No Cell Phone?!

In the Name of Allah, the Ever-Compassionate, the Ever-Merciful

Humans are always questioning things and wondering about how life would, or would not, be under different circumstances and with different resources. Many of these questions have the cliché beginning, "I wonder what life would be like without..." Most of these questions are just random imaginations which we enjoy running through our minds. Interestingly, if such a situation ever does arise where we have to actually live through that "I wonder" question, our perception of such a scenario changes in a whole new way. From being an interesting notion --maybe even an adventurous experience for some-- it becomes completely unbearable and unacceptable.

Not so coincidentally, I had to experience one of those scenarios myself not so long ago. Although I cannot claim to have allowed my mind to ever concoct an adventure-laden experience mimicking such a scenario, I can say that I had thought about what most people would feel like in such a situation --including myself. It was one of those natural thoughts that cross the minds of a number of people in this day and age. It was the thought of "life without a cell phone".

Laying Down A Foundation---Part 1

Everything we do in life is built upon a foundation --a basis, an understanding of deeper concepts. These aspects of our lives may be divided into some broad categories: our characteristics and actions. Regardless of how much we may try to attribute our actions and our defining characteristics to a collage of random forces, ultimately these aspects of our lives are found upon, and well rooted in, a foundation that we partially build for ourselves and that is partially built for us by the people and ideas around us. Just like any building, if such foundations are weak to begin with, or if we allow them to become vulnerable at a later time in life, our entire being of existence will falter. In such a situation, we will have no retort but to cave-in to ourselves. A simple glance at the world around us will demonstrate how much of a reality that is.

Ponder, oh People of Intellect!

270-280 people -men, women, and children- have died according to various reports.
Homes, and centers of security, like police buildings, have been decimated. In the words of a Yahoo News article posted on Sunday titled, "Israel strikes Gaza in 2nd day of attacks," Israeli war planes have

"dropped bombs and missiles on a top security installation, a mosque, a TV station and dozens of other targets across the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Sunday."

Furthermore, it states,

"One of the main medicine warehouses supplying local pharmacies in southern Gaza was attacked in another sortie."

A BBC television correspondent from just outside the Gaza Strip -as entrance to Gaza has been blocked by Israel- reported:

"This is the highest number of people to die in 24 hours in the entire history of the conflict."

An article on the BBC website entitled "Israel renews air strikes on Gaza" reported the following political reactions:

US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad suggested Hamas held the key to restoring calm.
"We believe the way forward from here is for rocket attacks against Israel to stop, for all violence to end," he said.
He was implicitly backed up from Cairo by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas - whose Fatah faction is a bitter rival of Hamas.
"We could have avoided what happened," Mr Abbas said, saying the Islamist group should have renewed the ceasefire before it lapsed.

The only categorical response from the rest of the Muslim world, so far, comes from Turkey. According to the International Herald Tribune, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, said that the Israeli air strikes were a,

"crime against humanity."

Reuters online reports that,

"The Arab League has delayed until Wednesday an emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers called to take a common position on the Israeli raids on Gaza because many of them were busy in separate meetings of two Arab regional groups -- the GCC and the Maghreb Union."

"Air strikes on Gaza continue as deaths rise," an article posted on the CNN website on Sunday, described the statement of the emergency UN Security Council session in the following manner:

The statement "expressed serious concern at the escalation of the situation in Gaza" but it did not single out Israel or Hamas by name when it "called for an immediate halt for all violence."

Some TV news channels have reported that the morgues are full, while others have reported that they received information that the morgues of hospitals in Gaza were already full before the recent attack. In the case of the latter a person of thinking must ask, "where will the newly dead then go?"