Solar Energy

If only they made use of it in the Middle East instead of relying on an ending source of energy (oil)..

Have a blessed day..

Beauty

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

My post today is about the things I 'in my personal culture/opinion' believe are part of women's beauty. I love these things and use them/ or do them frequently and some on daily basis. This is of course within my Islamic beliefs meaning I do them at home or within the sharia law.

• Dihn oud, I am addicted to it, it is best applied in very small amount in pulse areas and hair specially when it is wet. It is quite expensive but used in very tiny amount. Every Khaleeji house (gulf) must have it.

source

• Kohl, and I mean the pure Kohl made at home by ladies. In, Oman they make the natural very black kohl using olive oil and frankincense. It is also used in infants as a remedy for eye problems and to keep the evil/bad eye.

source

• Henna, it is attractive, beautiful and smells wonderful (in my opinion) 

source

• Bukhur/oud, which we use to scent the house, our clothes and our bodies. It smells better when accompanies dihn al oud and when you moisture your body with an Arabic fragrant cream. advice, try to hold your hair (wet) above the bukhur, you'll thank me :)

• Anklet, a beauty that I adore

source

• Amouage creams (Omani yepii), I don't mind other types but these are great. The smell is amazing

source

There are other things but I cant put them here in Public. However, these are the most important things for me :)

Your Time to Shine, an interview

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

I was very lucky to be interviewed by Marie Harmony, an inspiring lady who has a blog dedicated to women and for their voice to be heard :)..

You can find the interview here in her blog :)

Random from Eidul Adhha, 2011

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

I realise that I never posted photographs of my own country, so here are some I took on this week of eid we celebrated...enjoy :)

Nizwa

We rarely get these heavy clouds, the weather was absolutely beautiful, and we enjoyed each day of it, it is getting hot again :)

Nizwa

BBQ time :)

part of souq (market)..

trying to grow basil :)

Muscat

at my parents house


wish you all a lovely week

Happy Eid?

 بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Some days, this whole life is my concern.. I am as ambitious as a little child..

The other days, I have a deep feeling that nothing can be changed.. oh no..

May Allah give us guidance and bring contentment to our heart..

Amin..

Happy Eid for Muslims..and may the coming years bring peace that has escaped many nations/countries/individuals/communities around us..

Love...Moon

Holistic Learning

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

I have been working recently on developing my own "mini" curriculum that I can do with my children (age five and three) at home and after school. Why am I doing so?

• Although My son is enrolled in one of the best schools alhamdulilah, which is an international one. They still are missing some aspects that every human being requires to be better ones
• I am afraid that I might miss my children's strengths/weaknesses.
• Pointing out/improving/consolidating their strengths and talents
• improve my parenting skills (of course :))
• I have studied in an education system that unfortunately did only focus on memory skills (memorise, MEMorise, MEMORISE), with no creativity, no encouragement of it, and it KILLED talents

So why am I sharing my thoughts here?

• Maybe someone can tell me where I am going wrong/what can I add/modify?
• someone might find it a good idea/sharing is caring
• so I can arrange my thoughts

I didn't know what to call it, is it a continuum of home schooling? I just called it holistic learning. I am looking at the following aspects, and designing activities in relation to that:

• taffakur/tadabur (I did not know how to translate it, but it means fathoming/deep thinking) which will be on Quran, Islamic literature, fathoming on how/why we were created, be independent thinkers and deeply thinking about what has been created/why and so on (I got one site which focuses on this, it is actually a school curriculum but it has some products for parents. http://www.tafakkur.com
• emotional intelligence, I've a book that you do it together with your child in Arabic and it enhances this aspect of intelligence in a fun way 

• Home project: crafts, baking, handmade stuff
• an outing that is to somewhere for a purpose/objectives that will be discussed prior to the outing.
• and a story time/reading time

What are you doing with your children, any suggestion please :)

..

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

This month has been overwhelming for myself and the whole family by different incidents, but the one that affected us all and still does is the sudden death of my uncle (My mother's brother). He died less than a month ago, and our life didn't return to normal yet. He was in the masjid, reading Quran and he died at that moment.

This left the family devastated although very patient as well. He was a second father to all of us.

It made me think a lot about death and how short this life can be. It made me realise you should not think that everything will remain the same for us. We'll leave, others will come, nations will change and so on.

My Uncle had Hypertension, my mother might be suffering from it as well. I've been having some medical checkups to investigate why I feel fatigue and muscle ache most of the last two years. I finally decided to investigate on this :). The doctor told me I've iron deficiency anemia, waiting for the other results, inshalla all good.

I am sorry I feel my post is depressing, I needed to write down something...

love, moon

Inspirational blog award

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

I was honoured to receive this award. Thank you to Marie from the wonderful blog the colour of our skin. I just discovered it recently but I am touched by how beautiful is the personality of this lady that you can see  through her blog.

• Copy and paste the award on your site and copy the link of the person who gave you the award. I've done it :)
• Then answer the tag questions! 
• Nominate any blogs you feel deserve it.

EIGHT EASY TAG QUESTIONS:

1. What makes you laugh, smile or giggle? Listening to my kids talking together ,an outing with my friends, it really cheers me up
2. What are your dreams for your future? achieving something that I will be remembered with even after death, seeing my children as good leaders and Muslims
3. If you are to go to a cruise, where would it be and why? the Mediterranean sea, I would love to visit all the countries that lie there :)
4. How would you spend your vacation time and with whom? travelling with my family
5. If given a chance, what life would you choose? Your life now or your past? My life now with the ambitions I had in the past
6. Is there something that you wished before when you were young but you didn’t get it? I wished to study architecture but didn't :)
7. Have you been in a situation where you might have given up but still you chose to move on? yeah but cannot talk about it here :)
8. Is their someone in your life who has been your source of strength and inspiration? so many people, I am easily inspired by anyone who has been influential in this life.

I love reading many blogs whenever I've time. I'll mention some that I will tag but there are other great ones mashallah..

Musings of mom2four, an intelligent woman who writes about her kids, family and other interesting subjects.

Old Muslim woman in the shoe,  an inspirational woman who despite her big family mashallah she is active and achieves a lot

My life as a Muslim Convert, a lovely lady who writes about her experiences daily and her struggle with the Muslim community

Chasing rainbow, an inspirational lady who writes about her baby rainbow and other interesting topics. I keep checking her blog daily to learn new things everyday 

Love...Moon

I want to go to Janna

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

My father-in-law's eyes were filled with tears I was told. My son who is going to be five years old in two months inshallah was with his Auntie (father's youngest sister), he wanted to see old photographs of our grandparents. He asked her; where is 'my mom's grandmother'?, 

my sister-in-law: she is dead..

My son: is she in janna (heaven)?

Sister-in-law: yes she is

My son: I love Allah, I want to go to janna, are there beautiful things in there?apples, toys etc etc.. 

and so was the conversation.

When my father in law knew the story, he was touched and said that inshallah he'll remain like this as this is planted in him at young age..

I was touched, being me worrying a lot and thinking that what I am teaching my kids is not enough and their deep believe and knowledge of Allah is not there yet..I was touched and knew that what you teach at this young age remain deep within your children's faith..

small things lift your spirit.. make you believe that you are affecting people's life around you in a positive way.

Al hamdulilah..

Happy Eid to Muslims all over the World

Masjid essaida Mayzoon,in our  Neighbourhood

عيدكم مبارك وعساكم من عوادة

Secret Thursday

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

We all get our moments of anger, despair, sadness.. or maybe we've something that is hard to share with people around us. Imagine this being a kite, where you write all the secrets you have in your heart, all the matters that concern you but you just can't share, and you fly the kite away, relief can fill your heart afterwards to some extent.

Post anonymously. I will be posting in between as well :), on our secret Thursday.

Laylatul Qadr (ليلة القدر)

Ramadhan Kareem

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

sponge cake with chocolate ganache

Ramadhan Kareem, isn't it very late. It is 19th Ramadhan and I didn't post anything. I always have the intention of posting once a week, but never seem able to achieve this :(.

done by my sisters-in-law

Before the start of Ramadhan I did with the great help of my sisters in-law (much appreciated help) a small party to introduce ramadhan to my children. They did a funny puppet show as well :), we ended it with dinner and the cake above. I hope that the idea of how special and important this month is will remain forever in my children's hearts.

It is almost over. I have the sad feeling that you get when you get separated from someone close, and you don't know if you will ever get to see them again.

a crucial side note: remember our brothers and sisters in Somalia. while we have an end of our fasting, they don't. to donate, here are some great and trusted organisations:


www.ihh.org.tr/


http://www.islamic-relief.me/index.php/home


http://www.qcharity.com/a/index.php


http://al-istiqama.net/How2Donate.asp

The nation of Iqra does not read!

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

I've been thinking and reading about this matter for a while now, we are the nation of "Iqra", which is an Arabic word meaning "read", it was the first word the angel Gabriel (Jabreel) told prophet Muhammad (pbuh) who was sent by Allah (God). But are we really a reading nation,(talking generally about Muslims and Arabs specifically). 

Sadly the answer is no. we are a nation that has been attracted to video games, football, movies and other non-productive materialistic entertainment and forgot the importance of reading and learning from a book, plus enjoying it. I once read somewhere that that our population reads around half a page per person per year!!!..if this is true, than this is so scary.

A shocking news: A recent UN report suggests that less than 2% of the population in the Arab world reads even one book a year and that one-third of Arabs are illiterate. 

http://www.theworld.org/2010/04/lack-of-reading-in-the-arab-world/

of course some of the problem will be due to the lack of financial ability to feed a family let alone buy a book (which is not that cheap in the Arab world). Moreover, the lack of public resources that can encourage reading (such as public libraries and so on). In addition, a high percentage of the Arabs don't have internet access nor they are literate which means that there is a lack of resources again and knowledge as well.

Moreover, talking from the aspect of my culture and my place. I can't remember if we have a public library where I live, there might be few in the whole of Oman. I am ashamed to say that I don't think we have over three public libraries (if they reach this number anyway-there might be less than that!).

I know of some very devoted readers in Oman, they can't spend a day without reading. However this come from your own personal interest and otherwise, we lack the encouragement and resources that help people and specifically children to read!!.

Read, a word that has deep meaning, a crucial word that will either prosper a nation when it is followed, or lead it to be ignorant and collapse.

I was thinking of doing a campaign on this subject, I want to make changes, even if it was a minor change. Any suggestion?

Moon

Are Palestinian Children less worthy?

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

With the overwhelming uprisings in the Middle East, my mind cannot stop wondering all the time on how this year is going to end, or what will happen next. I feel as if someone is squeezing my heart. I read this article last night, and it just came with what I couldn't express myself. If I can spread some truth, I will do it whether it was with me or against me.. 

No hatred words please if someone disagrees with me, because I know that some people never accept the truth. It is from al jazeera and the photos as well. A long article but worth reading. http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/201152911579533291.html

What is it about Jewish and Arab children that privileges the first and spurns the second in the speeches of President Barack Obama, let alone in the Western media more generally? Are Jewish children smarter, prettier, whiter? Are they deserving of sympathy and solidarity, denied to Arab children, because they are innocent and unsullied by the guilt of their parents, themselves often referred to as "the children of Israel"? Or, is it that Arab children are dangerous, threatening, guilty, even dark and ugly, a situation that can only lead to Arabopaedophobia - the Western fear of Arab children?

Innocence and childhood are common themes in Western political discourse, official and unofficial. While it is a truism to state that since the end of European colonialism the US and Europe have been, at the official and unofficial levels, friendly to and supportive of the Zionist colonial project and hostile to Palestinians and Arabs in their resistance to Zionism, the expectation would be that a West that insists rhetorically on the "universalism" of its values would show at least a rhetorical commitment to the equality of Arab and Jewish children as victims of the violence visited on the region by Zionist colonialism and the resistance to it. Yet, the only Western sympathy manifest is to Jewish children as symbols of Zionist and Israeli innocence. This Western sympathy is deployed primarily to denounce Arab guilt, including the guilt of Arab children.

Indeed, the only time Arab children received any sympathy at all in the West was a few years ago when Israeli and US propaganda outlets, official and unofficial alike, mounted a major propaganda campaign to save these children from their barbaric Arab and Palestinian parents, who allegedly trained them to commit violent acts, or who unlovingly placed them in the middle of danger, sacrificing them for their violent political goals. It was not Israel who was to blame for killing Palestinian children, but the children's own uncaring and cruel parents who placed them in the path of Israeli Jewish bullets, which left Israeli Jews no choice but to kill them. This of course is an old Israeli casuistry used to justify Israel's carnage of Palestinians. Golda Meir had famously articulated the workings of Israel's Jewish conscience thus: "We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours."

In the official discourse of post-World War II US power, Jewish children have been often invoked to illustrate the innocence of Israel, a tradition carried faithfully by Barack Obama's rhetoric. Refusing to even acknowledge Arab children as victims of Israel, on June 4, 2009, Obama told Arabs in his Cairo speech: "It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered." He reiterated this in his May 19, 2011 "winds of change" speech, declaring: "For decades, the conflict between Israelis and Arabs has cast a shadow over the region. For Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them."

A Gazan boy sells vegetables in the rain after the Israeli blockade crushed the economy in the coastal territory

 

Later that week, in his speech to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on May 22, Obama expressed sympathy with the hardship colonising Jews experience while appropriating the lands of the Palestinians: "I saw the daily struggle to survive in the eyes of an eight-year old [Jewish] boy who lost his leg to a Hamas rocket." He averred that the US and Israel, presumably unlike Palestinians or Arabs more generally, "both seek a region where families and their children can live free from the threat of violence".

Endorsing Israel's illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, he asserted: "We also know how difficult that search for security can be, especially for a small nation like Israel in a tough neighbourhood. I've seen it firsthand. When I touched my hand against the Western Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones, I thought of all the centuries that the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland." Aside from borrowing anti-Black American white racism with the use of terms like "tough neighbourhood" - a term first borrowed by Binyamin Netanyahu to refer to the Middle East over a decade ago - wherein Arabs are the "violent blacks" of the Middle East and Jews are the "peaceful white folks", Obama's endorsement of the Israeli claim that East Jerusalem is part of the Jewish homeland is the first such official US endorsement of Israel's illegal occupation of the city.

Nonetheless, Obama's attention lay elsewhere, in the fear he expresses of Arab children. He first articulated this fear in his May 19 speech: "The fact is, a growing number of Palestinians live west of the Jordan River." In his speech to AIPAC three days later, Obama reiterated his fear once more, as the first "fact" and threat that Israel, Jews, and the US must face: "Here are the facts we all must confront. First, the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories." This is hardly a new fear, as Israelis have annual conferences, and have developed all kinds of political and military strategies, to deal with their fear of Palestinian children, whom Israel's President Shimon Peres calls a "demographic bomb" that he wants to defuse. Golda Meir herself once revealed in the early seventies that she could not sleep worrying about the number of Palestinian children being conceived every night. If children are the future - except that Arab children are a negation of it - then the crux of the argument is simple: Israel can only have a future with more Jewish children and fewer Arab children.

Murdering Arab children

The story of Arab children, and especially Palestinian ones, is not only tragic in the context of Israeli violence, but one that also remains ignored, deliberately marginalised, and purposely suppressed in the US and Western media - and in Western political discourse. When Zionist terrorists began to attack Palestinian civilians in the 1930s and 1940s, Palestinian children fell victims. The most famous of these attacks include the Zionist blowing up of Palestinian cafes with grenades (such as occurred in Jerusalem on March 17, 1937) and placing electrically timed mines in crowded market places (first used against Palestinians in Haifa on July 6, 1938).

While the violence of the 1930s was the first introduction to the Middle East of such horrific terrorist violence, it is in the 1947-48 Zionist invasion of Palestinian villages and towns that Palestinian children were deliberately not spared. In December 1947, one of the first attacks by the Haganah (the pre-Israel Zionist paramilitary army) first attacks - which would become typical in this period - targeted the Palestinian village of Khisas in the Galilee and killed four Palestinian children. This proved to be a small number compared with the subsequent mass murders awaiting the Palestinians. In the village of Al-Dawayimah, where the Haganah committed a massacre in October 1948, an Israeli army soldier, quoted by Israeli historian Benny Morris, described the scene as such:

The first [wave] of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women, and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead... One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house... and to blow up the house with them. The sapper refused... The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clean the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby.

Palestinian children were murdered along with adults in April 1948 in the Deir Yassin massacre, to name the most well known slaughter of 1948. This would continue not only during Israel's wars against Arabs in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1978, 1982, 1996, 2006, and 2008, when thousands of children fell victim to indiscriminate Israeli bombardment, but also in more outright massacres: in Qibya in 1953 where even the school was not spared Israel's destruction; in Kafr Kassem in 1956 where the Israeli army massacred 46 unarmed Palestinian citizens of Israel, 23 of whom were children. This trend would continue. In April 1970, during the War of Attrition with Egypt, Israel bombed an Egyptian elementary school in Bahr al-Baqar. Of the 130 school children in attendance, 46 were killed, and over 50 wounded, many of them maimed for life. The school was completely demolished. The first Israeli massacre at Qana in Lebanon in 1996 spared no child or adult, and the second massacre in the same village in 2006 did the same - adults aside, 16 children were killed that year.

The number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli soldiers in the first intifada (1987-1993) was 213, not counting the hundreds of induced miscarriages from tear gas grenades thrown inside closed areas targeting pregnant women, and aside from the number of the injured. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that "23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada", one third of whom were children under the age of ten years old. In the same period, Palestinian attacks resulted in the death of five Israeli children. In the second intifada (2000-2004), Israeli soldiers killed more than 500 children with at least 10,000 injured, and 2,200 children arrested. The televised murder of the Palestinian child Muhammad al-Durra shook the world - but not Israeli Jews, whose government concocted the most outrageous and criminal of stories to exonerate Israel. In the Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008, 1,400 Palestinians were killed, of whom 313 were children.

This exhibition of atrocity is not simply about regurgitating the history and present of Israel's murder of Arab children for the past six decades and beyond - a history well-known across the Arab world - but to demonstrate how obscene Obama's references to Jewish children are when he insists to Arabs that they must show sympathy with Jewish children, without ever enjoining Jews to show sympathy with the far larger number of Arab children killed by Jews. But Obama himself shows no sympathy with Arab children. Had he attempted to mourn the Arab children who fell and fall victim to Israeli violence at the rate of hundreds, if not thousands, of Arab children to one Jewish child, Arabs might have forgiven him this indiscretion.

Alas, Obama has no place in his heart for Arab children, only for Jewish ones. He even manages to infantilise Israeli Jewish soldiers who kill Palestinians, as nothing short of innocent children whose families miss them. In his AIPAC speech, Obama calls on Hamas "to release Gilad Shalit, who has been kept from his family for five long years", but not on Israel to release the 6,000 Palestinian political prisoners, who include 300 Palestinian children, languishing in Israel's dungeons for many more years. Perhaps Obama could have at least mentioned the reports of Israeli soldiers' torture of detained Palestinian children issued in late 2010 by Israeli human rights groups. In the case of detained Palestinian sixth graders, in addition to being beaten up and deprived of sleep by Israeli soldiers, two thirteen-year old children testified that "the most awful thing that happened, was when the soldiers went to the bathroom, they peed on us and did not use the toilet. One of them videotaped it." But Obama was not moved by their plight, for they were not Jewish children.

Zionism and Jewish children

Interestingly and unlike Obama, Zionism did not always show similar love towards Jewish children, whom it never flinched from sacrificing for its colonial goals. In the Nazi period, Zionist leaders, for example, protested strongly against granting European Jews refuge in any country other than Palestine. In December 1938, David Ben-Gurion responded to a British offer, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, to take thousands of German Jewish children directly to Britain by saying: "If I knew it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), then I would opt for the second alternative, for we must weigh not only the life of these children but also the history of the people of Israel." In November 1940, the Zionists responded to the British-imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, long demanded by the Palestinian people, by blowing up a ship with Jewish civilian passengers in Haifa - killing 242 Jews, including scores of children. For Zionism, Jewish children are as expendable as Palestinian and Arab children, unless they serve its colonial goals. In light of this, it becomes clear that it is not simply the Jewishness or Arabness of children that makes them expendable or not, but their insertion into a political project as figures that can advance its goals or constitute obstacles to them.

 

Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border, Monday, July 17, 2006

 

Israel's recruitment of Jewish children in paramilitary organisations, which began in 1948, continues apace, and is perhaps best exemplified in its Gadna ["Youth Battalions"] programme, where young Jewish boys and girls are prepared early for their future military service in the most militarised state on earth. The most outrageous use of Jewish children, however, would be illustrated when the Israeli army invited them to write messages of hate on the missiles about to be launched against Lebanese children during Israel's July 2006 invasion of Lebanon. Captured by an Associated Press cameraman, the picture of blond Jewish girls near the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona writing messages of death to Lebanese children circulated the globe - though it remains unclear if they ever made their way to Obama's desk. It is important to note that Obama might have met these same blond girls when he visited Kiryat Shmona a few months earlier, in January 2006. He recalled later that the town resembled an ordinary suburb in the US, where he could imagine the sounds of Israeli children "at joyful play just like my own daughters".

Teaching children to hate

Given this history, not only are Palestinian children guilty of hating Israeli Jews, but also, Obama insists, they have no reason to hate Jews unless their evil elders indoctrinate them to do so. Binyamin Netanyahu himself, in his speech before Congress last week, reiterated Obama's condemnation of Palestinians who allegedly "continue to educate their children to hate". But what about Israeli Jewish children's hatred of Arabs? A March 2010 poll by Tel Aviv University found that 49.5 per cent of Israeli Jewish high school students believe Palestinian citizens of Israel should not be entitled to the same rights as Jews in Israel; 56 per cent believe they should not be eligible for election to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. According to a report in January 2011 in the largest Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, Jewish teachers in Israel stated that anti-Arab racism among Jewish students reached alarming levels, advocating killing Palestinians. The teachers found graffiti written on school walls and even on exam papers stating "Death To Arabs". According to the report, a student at a school in Tel Aviv told his teacher during class that his dream is to become a soldier so he can exterminate all Arabs; several students in his class applauded in support of him. This, in no small amount, is the direct result of the racist Israeli school curricula with which Jewish children are regularly indoctrinated.

In his speech to Congress, Prime Minister Netanyahu correctly diagnosed the situation on the ground. He declared: "Our conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state. It has always been about the existence of the Jewish state." It is the establishment of a Jewish settler colony that the Palestinians must accept to ensure a future for Jewish children and terminate a future for Palestinian children. Indeed it is precisely the refusal of Arabs to adopt Arabopedophobia that is the biggest impediment to peace in the region. Obama hopes that a Palestinian bantustan could limit the threat that Palestinian children constitute to the nightmare that is "the Jewish and democratic state". He recognises that the world can no longer claim to support universalism while endorsing Israel's right to discriminate against non-Jews. In his AIPAC speech, he said as much when he told Israel's lobby that the entire world, including Asia, Latin America, Europe (and he could have added Africa, which he inexplicably excluded) and the Arab World can no longer tolerate Israel's institutionalised racism; that America in fact stands alone with Israel today. Clearly, Obama's love for Jewish children knows no limits. His Arabopedophobic views, however, are not accidental, but are motivated by his great love for the "children of Israel", a love that can only be realised through continued hatred and containment of all Arabs, children and adults alike.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. He is author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Routledge, 2006).

Keep it up

Oman

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Being effective in managing your time is sweet,, isn't it? However it can be totally stressful. As I have moved back to my home country Oman over a month ago, I went back to my work, continued my MBA studies, engaged in getting my son ready for school, making breakfast, making lunch boxes, sending my girl to my mother's house, working, coming back, cleaning, washing clothes, cooking dinner, trying to find a time to study, getting kids to bed and collapsing on my bed..

I try to take my kids to the beach few times a week, visit relatives, have dinner at my in-laws place once a week, taking mom to places she requests sometimes, spending some "quality times" with my kids, trying to bake things I enjoy, go for aerobics three times a week..oh and am I coping..yes, almost..:)..I am actually content that I can achieve so many things a day, not everything I am aiming for, but I am almost there..Keep optimistic..

The stylish blogger award

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم..

I am ashamed to say that I received this award ages ago, but forgot about it!...

Thank you Imperfect Stepford Chronicles, and Rose Water for the awards..:) love yeah xx..

Rules connected with Stylish Blogger awards:

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave me the award..I did above :)

2. Share seven things about myself

emm....

I hope I won't be repeating myself in this:

• I visit food gawker almost everyday to check for recipes specially baked sweets
• I am going to travel by car to Oman tomorrow inshallah (that's why I am posting now as I might not get the chance soon)
• I hope inshallah to have four kids :O
• I have lost many friends but don't regret it as they were there by chance and not choice
• I kept good friends alhamdulilah
• I only drink hot chocolates in cafes
• I am going back to work in less than three weeks :O

I have packed almost all my stuff, so I can share two simple pictures I just taken now, that might be related to being stylish, (although I doubt it lool)

A hand bag from Kathmandu

what is left on my dressing table

3. Award 15 recently discovered great bloggers.

15 is a lot as I haven't been around other blogs recently..

• Safiya's Musings, a young Muslima revert, Belgian, sharing with us her experience with her life changes :)
• Shy rebellious Arab Girl, a young university student from my home country Oman, sharing her everyday thoughts :)
• Muslim convert, a Young Muslim who recently moved to syria 
• handmade beginnings , not recently discovered, a great blog for ideas you can have to enjoy with your children
• Exploring life and Islam, I am still discovering this blog :)
• faithfully yours, I think this blog is great :)

I shall stop here, can't find any more..sorrrrrry :( 

4. Contact these bloggers to tell them of their award

I will now :)

Love xx