these two article are very important as they are written by a Jewish shcolar and therefore, it cannot be taken as biased.
Book refuting Jewish taboo on Israel’s bestseller list
Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent
Last Updated: October 06. 2008 10:38PM UAE / October 6. 2008 6:38PM GMT
TEL AVIV // No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel’s bestseller list – and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel’s biggest taboo.
Dr Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation – whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel – is a myth invented little more than a century ago. An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr Sand drew on extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this claim but several more – all equally controversial.In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today’s Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel and that the only political solution to the country’s conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.
The success of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? looks likely to be repeated around the world. A French edition, launched last month, is selling so fast that it has already had three print runs.Translations are under way into a dozen languages, including Arabic and English. But he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched by his English publisher, Verso, in the United States next year. In contrast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly supportive, at least curious about his argument. Tom Segev, one of the country’s leading journalists, has called the book “fascinating and challenging”.
Surprisingly, Dr Sand said, most of his academic colleagues in Israel have shied away from tackling his arguments. One exception is Israel Bartal, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Writing in Haaretz, the Israeli daily newspaper, Dr Bartal made little effort to rebut Dr Sand’s claims. Paradoxically, he dedicated much of his article instead to defending his profession. He suggested that Israeli historians were not as ignorant about the invented nature of Jewish history as Dr Sand contends.
The idea for the book had come to him many years ago, Dr Sand said, but he waited until recently to start working on it. “I cannot claim to be particularly courageous in publishing the book now,” he said. “I waited until I was a full professor. There is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort.”Dr Sand’s main argument is that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion.
Equally, the modern Zionist idea of Jews being obligated to return from exile to the Promised Land was entirely alien to Judaism, he added.“Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem. Before, the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be lived in. For 2,000 years Jews stayed away from Jerusalem not because they could not return but because their religion forbade them from returning until the messiah came.”
The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking at the archaeological evidence from the biblical era.“I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD.“But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends. “Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can’t explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldn’t find any. Not one.
“That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelming peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands.” Instead, he believes an alternative theory is more plausible: the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. “Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God.”
So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up scattered around the globe before the modern state of Israel began encouraging them to “return”?Dr Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytising religion, desperate for converts. “This is mentioned in the Roman literature of the time.”Jews travelled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen and among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the people of the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia, would convert en masse to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe.
Dr Sand pointed to the strange state of denial in which most Israelis live, noting that papers offered extensive coverage recently to the discovery of the capital of the Khazar kingdom next to the Caspian Sea. Ynet, the website of Israel’s most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, headlined the story: “Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital.” And yet none of the papers, he added, had considered the significance of this find to standard accounts of Jewish history.
One further question is prompted by Dr Sand’s account, as he himself notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?“It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area’s original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam.”
Dr Sand attributed his colleagues’ reticence to engage with him to an implicit acknowledgement by many that the whole edifice of “Jewish history” taught at Israeli universities is built like a house of cards. The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Dr Sand said, dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two disciplines: general history and Jewish history. Jewish history was assumed to need its own field of study because Jewish experience was considered unique.
“There’s no Jewish department of politics or sociology at the universities. Only history is taught in this way, and it has allowed specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative world where they are not touched by modern developments in historical research. “I’ve been criticised in Israel for writing about Jewish history when European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world.”
Friday, October 31, 2008
Arabic Calligraphy
Today shall mark the end of the Arabic Calligraphy workshop that i have been attending for the last 3 weeks. It is a short workshop that meets once a week on Saturday at wild Jordan. We spend two hours learning about the different types of Arabic handwriting. I am a big fan of Arabic Calligraphy, and after attending the workshop, i am more determined than ever to pursue my quest to mastering the Diwany style, which truly captivated my sentiments.
Lots of talents coupled with a superb sense of brilliance is embedded in the scripts; coherence, harmony, and symmetry which are the prime features of this art, render an unprecedented new dimension of aesthetics to my repository of splendor.
Note: i was mistaken, there are three more sessions to go.
Lots of talents coupled with a superb sense of brilliance is embedded in the scripts; coherence, harmony, and symmetry which are the prime features of this art, render an unprecedented new dimension of aesthetics to my repository of splendor.
Note: i was mistaken, there are three more sessions to go.
Emergence of a Poet
Last night, I witnessed the emergence of the next generation of poets. The 30-year chap, Tamim Barghouthy who is the sun of a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, is currently a political science assistant professor at Washington University. The event was held by Jerusalem Forum and the Welfare Corporation at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Amman. The Ballroom was filled with about 700 attendees and all proceeds went to the children of Gaza.
The Guy is a natural, who can write in colloquial Egyptian, and other local dialects as well as in well-formatted formal poetry.
He possesses a stunning talent of recitals and a superb ability to write captivating collections of harmonious series of words we call POETRY
That was my first real encounter with Tamim, even though; he appeared on TV many times before. I guess, however, that his star is shining like never before.
During the function, people generously donated money for the children of Gaza. The session ended by a book signing and I was privileged to have his signature on two of his published poetry books
The Guy is a natural, who can write in colloquial Egyptian, and other local dialects as well as in well-formatted formal poetry.
He possesses a stunning talent of recitals and a superb ability to write captivating collections of harmonious series of words we call POETRY
That was my first real encounter with Tamim, even though; he appeared on TV many times before. I guess, however, that his star is shining like never before.
During the function, people generously donated money for the children of Gaza. The session ended by a book signing and I was privileged to have his signature on two of his published poetry books
Ammar Sajdi
www.realsoft-me.com
www.e-ammar.net
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Gitex is over and we are all back after 5 straight day in what i feel inclined to call Computer 7esbeh. A few positive things :-
I was really impressed by the care that the Jordanian consulate in UAE showed The commercial attaché : Mr. Al-Hakam Al-Taleb (who happened to be a classmate of mine visited the Jordanian Booth almost everyday
The consulate of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan invited us for lunch at the MovenPick hotel and the consular attended the lunch
Mr Altaleb arranged for 1 hour TV show, where one of my colleagues and I were the host in a program called Sa3et Wafa through a satellite station called Decision Makers (NileSat). It is something similar to Yes3ed Saba7ak. At the end they gave us a CD recording of the episode.
The show itself is a just an networking oppurtunity and a way to say, we are here! There are lots of people and lots of companies, and as such, there is a bit of focus distraction.
I was really impressed by the care that the Jordanian consulate in UAE showed The commercial attaché : Mr. Al-Hakam Al-Taleb (who happened to be a classmate of mine visited the Jordanian Booth almost everyday
The consulate of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan invited us for lunch at the MovenPick hotel and the consular attended the lunch
Mr Altaleb arranged for 1 hour TV show, where one of my colleagues and I were the host in a program called Sa3et Wafa through a satellite station called Decision Makers (NileSat). It is something similar to Yes3ed Saba7ak. At the end they gave us a CD recording of the episode.
The show itself is a just an networking oppurtunity and a way to say, we are here! There are lots of people and lots of companies, and as such, there is a bit of focus distraction.
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