What can I add about this tragedy....i was appalled...and i was very angry....1500 people were on board this egyptian ferry and hours passed before anyone knew about this disaster...it's possible according to the news that the first one to receive the SOS call was a british military base in Scotland!! Yes, because in the arab world and especially in egypt nothing works properly...am sure one or two of the two scenarios took place: either the SOS system wasn't working properly on the ferry, or the reception system (coast guard, egyptian navey....etc) was not working....this is expected in acountry (to be fair this could have happened in most arabic countries, but egypt is notorious for its everlasting inability to learn from disasters...remember the passenger ship that sank with 450 onboard, the earthquake few years ago...etc...constant failure)....I was furious, not only because of the horrible human loss, but of the fact that this thing will happen again and again....i'm sure it will be few months before we heard about another disaster, especially in egypt where buildings could collapse because the engineer used cheap building material, or the building owner manged to bribe someone in the municipality to allow him to build an extra floor in a building that is still erect because of sheer luck and fate....I'm sure Allah protects all those people and only this is keeping things in order...as we say in Arabic "Allah latif beena".....The question is are we going (ever) to learn from these lessons....the answer so far is no...not yet....Mubarak will condemn and promise this thing will happen again and things, and people will be extreme in their actions and probably all ferries will be banned from carrying passengers, and in few weeks things will go back to the pre-disaster status: unsafe ferries that lack basic conditions of safety will resume its operations and we just need to pray that "Allah yultif beena"......I hope Saudi will ban all ferries to operate between Egypt and S.A....at least there is less corruption in S.A...though things are properly not very different from egypt....
today i read in the independent an article by an english writer, depicting how europeans are basically ignorant when it comes to understanding islam and muslims...i like the article....i think it's largely true...Europeans don't understand why muslims are enraged following publication of cartoons in an Danish paper that ridicule prophet mohamed....Mulsims are boycotting Danish government and that hurts....Danish PM apoligised only when he found that his people are going to lose more jobs....However, that doesn't mean that Muslims and Arab reaction was appropriate, it was chaotic: some palestinians kidnapped a german to blackmail his government, others blew up some christian churches in Iraq....another stupidity and further distortion of prophet mohamed's message......Arabs and Muslims have distorted the prophet and his religion and continue to do so.......I wonder why Arab and islamic governments backed up its citizens for the first time, i wonder what would have happened if this paper was an american one???
