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Scared of Scorpions: My Year of Hell in the Holy Land
Scared of Scorpions: My Year of Hell in the Holy Land
Scared of Scorpions: My Year of Hell in the Holy Land
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Scared of Scorpions: My Year of Hell in the Holy Land

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With his Vegas-made music video Palestine, My Heart playing on the radio in Tunisia, songwriter Chauncey Roberts tours Syria for the first time when his movie camera is stolen in February 2010. After numerous meetings with Damascus police--even writing a song as tribute for the chief’s young wife--Roberts is advised by the US Embassy to get out of the country at once. And yet the camera theft has triggered a downward spiral when, tumbling over the brink of disaster, Roberts pushes onward to co-produce the Palestine, My Heart Concert in Bethlehem on June 5, 2010. Then comes the Gaza Flotilla Tragedy, bringing the concert to a halt less than a week before show-time.
Exhausted, Roberts next creates from a Hebron hospital (before scandal hits) a unique TV sitcom, Princess of Palestine, based on a divinely gifted teenage pianist from Bethlehem. "Don't worry about the money!" exclaims his young German co-producer, who suddenly exits during the Arab Spring. Overstaying his Israeli visa by nine months Roberts is inspired by Palestinian children and a scout troop to commence writing a suspense screenplay, Camp Evil, in which Jewish settlers terrorize a Palestinian Boy and Girl Scout camp.
Paranoid. Delusional. Committed to the truth. Meeting Palestinian psychos and talent, Israeli bogies real and imagined, the risky, beer-drinking vagabondish farmboy from West Virginia keeps penning songs and scenes, breaking rules and escaping from landlords until his final escape from the Holy Land...and Israel which says he can never return.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 6, 2014
ISBN9781310292064
Scared of Scorpions: My Year of Hell in the Holy Land
Author

Chauncey Roberts

Originally from Charleston, West Virginia, Chauncey Roberts was educated at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, the University of Washington in Seattle, and in Freiburg, Germany. Injured with minor head injury at age 23, he abandoned a possible political career while suffering from “vagabondage” and moving continuously, including around the world while teaching business English and at universities while writing screenplays, articles, short stories and songs. Roberts was a participant in the Hungarian Revolution of 1989; his song Palestine, My Heart played on the radio in Tunisia before the Arab Spring. Before upheaval in Ukraine in 2013 he sang his "Judgment for the Bushes" at a Kiev festival. In 2013 he created a podcast series for Yappi Corporate in Kiev, The Saga of Lusty Louise, in which he impersonated all the male voices and two older female roles. His first video blogs are short historical films made in Germany, Building the Case for a War Crimes Tribunal Against Bush, His Cronies and Blair. His music videos include Impotent Again and There's a Child (tribute to Iraq War refugees). His newest song is "Boycott Israel: Don't Eat Their Bananas."

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    Scared of Scorpions - Chauncey Roberts

    Dedicated to Laura Lee Jenkins Rhodes,

    Dr. Dodgie Male,

    and the Palestinians, all children of God and Abraham

    If you set your mind on humanity, you will be free from evil.

    Confucius

    The real house in which we live, and move, and have our being is Spirit, God, the eternal harmony of infinite Soul. The enemy we confront would overthrow this sublime fortress, and it behooves us to defend our heritage.

    Mary Baker Eddy

    Pulpit and Press, page 2

    "to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause…"

    Joe Darion, lyrics

    "The Impossible Dream"

    Man of La Mancha

    THERE HAVEN'T BEEN SUCH COUNTRY LIKE SO CALLED PALESTINE

    GO BACK TO SAUDIA WHERE YOU CAME FROM DIRTY ARABS!!

    (presumably) a Jewish settler posting on internet

    Appendixes Central to the Narrative

    I. U.S. Financial Aid to Israel

    II.Concert Proposal while in Amman

    III.Invitation to Nelson Mandela

    IV.The Palestine, My Heart Concert Proposal of April 14, 2010

    V.Concert Program at time of Gaza Flotilla Tragedy

    VI.The Gaza Flotilla Tragedy

    VII.Radio spot for concert (which never ran due to cancellation)

    VIII.Princess of Palestine (the TV Sitcom Proposal)

    IX.Filmperspective Letter of Intent

    X.Princess of Palestine Sponsorship Package Levels

    INTRODUCTION

    It all began when my movie camera and cell phone were stolen from a hotel room in Hama, Syria, a lovely city about two hours north of Damascus. Eventually I met with the Syrian police eight times, and even wrote a song for the wife of the Damascus police chief. More about that later, but the hotel theft started a downward spiral which led through some fascinating people, impeccably noble endeavors, unbearable pain and unforgettable scenes. That last statement could be repackaged various ways, such as: unbearable people, noble scenes, fascinating pain, and unforgettable endeavors.

    In fact, it all really began in Tunisia in 2008, when I was drinking beers after work at a usual dive near the Carthage train station downtown. Actually, consecutive beer sessions there after work resulted in lyrics for two songs. The first was There’s a Child about Iraqi refugees and based on Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column Books Not Bombs.1 Having shared the Kristof op-ed piece with business and university students at Amideast (America in the Middle East, which competes with the British Council for English students), I penned the words of the song from ideas and info provided in the Kristof column.

    Days later I was back at it writing Palestine, My Heart after provocative class discussions with intelligent Tunisians. It occurred to me that if the Palestinian-Israeli conflict could be resolved, far more attention could rightly be turned to water resource management and Global Warming. (Nearly a billion people lack access to clean water with three billion lacking proper sanitation.)2

    In 2009 both songs were made into music videos in Las Vegas with filming done in Jordan, Palestine, Jerusalem, Tunisia, Germany and Switzerland. The unique risque number Impotent Again completed the Vegas trio of music videos and starred the beautiful Dallas singer-actress Savannah Smith.

    Later however, perhaps a hundred times I wished that I’d never written Palestine, My Heart because of the utter hell doing so put me through in my own life, including eventual homelessness in Palestine, and even after the final escape from Palestine-Israel, homeless nights in North Cyprus, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia! Even as I tried to get home to Slovakia, to a world of any country in Europe where I’d lived before--and I’d lived all over Europe, Asia, the Arab World, and the U.S.--this wretched trip through impoverishment begun because of Palestine, My Heart could not easily be brought to conclusion.

    Now, living once again safely in a 400-year-old house beside a 16th century castle in Slovakia, in a place I called home previously as part of my general vagabondage, I know that the I Ching warnings of over a year ago proved all too true: I could never go back to the person I was before, as if casting off an old shell or a snake shedding its skin, unable to return to my homeland as my former self.

    No existence could be more agreeable than my current one with an older couple and their adorable little fluffy white dog, this home of my landlord and landlady from years ago.

    Three projects begun in Palestine never came to fruition there during my year of hell in the West Bank from spring 2010 to spring 2011. First, the Palestine, My Heart Concert was to have taken place on Saturday, June 5, 2010, in Bethlehem’s Manger Square (also known as Nativity Square). The concert, intended to launch the song internationally while also highlighting outstanding Palestinian and especially Bethlehem talent via various music and dance performances, was cancelled. It was cancelled because Israeli military killed nine peace activists aboard a Turkish boat on May 30, 2010, in the Gaza Flotilla Tragedy.

    At the end of my wits emotionally, and ever penniless financially, I moved to Hebron and soon began developing a TV sitcom, Princess of Palestine, originally intended to star the best act from the failed concert, the divinely inspired Christina J. Canavati, a teenage classical pianist. From Bethlehem, she had won first place in the competitive Chopin Competition in Palestine after having played the piano for only two years or so. The show was to have begun filming in February 2011, by a German production company in Jenin. As the director who was my co-producer went off to Germany for the Christmas holiday and never returned, however, that production, its financing and casting, was put on hold. I stopped seeking financing while beginning the third project, a suspense movie.

    Camp Evil sprung from my having met Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts one rainy winter evening while living in Birzeit, just north of Ramallah. I listened in horror to local stories of how radical Jewish settlers had previously terrorized the town, shooting up homes or buildings helter-skelter, and even today still shooting at taxi vans headed to Jenin in the north, taxi vans carrying Arabs but also Christians, Jews and anybody else not headed for a Jewish settlement. Presumably, I could have stayed on and begun filming or organizing toward future filming of this horror/suspense movie, Camp Evil, in which radical Jewish settlers invade and take over a scout camp, kidnapping, killing, and torturingthe usual fare. As for the adorable 9-year-old girl who inspired me for the main character, Lara, I could have enjoyed her company forever. But I couldn’t wait for funding or deal further with Palestinians on the scene. It was time to leave, indeed to escape.

    Leaving Israel and Palestine was in some ways as traumatic as anything I’ve ever done. Having overstayed my three-month tourist visa by nine months, I knew the Israelis were going to question me severely, especially as I intended to explain that I’d been doing some teaching work in Palestine. On paper this may not sound like much. At Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, the trauma was very real!

    Furthermore, leaving Israel and its illegal Occupation of Palestine was always going to be traumatic, as from the time I crossed over the border from Jordan the second time, going straight to Bethlehem and thus to Israel’s perceived enemy Palestinians, I couldn’t sleep well at night not knowing what info Israel would have on me, and cognizant while there and right up until leaving and beyond, it was essential to protect the identity of my friends, contacts, acquaintances. This is not because my friends, contacts, acquaintances in Palestine are all and one enemies of the State of Israel, but because they unanimously oppose the illegal Israeli Occupation of Palestine. Of course, the UN itself, meaning most of the world, has sanctions against Israel, a cornerstone being UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted unanimously on November 22, 1967, in the aftermath of the Six Day War. It was adopted under Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter, with the preamble referring to the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every State in the area can live in security.

    At one point in Hebron a university administrator corrected me, saying, It’s not Israel, it’s the Occupation. And indeed, his viewpoint is shared by other Palestinians as well: Israeli people, and specifically Jews, are very nice people. Soldiers and settlers are of course not as popular.

    Israel, in my opinion, engages in state sponsored terrorism, perhaps even on a daily basis. There are websites providing this information, including ones by the U.S. Government and its agencies. The proof is in the rather poisonous pudding, just take a bite!

    As an American originally from West Virginia, I am fairly appalled by my native country’s apparent brainwashing with its blind eye to Israel, its lack of condemnation of the ongoing atrocities committed by Israeli military, especially against young Palestinian boys, the no-questions-asked arse-kissing turnover of $3 billion annually to Israel, a country routinely violating human rights. (The exception in human rights is Israel’s support and providing safe haven for Palestinian gays escaping from their families’ vigilante groups.)

    With Americans and British respectively re-electing war criminals George W. Bush (2004) and Anthony Blair (2005), and no International War Tribune confining these men and their cronies to prison for breaking international laws, who in the world actually cares what Americans and Brits have to say anymore?

    With not even a single American presidential candidate, current U.S. senator or congressman, standing up to Israel and its Jewish lobbyists’ control of American politics, an uncaring and unconcerned onlooker might suggest leaving the U.S. and Britain, regretfully, to their own self-destruction.

    But I had been brought up listening to Up, Up with People music from the patriotic singing group Up with People touring America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and one of the songs we learned after seeing the group perform at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, was "Which Way America?" Back then during the Vietnam War with protests taking place around the country, the song was more than about which hill to climb, which road to take.

    I did not imagine as a small boy singing the Up with People songs--with titles like "What Color is God’s Skin?, I Want to Be Strong and Keep Young at Heart"that I would one day find myself on the front line of racial and political animosities in the blessed and tragic city of Hebron. Nor did I expect that a lifelong hobby of heavy beer drinking and letter writing outdoors would one day situate me on the ground considered sacred by so many, wondering whether scorpions might sting my ass in the vicinity of Manger Square in Bethlehem! Further, it must be added, ever since a criminal attack on my person in Madrid in 2006, temporarily destroying completely the right side of my face, I have suffered from paranoia…

    I. PRELUDE TO HELL

    Sensible people will see trouble coming and avoid it,

    but an unthinking person will walk right into it, and

    regret it later. Proverbs 25:24

    Chapter One

    When I first visited Palestine to begin filming the music video Palestine, My Heart, I arrived in Ramallah from Jordan after a riotous visit to Munich during Oktoberfest in late September 2009. I’d not been to Munich in years and every move through the city which I was so involved with during the 1990s stirred memories in a mental treasure box misplaced over time. One can have a love affair with a city, with affairs likewise going sour. With Munich that first phase of falling in love never faded.

    Drinking my all-time favorite hefe-weiss beers was far cheaper than renting the only room available at 265 euros! And although I’d wanted to return to this classy German city just north of the Alps, to live and play again, my thoughts pressed me into a future of new diverse experiences in the Middle East which would eclipse a melancholic tango with the past. Through the 1990s, I had devoted many years to writing a serious screenplay, Putsch, which depicteded a fictional niece of Hermann Goering, now matriarch over a Bavarian family, wishing for a fascist putsch supported by Neo-Nazis but ultimately defeated by Antifa and antifascist folks.

    While I was working on Putsch in the ‘90s, my dear German friends from university days in Freiburg (beautiful capital of the Black Forest) and their neighbors questioned why I should get into the subject of NeoNazis, immigration, antifascists, and so on. As an American I was asked, Don’t you have enough problems in the United States to write about? Why don’t you write about those problems? At one point a Catholic priest in a neighboring little town hung up on me when I phoned to ask about recent NeoNazi vandalism in a local Jewish cemetery. Well, I lived in Europe and fancied I could write about whatever I liked, and the historical subjects and characters in Putsch were haunting and intriguing.

    At one point I felt as if I knew Hermann Goering so well that I chilled to enter the entrance of his bunker at Castle Veldenstein, a home of his youth, the creepy sensation of imagining Goering himself visiting the bunker itself to inspect it. (Goering’s mother almost certainly had had a Jewish lover, von Epenstein, who had placed the Goerings in the castle.)

    What stood out over the many years I worked on Putsch, however, was the attitude of certain American friends and family members whom I saw on occasion. I realized that they and so many listeners of that so-called conservative radio windbag Rush Limbaugh were in fact hatemongers. A few years later I would see how the hatemongers had become full-fledged war mongers. Leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, a best friend in Pennsylvania said, Let’s just see what happens, while his mother stated flatly a few years later after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, War is war. The comforts of armchair warmongers over a glass of tea or beer! While millions of Iraqis became homeless, their country totally devastated as the world indeed saw exactly what happened…

    Thus, my opposition to the Iraq War was part of the discussion outside the cafe at Hotel Royal in Ramallah with a chap I’d just met, with whom I would stay during my first visit to Ramallah.

    Abdu was emotional as he described the loss of life of a family member in Hebron area or the same of a stranger in Gaza. When I mentioned a two-state solution, he quickly responded, Why should we not have a one-state solution? We want to live in peace. I am not against the Jewish Israelis. We are all brothers and sister.

    Sisters, I corrected him.

    Sisters, he said, wiping away tears apologetically.

    A one-state solution? Not the talk out of Washington for as long as I could remember. But then, I hadn’t realized Hamas supporters had a different idea of a one-state solution, much in common with Benjamin Netanyahu’s, although Netanyahu’s did not involve Palestinian political participation but their immigration, even ethnic cleansing.

    Because Abdu bore an amazing likeness to movie star Will Smith, I imagined Abdu and Will Smith playing brothers in a really good movie one day. And straight away I considered Abdu’s handsome face and likeness to the actor, his distinct manner of speaking and own star quality all very useful for my eventual website. Songs were being recorded in Las Vegas, filming underway for music videos, and here was my ace in the hole!

    Abdu seemed to know everybody in Ramallah, although he’d arrived only three months earlier. And if I felt more than a little wary of being nickel and dimed continuously while staying with Abdu and his roommate, well, they were oppressed Palestinians, right? They were the ones whose families left for Jordan to find work, whose families had lost land from the illegal Israeli Occupation of the West Bank. I was the lucky one with the American passport, free to roam the globe. (And I had roamed the globe with four trips to Asia, living in South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, with voyages in every direction, plus 28 countries in Europe, calling Bern, Switzerland and Freiburg, Germany home. Additionally, I had hosted seven parties in nine months at my beach pad in La Marsa, the most European part of Tunisia, my place overlooking the glorious green hues and turquoise of the Mediterranean…while the dictator Ben Ali’s sister and the Kuwait ambassador had the less appealing views beachside, albeit with much grander homes.)

    Jumping right in I think it’s fair to say that my experience with Abdu became something of a pattern in dealing with Palestinians. Unique in his case, however, was that over time I discovered that these tears could be whipped up, manufactured to achieve whatever financial objective was at hand! This included his hitting me up for money when I was in Vegas working on the music videos, with him making false allegations about his family being out to kill him because they discovered he was gay. When I heard this news and read on the Internet about vigilante groups, including family members, torturing gay Palestinians, I decided to believe that Abdu could indeed be in mortal danger, so I loaned him the money to escape to Jordan. Some months later upon returning to Jordan on my way to Palestine I saw very clearly that I had been duped.

    However, keep in mind things were just getting started as per my involvement with Palestinians and Palestine.

    The first Palestinian I ever met and dealt with was a dancer who was to appear in Palestine, My Heart during the beach filming scenes shot in Tunisia, beneath my beach pad. Ayad was to have danced with a sexy and chic girl, Maya, but didn’t show up for the shoot, instead demanding $200 up front. And so the problem of dealing with Palestinians first reared its ugly head. Looking back I write this still totally dedicated to the cause of helping Palestinians toss off the ugly shackles of illegal Israeli Occupation.

    I do so for various reasons, including that Jesus Christ instructed us to love our neighbors as ourselves, not just neighbors whose ethnicity, tendencies and cultural habits of which we approve. Indeed, the Master Teacher would have us love even our enemies. With any luck my enemies will eventually feel my love for them; the absence of love is not hostility but indifference. And indifference I have felt from a wide array of so-called friends in the United States who dropped me because of my involvement with Palestinians and support of their cause.

    When I arrived to film toward the music video Palestine, My Heart, I had already begun filming There’s a Child (a tribute to Iraqi refugees) at Baqa’a refugee camp in Jordan, outside the capital city of Amman. There I was, filming Palestinian refugees to go with the Iraqi refugee music video because the Jordanians in Amman had claimed Kristoff’s info was inaccurate and that there were no Iraqi refugees in Amman! They repeatedly told me that Iraqis were rich and had gone back to Iraq! What to think? Even the U.S. Government website ANERA had put the number of Iraqi homeless at 2 million displaced persons inside Iraq and 2 million refugees outside Iraq, as I recalled.

    Suddenly I found myself in a taxi in Ramallah as riding shotgun filming for the video; in the back Abdu’s strange he-she type boyfriend Fires was translating my instructions and questions to the taxi driver.

    This was exciting in that I had just arrived in Palestine only the night before and had never filmed in a location like Ramallah, best known to the world for Arafat’s having been bombed away in his compound by Israel during the 2nd Intifada.

    The prelude to hell was beguiling and misleading, because I enjoyed dancing at Snowbird outside in Ramallah, the disco floor center of a nice terraced outdoor nightclub. Same for filming at a disco in Jerusalem, led there by Asian Christian friends who lived in the Old City’s Christian Quarter.

    A group of very nice people happened to come together during my first visit to Ramallah. This group included a beautiful blond from England, Kat, truly a lovely girl inside and out. There was Dr. Mary Agnes, a general practitioner, a telephone company executive with the ubiquitous name Mohammed, a former teacher colleague named Lin originally from Indonesia, a lovely British reporter named Jane who resembled Hillary Clinton, Abdu who worked as a front desk security man, and me. Dr. Mary Agnes became my closest friend in Palestine over the next year.

    We all went together or met up at the Taybeh Beer Oktoberfest in the Christian village of Taybeh outside Ramallah. And I got thoroughly smashed then and another night or two when the drinks were flowing at my expense.

    Incidentally, should my reader like to start counting the betrayals in my year of hell, the telephone executive messaged me once to ask for money for his mother in the hospital, then later suddenly attacked me--over Facebook--for being indifferent to the needs of his dearly beloved mother. As this happened around the same week that Abdu rolled out his crocodile tears over the phone, I felt the executive had heard--or heard ofAbdu’s pleading. Later in Hebron when I finally encountered this executive ten months later, I asked about his mother’s health, and he said he didn’t know what I was talking about, that his mother had just returned from the United States! Then he attributed the earlier hospital stay to his grandmother.

    But so much realization and experience and betrayal was to come later, for my first ten-day visit to Palestine was remarkably wonderful! This was especially so because of the filming which took place during just a few days: children in and outside school in Ramallah, the Taybeh beer festival, two weddings in separate villages with hundreds of men dancing in circles while women watched the men’s night of festivities from the side, the weekly Friday demonstration at the village of Bil’in, plus the late night disco dancing in Jerusalem. What a joy and delight it all was!

    Hundreds of people drank beer outside at the Taybeh Oktoberfest while listening to truly entrancing Arabic music highlighted by stylish traditional Debka dancers on stage. To share this in the company of a new group of friends who also went to the Bil’in demonstration was all the more meaningful.

    First impression? Palestine was wonderful! Ramallah was a very nice city with more diversity than one would imagine, more attractive by far, also, than the horrid scenes shown on television during the bombing of Arafat’s compound in 2002.

    Moder, a businessman student of the teacher Lin, took us to two weddings. Although obviously a hearty beer drinker I was mesmerized by the music and excitement of these two village weddings outside Ramallah. Up to three hundred men danced in a circle at the first wedding in the village square. The scene was lit by festive lights strung about, and women watched from behind and beside a wall. (The ladies’ own festive night for the wedding would take place a separate evening, which men were not allowed to witness, the women covered by a tent.) Large storybook-like characters added a unique charm as people dressed in Disney-like character costumes appeared in the crowd and were boosted upon shoulders of dancing men. A band played from a stage with a well known male singer, and a crane with camera captured this enchanting, and expensive, village wedding on film. I too was catching it on that ill-fated movie camera, and in disbelief of my good fortune in bringing Palestine, My Heart to life in such colorful ways.

    Moder drove us straight to the second wedding, after passing Go and collecting a few beers for me in the backseat. The second wedding was just as exciting with the women watching from balconies from large houses as men danced in circles round the wooden platform set up for the occasion. Lin and I were treated like celebrities as I joined the MC or singer on a platform to wave to the crowd of hundreds. More than a little paranoid, I wondered if Israeli informants were among the wedding bash partiers and whether my open participation at the event might come back to haunt me.

    Despite the impressive filming which enhances the music video, Palestine, My Heart, I began to experience problems with Abdu, with whom I stayed in a somewhat rough neighborhood of Al-Shaaraf in Ramallah. Staying with him led to his developing an obsession regarding me with ridiculous non-stop calls interrupting a dinner engagement I had with two businessmen. His boyfriend Fires was an emotional mess because his mother and sister had just left to move to Jordan. I considered him a he-she as I’d lived in Hollywood one year long ago before moving to Europe full-time, and this particular waiter, Abdu’s friend Fires, was most unprofessional at the Hotel Royal Cafe, making big tearful scenes regarding his mother to his regular female patrons. Memorably, he tossed dishes and an ashtray across the dining room at the apartment. I am not against people of different sexual orientations but felt rather uncomfortable with this guy. In a conservative Muslim country he was the only adult male walking around with the hair atop of his head brushed forward while the back part was brushed upward!

    I doubt that particular hairstyle would look nice on anybody, including David and Victoria Beckham! Fires could be very nice but from the beginning I found him fairly creepy.

    Why someone resembling Will Smith would choose a creepy he-she boyfriend was food for thought, but then again I always thought Jews and Arabs had quite a lot in common, and that extremely wealthy and lower/middle class Republicans do not, if one excludes the blinders. (Semitic refers to the language family, including Hebrew and Arabic among many others of the Middle East, and to the well spring of numerous fascinating, historical ancient ethnic peoples.)

    Upon first meeting Abdu’s waiter friend Fires, he and I went to shop for food. Fires assumed that I would like to buy a pack of 18 toilet rolls when I had just arrived and would likely not stay beyond ten days, but in any case was just trying out this arrangement with Lin’s acquaintance who could use the money I’d otherwise spend on a three-star hotel. Unfortunately, a lot of foreigners believe all Americans are rich, indifferent to the desire to budget and operate practically. This contributed to an abusiveness which could be found in Abdu’s advice to take more money from ATM visits so as to make less visits to the bank, this advice being offered even during my very first visit to the HSBC ATM in Ramallah.

    As I was leaving Ramallah to return to Jordan and flights back to Tunisia, Europe and the U.S., I discovered a small amount of cash in Euros missing from one of my bags. I knew one of my hosts had stolen the cash, even as they both held jobs at the time. I didn’t know which one stole the money but felt that any theft seriously endangered future dealings with Abdu, my would-be Will Smith look-alike website star.

    Fires did make a nice chicken and safron rice dish, the Palestinian favorite, called Maklouba. But he revealed what a nasty little bitch he could be when, at his waiter job, he demanded I pay for the drinks of people whom I’d only met for five minutes before they went off with Abdu to lord-knows-where.

    In Ramallah the rough neighborhood Al-Shareef had fringe neighborhood benefits, however. The small school across the street from Abdu and Fires’s apartment had charming schoolchildren who happily made hand gestures together from their desks in one classroom for the music video. While filming I zoomed in on an angelic little girl, later contrasting her with a little blond German girl.

    A walk through the neighborhood for sunset filming led me to a boy doing somersaults, which too appears in the video.

    One afternoon I was returning to Abdu’s flat when two teenage boys, apparently age 13-14, waved and called to me from where they sat beside a closed building. I went over to say hello. After minimal chitchat it became apparent the only English words they knew were money and dollar. They asked for a dollar, and whatever dollars and Euros I had were back at the flat, and I was not of a mind to be doling out whatever cash I hadthings being as they were back at the apartment!

    As I walked away I left these two teenagers looking angry. They started to follow me but then decided to throw rocks as well. I knew not to turn around and hastened away. But they followed me and the small rocks continued to fly past, none making a hit.

    This happened again a night or two later, no doubt one of the same kids, or both. Because it was dark I escaped into the grocery store beneath the flat and heatedly complained to the owner. He went out and yelled in the direction of my rock-throwing assailants. And I vowed not to return again after dark without a taxi to the door. Now they knew where I stayed! Great!

    There was a final incident in which I was heading for the taxi-van into the downtown when I encountered a group of boys who apparently had just gotten out of school. Uh-oh! Now my rockers had lots of friends! I quickly made my way, just as the Master did back in the dayeven running like hellto the main road. There a taxi-van assisted in my escape from the group in pursuit a short half-block away.

    When I’d gotten footage of the boy doing somersaults near sunset, I had arrived to his area in the vicinity of Palestine Broadcasting Company’s station by intentionally bypassing a certain apartment building. On the top floor of that building I’d seen another teenage youth pointing a rifle across the street to the neighboring apartment building. That teenage boy didn’t see me and I cut down the side street so he wouldn’t.

    I wasn’t so lucky on my return walk. Nearing his building by accident, I prayed he wouldn’t spot me on the approaching sidewalk six floors below. Wrong! He aimed that menacing long gun or machine gun straight at me! I made a dirty face and gestured with my forefinger and hand waving: Don’t even think of it. He must have been altogether harmless with his birthday gift Intifada empty gun because he hurried into the flat to tell his family there was a non-Arab in the neighborhood. Maybe I was head of the UN instead of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon! Or maybe I was a very ignorant and foolish Jewish settler come looking for a nice place to rent and take over the neighborhood; take over the radio and TV station to boot!

    There are rocks and there are verbal errors and looking back I delight in remembering my visit to Casabah Theatre to meet its director George Ibrahim. Somewhere along the line I had an idea that I’d like to do a comedy TV show and have Palestinian actors performing in English.

    Theatre folks tend to have a bit of an ego and this successful gentleman was no different. He did not like my idea of Palestinian actors performing in English.

    Yes, we speak English but we are all acting here in Arabic. And why shouldn’t we?! It is our national language, blaa, blaa, blaa.

    I left fairly disgusted, strong in my belief that a Palestinian TV sitcom in English could influence international and ultimately, god-willing, especially American perception of Palestine and Palestinians. Of course, I may be very naive and foolishly so, but as a Christian I consider loving our neighbors and enemies one of the hallmarks of proper Christian behavior.

    Now George Ibrahim is no doubt a fine director and actor, and in time I enjoyed seeing him in director Rashid Masharawi’s film Ticket to Jerusalem. But gleefully a year later I wanted to encounter George Ibrahim again and tell him I was organizing Princess of Palestine, and reel off the names of the directors, casting directors, and actors all quite ready and willing to create a Palestinian sitcom in English!

    From a slew of aunts and uncles, and socially ambitious bickering lawyer/doctor housewives in my hometown of Charleston, West Virginia, I’ve always deplored presumptuousness in others, finding that strong hints of arrogance usually precede enormous waves of error. Condescension teeters on stupidity. And presumptuousness shows people at their worst, whether in Switzerland or New Jersey, Bombay or Bucharest.

    Presumption also gives its owner or carrier--like a diseasethe high-minded right to support war and torture, my country-right-or-wrong, and you-are-not-allowed-to-have-an-opinion, although this-is-the-greatest-country-in-the-world.

    Chapter Two

    Flash-forward to February 2010. I’ve been back to Las Vegas to complete the music videos, including Impotent Again, have passed through Tunisia twice, and dealt with storing securely my things there. I’ve trudged through snow in West Virginia to stack firewood beside a farmhouse, and spent Halloween with an old high school friend, Jill, who encouraged me in my work after we met up at a class reunion. She was part-Arabic. With both Jill and a family member I’ve had separate blow-out arguments in which they declared, Palestinians are not being oppressed!

    Most Americans believe that Israel can do what it likes, including with Palestinians’ land, water, orchards, I suppose. Although I truly appreciated Jill’s supportiveness of my work, I was surprised when she began writing a novel called "Palestine, My Heart"! And, from her first rough draft she wanted to read long passages to me over the phoneugh. Her novel did not seem like the Palestine I knew, and her characters could be Humphrey and Ingrid at any airport in the world!

    Jill is apparently prone to histrionics, and when I was in Vegas she asked me over the phone to get a voodoo doll and stick pins it while imagining Jill’s sister, the executrix of her mother’s estate. Jill had chosen not to go to her own mother’s funeral, which would seem to place her in a special category.

    Meanwhile I had read Ben Orbach’s book Live From Jordan: Letters Home from My Journey Through the Middle East and even submitted an anecdote for his Goodwill Ambassadors organization or website. He wrote me before I left the U.S., and I would liked to have met his mother when I went to Pittsburgh, driven there by two redneck friendsan incestuous married couple. (Dressed in black leather jackets with lots of fringe, that couple made me feel I was walking about Pittsburgh with two crows. How I got involved with these two rednecks is another book, but my justification of such fishing companions had something to do, by comparison, with a trip to the moon…)

    I felt that Ben had made unfortunately a significant error in his book. He stated that there never was a place called Palestine on the map, that there’d never really been an entity called Palestinian people, not throughout history. Ben Orbach wrote:

    {B}efore Israel became a state in 1948, there was a Palestinian mandate under British rule. Prior to that, it was the Ottoman Empire that ruled the Holy Land for several hundred years. Before the Ottoman era, there were periods of Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and pagan rule. There never was a Palestine, ruled by Palestinians.1

    In fact, the Ottomans captured Palestine in 1516, at which time there was no modern Slovakia or Ukraine ruled by the locals as we know them. So self-determination of a people has nothing to do with the wants of the rulers. There may be a spoonful of good Jewish boy wishful thinkingbut it belongs in the waste basket along with the professor Joel Migdal’s instruction at the University of Washington in Seattle (circa 1984) that there is a place for Palestinians, it’s called Jordan. Still, at least Orbach concedes a return to the 1967 borders and support of the Saudi peace proposal which would also promote the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab countries.2

    As for the British Mandate, it's true that Israeli Zionists learned from the British to blow up Palestinian homes. Britain, having been aided at the end of WWI by the US to defeat her enemies, was soon demeaning the Palestinians by deception, manipulation and lies. (Hmm. Sound familiar?)

    The American colonials in 1776 were arguably less oppressed than Palestinian people since 1948. Americans did not flee to refugee camps because their homes were being blown up by what Einstein referred to as terrorists.

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

    The United States Declaration of Independence, originally drafted by

    Thomas Jefferson, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776

    It isn't enough to commiserate with Palestinians over their tragic losses but let us recognize that water being stolen from Palestine today smacks of ethnic cleansing.

    Turn down the road to Damascus, where metaphorically eyes became opened, or blinded, or both. Mine might have been a little more blurred over many beers. One Friday night when in a small Old City pub in Damascustiniest pub I’ve ever knownI explained to a British chap, whose Lebanese wife didn’t know he was out drinking, and other listeners, that Ben Orbach was wrong, and in turn the British guy informed me that Hezbollah was not a terrorist organization.

    With a mild hearing problem, I asked over the bar noise, Did you say tourist or terrorist?

    Terrorist.

    Did you say Hezbollah is or isn’t a terrorist organization?

    It isn’t.

    We hear on the news that it’s a terrorist organization, I reminded the Brit.

    It isn’t. You’re misinformed, he said.

    As bad luck would have it my first visit to Lebanon was delayed. But first I should add that Damascus is a great city and Syria a beautiful country with truly friendly people. In February 2010 no one could have predicted the revolutions sweeping through the Arab World, in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and the crisis in Syria to date.

    I considered returning to Damascus sometime to live. I’d been to Old City Jerusalem and preferred Damascus’s Old City somehow. Easier to get beer and booze by far in Jerusalem, but Damascus has special qualities, and I fondly recall writing a letter to a friend in the elegant glass and black mahogany avec silver dish room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus.

    Yet first came a technical difficulty which changed the course of my life: My movie camera was stolen in Hama, Syria on February 12, 2010, by a 16-year-old kid acting as my tour guide. We’d become friendly in Damascus when he’d shown me around the Old City and Umayyad Mosque (the Great Mosque of Damascus). So we went

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