Month / November 2011

by Fadi Zaghmout

الربيع العربي هو مخطط أمريكي بحت؟!!


تصيبني بالدهشة المواقف السياسية للأفراد من حولي في ميمعة الربيع العربي. كل يحمل تحليل معين و كل يحمل فكر معين. وجهات نظر متضاربة تحمل أبعاد تاريخية و ارثا ثقافية, تحمل مشاعر وطنية و مخاوف شعبية, و العديد من ادعاءات التخوين و نظريات المؤامرة.

في الأعوام الماضية كنت أستغرب الموقف الشعبي المحلي من صدام حسين. أستغرب تلك الرؤية التي صنفته في خانة الأبطال الشعبية بعد كل القهر و القمع و الدمار الذي سببه للشعب العراقي خصوصا و الشعوب العربية عموما. أستغرب أكثر من موقف والدي الذي يختصر كل الأحداث الفائتة و القادمة على أنها مخطط أمريكي. فأمريكا هي من صنعت صدام حسين و أمريكا هي من تخلصت منه. كما أن أمريكا هي من خطط للعنف الحاصل في العراق و هي من يخطط لتسليم الحكم في المنطقة للأخوان المسلمين كي تخلق معسكر سني أمام معسكر شيعي يسهل عليها التحكم في المنطقة لسنوات قادمة.

يبدو كسيناريو منطقي لتسلسل الأحداث, لكنني أجد نفسي ترفض هذا التبسيط في الأحداث و اختصار كافة القوة الدولية و المحلية في الدولة الأمريكية و الدول الأخرى على مر عقود عدة بكلمة “مخطط أمريكي”.

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by Fadi Zaghmout

A location based social game idea: The Flock


An idea for a location based game

It is funny when an idea hits my mind and occupy it for sometime. Usually it gets me all worked up, and most of the time it turns out not to be that original or feasible to implement. With time, I learnt to kick ideas out of my head, but I will never stop having good feelings about them, and if I won’t have the time or energy to implement them, I still can share them with other people who may.

Well, today I attended the Jordan Gaming Summit at the dead sea. I attended as a representative of my new job which is a social media specialist at Public Action Project. It is a USAID project that aims to help people in Jordan preserve and conserve our limited resources of water, energy along with protecting our environment by focusing on finding better ways to manage our solid waste. We basically give grants to local NGO’s who are willing to implement projects tackling these issues. Along with our new batch of requests for proposal we have in mind gaming as a good and fun tool to reaching a wide audience in the country.

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by Fadi Zaghmout

Between Tunis’s Bouazizi and Egypt’s Magda Alia Al Madhi a portray of a cultural intake on life and death


When a man protested social injustice with a suicidal move of burning his own body, he triggered a whole revolution that broke the boundaries of his own country to hit many other Arab countries. He was crowned as a hero, idolized a copied many other times!

Now comes a woman who protests social injustice by posting a nude pictures for herself on her own blog. She triggers much press and chat around her action. She gets attacked severely by the religious groups in her country and disowned by the so-called-liberal ones. She is faced with jail and death threats and depicted as a shallow stupid unstable person and even a devil!

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by Fadi Zaghmout

What would you do if your lifespan get extended to 1000 years? #imagination


If I am to break the current level of human lifespan as we know it and live a much longer life, I would study a different discipline every decade and would work in a different field every couple of years. I would become a doctor at one point of my life, an engineer at another point, a scientist, an artist, a dancer and a singer, a taxi driver and a bar tender, ..etc. The options are endless and pretty exciting each at its merits. I would write uncountable novels and millions of blog posts!

I am trying to entertain the idea of living for a long long life in this blog post. It is something that is not totally a “science fiction” because science is pretty close to end aging, and it is something that I started addressing in my second novel “Janneh 3ala al ard (heaven on earth)”. It is a big issues and one that carries many possibilities and opens a wide door for imagination.

So going back to the same line of thought from the first paragraph and raising the questions people usually come up with when faced with such idea. Would I get bored from living too long?

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by Fadi Zaghmout

Writing and reading are my new math and physics.


It is weird how time changes us and I am not talking about aging damage here. I was reading “The Help” yesterday in my bed before going to sleep, fighting my sleepy self and trying to get over as many pages as I can. The language of the book didn’t help either. I don’t like it. It feels weird and I have much difficulties understanding that an “at” is an “at” when it is written missing a “t”! In-spite that, I still intend to read it all, even-though it didn’t hooked me yet. Maybe it has to do with a recommendation of a friend who said that this book is amazing, along with the fact that it has been a best seller in the past months and was made into a movie.

The minute I put the book down, it hit me how much I enjoy reading novels now in comparison to my old school days. Back then, language was even a bigger barrier to me but it was not the only reason I hated that part of the English curriculum. I guess that at that age I failed to see the beauty words alone can carry. I failed to see  the art of putting words next to each other to form a story of another imaginary world that carries many of the emotions I face in my daily life in those few lines.

In class, we used to do a simultaneous readings. One in turn to read several paragraphs with stops in between for a short explanation by the teacher, or a question from her to generate a discussion about the issue presented in that part. I always shied of participating in these discussions as it wasn’t my thing. I focused more in trying to keep track of which line they stopped at so that I can pick up from there if my turn to read comes next and save myself the humiliation. Well, I kind of enjoyed the moments of hearing my voice read for I thought that I was fairly good at it and thus it would be a fair enough participation from my side in the class.

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