I'm Going to Disneyland!

This is what I've been up to in the last fortnight. Briefly.

After the Hotel Talal crew dispersed to the four corners of the earth, Nickie, Kristen, and Kieran flew into Beirut. We had work to do.

Kieran's my long-time partner-in-revolution, a large, bearish character with the grace of a drunk Viking, the mind of a Greek philosopher, and the ambition of a Roman emperor. Kristen's his opinionated little sister, all cheeky grins, contagious chuckles, and offhand comments that are as insightful as they are belligerent. Nickie's another old friend and kindred spirit, who's worked as a borderline-escort in the Japanese corporate underworld, almost died making a documentary about Malay jihadists in southern Thailand, and is launching a revolutionary social media website for the environment.

Nickie's done a lot of freelance film work, and using her contacts to several distributors- including Al-Jazeera- she scored agreements for these distributors to purchase a series of short films that we would make about the region during a month of travel.

So far, we've:

1) Filmed a Climate Change Walkathon in Beirut in association with the Global Awareness Day on Climate Change and the global conference held this year in Bali. Such a march, which involved over a thousand people, had never been held in the Arab world before. It was the first time I'd ever held a videocamera, or held interviews news-style: run in, shove your mike in a guy's face, ask him five questions, then rinse and repeat. Nickie and I nabbed a choice interview from Wael Hmaidan, the organizer of the event, who had a million optimistic comments about the possibility for putting climate change on the agenda of the next Arab League Summit, the repercussions of erosion, rising coastlines, and water scarcity in the Arab world, and the economic opportunities available in an Arab "green" economy. The war-torn, petrodollar-fueled Arab world, of course, doesn't give two shits about the environment... but hey. A Walkathon begins with a single step. Right? Sigh.

2) Filmed a community of human rights dissidents from Syria. These included a number of ordinary rankers- journalists, writers, activists- a Kurdish family that fled after one of the daughters was falsely accused of insulting President Bashar Assad, and a pair of reasonably high-profile politicians, one of whom was interviewed in exile, and the other secretly in Damascus. The latter was arrested the day after we interviewed him. I almost puked upon hearing the news, and fervently prayed that our interview had not been the trigger for his arrest. Sometime, I will write up the story of my buddy Ahed, who had a tale and a half to tell, and who was almost solely responsible for putting together this film short.

A number of potential film shorts fell through, including one on Sunni street politics, which I wrote up in my previous post in lieu of making a pod. Too much blue tape- the powers-that-be in Tareek Al-Jadidah didn't want us filming or probing their security arrangements. Whoops. Hope Sam can keep a secret. By the way, that isn't his real name.

We then blew through Damascus, stopping only for our clandestine (or was it?) interview and a few intense sessions at the local sheesha parlor. My head still hurts. We had been fed a lot of paranoid warnings about the unseen hands and eyes of the Syrian Security Services, known as the mukhabarat, by my exiled buddy Ahed- and we were wary of even speaking about him or the regime in public... as, it seems, was the entire country. We went from Lebanon, a country that lived and breathed politics, to a country where it was the one forbidden, untouchable issue.

Portraits of Bashar Assad- the figurehead for an Alawite regime puppeteered by Bashar's stronger little brother Maher and old associates of the dead founder of the regime, Hafez Assad, were everywhere. There could be four framed pictures of the guy in a single shop. His face was on bridges, buildings, taxi windows, shopfronts... and it all had one message: leave the politics to us. Big Brother.

Tongue-in-cheek, we called Bashar Assad "You Know Who", or "He Who Must not be Named." Alternately, we used Lord of the Rings lingo: Bashar was "The Dark Lord", or "Sauron". The mukhabarat were "Dark Riders", or "Nazgul". The army were "orcs".


We raced into Jordan, to find that the currency was pegged a third again higher than the US dollar, and everything was insanely overpriced as a result. Our wallets hemorrhaged, and this caused much bitterness. There isn't a drop of oil in Jordan. How could the currency remain so strong?

I figured that the Americans and Saudis are propping up the Jordanians with aid and petrofunds because of its location and loyalties. Jordan is south of Syria, north of Saudi, west of Iraq, and east of Israel and the Bank. It's one of the last strong allies of the States, and one of only two nations to sign a full peace with Israel. 30% of the people are descended from Bedouin, and are ethnically most similar to Iraqis and Saudis. More importantly, 70% are Palestinians, descendants of refugees from 1948. Jordan must be one of the only countries in the world whose currency boasts a monument from another state: the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

It's an island of stability in a sea of madness, and the West should want to keep it that way. If the monarchy fell and the "Jordanian" identity was lost for those millions of Palestinians-Jordanians, Jordan could become anything from a Syrian vassal state, to a base for Islamist extemists or Iraqi militants and refugees, to a neo-Palestinian state that might serve as a base for West Bank and Gaza nationalists against Israel. And the best way to stave this off is to keep the bellies of the people full.

Anyway, we blew through a day in Petra, the rose-red city carved into a winding canyon by a civilization called the Nabateans, who were contemporaries of Christ.

Now we are in a town called Madaba, an hour from the the King Hussein Bridge, and the land know by Syrian journalists as "Disneyland", or "Dixie", and by the Arab world as "the Zionist Entity": Israel.

All of us have a place in the world that we're dying to see... and most of the time we have no roots there. Nickie's a South East Asia buff, and fulfilled a longtime dream to make the region her stomping ground when she filmed her documentary. Kieran was a Russian in another life, though I can't quite decide if he was a Czarist or a Red revolutionary. My cousin Gavin, who can't speak a word of Mandarin, goes through books on China at an astounding rate. My friend Maddie back home is obsessed with India- and she's British-Canadian. Other friends, white as sheets and Canadian as maple syrup- are obsessed with Latin America, East Africa, Central Asia.

For my part, I've waited for what seems like my entire life to see Israel and Jerusalem. And now that I'm a couple of hours from its gates, I can't sleep.

There's work and play to be had. Films to make, sights to see. Interviews to craft and trips to plan. A few days from now, Christmas in Bethlehem, and New Year's in Tel Aviv. But right now, I couldn't care less. I'm going to Jerusalem. The Church, the Mount, the Wall, the Gates. I've no words for it, and probably won't for a long time.

I'm going to Disneyland!