bettiwettiwoo's Journal: 'Almost Normal'

The Guardian interviews Professor Mosa al-Mosawe, president of Baghdad University:

Professor Mosa al-Mosawe has lost 34 of his staff since 2003. And when he says "lost", he doesn't mean that they have resigned or retired, or simply moved on to pastures new. He means that they have been shot or kidnapped, never to be seen again. "Around 50 students have also gone missing," he says, speaking on a mobile phone from his office in Baghdad University. But in other respects, he says academic life there is "almost normal" - with a heavy emphasis on the "almost".

[...]

More than 2,000 academics fled Iraq during two decades or more while the Ba'ath party tightened its grip on power. "It was difficult to express your ideas at that time," Mosawe says, "unless you spoke in favour of the regime. The penalty was execution."

[...]

"Everything's much more open now. On campus you can discuss what you want without feeling threatened. The downside is that you have to be very careful when you walk out on the streets." Or drive. Hassan al-Rubaiei, dean of the school of dentistry, died in a hail of bullets in December 2004, when his car was sprayed with automatic gunfire as he was driving along the western bank of the Tigris. The motive for the attack was unknown, but other academics have been targeted for attempting to uphold the country's secular academic tradition.

Mosawe believes that the threat of an Islamist takeover of universities has been exaggerated by the media, and is more determined than ever that the Baghdad campuses will function as normally as circumstances allow. [...] ["]By blowing up electricity sub-stations, the insurgents are trying to give us the impression that things were better in Saddam's day."

He clearly feels they weren't.

[...]

[Professor Mosawe] is surprisingly upbeat about the future. "Like a lot of Iraqis, I'm optimistic that the insurgency will stop some time. It may be next week, next month, next year. In the meantime, we carry on. We've just had a very extensive exam period and my staff are currently very busy marking papers." Almost normal.

sure, if whabism == normal

[js7a]

Not getting killed by not critisizing the government is better than getting killed purely at random? Sorry, but at least in the first instance, you have a modicum of control over your own fate.

Plus, that guy is a guy. Why don't you find a woman in a burka who knows she'll put herself at greater risk if she gets behind a wheel of a car and ask her if she feels almost normal.

Get a Grip!

[bettiwettiwoo]

You know, the anti-war movement's current drive to depict Saddam Hussein's regime as not that bad at all, really is not only dishonest, and deeply offensive to all those who got tortured, killed and had to live in fear under a very brutal dictatorship, but it is also totally delusional. Oppose the war if you must, but at least do it without resorting to a total perversion of reality. And really: all that whingeing about the tyranny of the Bush regime and how you all suffer, and then this total denial of the

Re:Get a Grip!

[js7a]

I never said the Saddam regime was "not so bad," but it is plain from the evidence presented by Iraqi women themselves [globalresearch.ca] that the U.S. occupation is far, far worse. Are these women not experencing and (sometimes) surviving far more "real" tyranny than before all that "shock and awe" which The Lancet conservativly estimates killed 100,000 -- and maimed how many? Is that not "torture" because the instrument of maiming is a bomb with an American flag on it? And as for "distortion of reality," those who are respo

P.S.

[js7a]

Should you think my 2003 link is out of date, and surely the glorious US occupying forces ave vanquished the opressive mysogynisnt remnants in Iraq since then, then you would be wrong [kintera.org].