Salmiya

The partial eclipse can be seen tomorrow both in the Arctic and in the Middle East. I will be in an airplane (provided no strike of Lufthansa employees) heading to Oslo and then returning to Tromsø. See the tiny area of the totality here .

On the eve of feared new military adventures in the Middle East and five years after the bombing of Baghdad see the movie Leading to War here . From the web page: SYNOPSIS of THE FILM How does a government lead its people to war? How does it communicate to its citizens – and to the wider world – the reasons and rationale for initiating military conflict? What rhetorical devices and techniques are employed? And how is a nation brought to support the profound decision to wage war against another nation? These are the questions that LEADING TO WAR seeks to explore. This 72-minute film shows the evolution of the United States government’s case for military action against Saddam Hussein’s regime, leading to the Iraq War which began in 2003. LEADING TO WAR is comprised entirely of archival news footage – without commentary, without voiceover – presented chronologically from President Bush’s State of the Union address in January, 2002 (the “axis of evil” speech), and continuing up to the ann...

It was exactly one year before the abject, world-shaking September 11 attacks of Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon, in September 2000, when I stumbled over a large advertisement in one of our professional journals which told me that the new Faculty of Dentistry at Kuwait University was seeking applicants for academic positions. I have to admit here that I had never ever considered moving to an Islamic country, in particular not working there. But that was entirely due to lack of information at that time. What Islam meant was not clear to me at all. I was not even interested very much. A quick check on the internet told me that this was a project mainly engaging well-known international academicians, most of them from Scandinavian countries, with a quite good record of publications. So the question came to my mind, would I fit in that environment? I read Kuwait was the hottest place in the world. But a dear friend who had been traveling in the Middle East...