Raed Jarrar's Shirt Even Had a Translation?

Raed in the Middle

Wearing Free Speech Tshirt

cClick on picture to go to original at Flickr.com click on magnifying class to enlarge to read English words.

 

Picture allowed via Creative Commons license (attribution, no derivatives, non commercial ). Thanks to MatthewBradley at flickr.com. Support of this blog by  photographer/artist is not implied.  Roll over picture for further attribution.  Click on picture to go to original.

So the horrible, no good, terrible, very bad shirt that said "we won't be silent" in Arabic had an English translation if this is the same shirt Raed is wearing while speaking to a crowd.  I guess the airlines case was as flimsy as the one against the Muslim family that was blocked from a flight because one member looked out the window and saw the engine. 

Top line of caption is a play on the title of Mr. Jarrar's blog which used to be named  "Raed in the Middle" but now I see is titled "In The Middle".

This post is too short to support the picture so, just in case you don't know the world first learned of Mr. Jarrar through another Iraqi blogger, who called himself Salam Pax who wrote the Where's Raed? blog in the months before our invasion of Iraq  and for about a year afterwards.  For a while Mr. Pax's blog was acknowledged as the most popular in the world.  Some thought he was a fraud and the blog was a propaganda stunt by the Saddam government, I suppose because Pax wasn't particularly looking forward to getting shocked and awed by the US military.  Last I heard Mr. Pax was writing for the Guardian.

I think even we got a bit of an idea what they were going through when the young man wrote about watching the bombers taking off on television that would be unleashing hell on their city within hours.

Another famous blogger which who introduced by Salam in the Where's Raed blog was Riverbend at Baghdad Burning.  She seems to have stopped after October 2007 as her family were in Syria and trying desperately to stay as long as they could.  Like with Salam Pax we don't know Ms. Riverbend's real name, but she has had two books published that I know of.  They contain writing from her blog, and that is good. I wouldn't have missed any of it.  (Picture at side provided via widget from Blog City.  The owners of the site might receive money if you click on it or buy the book, but I don't.)

And of course Niki and the other Jarrars round out a great group of bloggers.

tags: raed jarrar  salam pax  riverbend  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit