We wrote about smudging to clear bad vibes out, and now let’s have some folklore from the Middle East. Brisk business being done in protective amulets at the Carmel Shuk, Tel Aviv (in pre-Corona times). Belief in the Evil Eye, hostile spirits, and bad luck goes back to very ancient times.

As you see, people believe in the Evil Eye to this day, and are willing to go to some lengths to avert it. Even this Westerner, from decades of living in the Middle East, has come around to the idea that ill-wishing someone, talking about bad things, or feeling jealousy, can invoke bad mojo.

In the Middle East,  deflecting these dangers is an involved, emotional, and mysterious business. Here’s a vignette from my Israeli experience.

Sitting at a café, gazing abstractedly out at the street, I noticed a young mother carefully moving her baby carriage out of my field of vision. It took me a minute to realize she thought I was looking at her baby, possibly jealously, and wished to avoid my loaded gaze.

I was insulted; why should she think I, a stranger, was jealous…? But I forgave her a minute later, understanding that naturally, every loving mother wishes to protect her baby. Never mind that she didn’t know me or what I was thinking; the thing was to avoid  bad vibes. I’ll bet that pinned to the inside of the baby’s carriage was at least one Hamsah, also known as the Hand of Fatima – the five-fingered amulet that’s said to avert that old Evil Eye, sorcery, and demons.

People whose origins are steeped in Islamic cultures invoke the Hamsah charm freely, raising open palms and repeating “Hamsah” five times. I’ve seen this many times with my Moroccan/Tunisian family connections, at weddings, henna celebrations and circumcisions; also in earnest discussions over life issues. And you can expect to see at least one Hamsah amulet hung around the house wherever Middle Eastern traditions live on.

Having a Hamsah amulet displayed on a wall, or keeping a small one in your pocket, is believed to bring good luck. In Israel, the Hamsah motif has moved from traditional to hip. It’s incorporated in jewelry, key chains, artwork, and, naturally, lottery tickets.

The color blue itself is thought to bring peace, prosperity, and safety. Blue beads representing eyes are also a popular device for warding off the Evil Eye.

Often a Hamsah will incorporate an eye in the center of its design. A double whammy is to buy a large Hamsah with an Arabic or Hebrew blessing inside it.

Designs representing fish are sometimes juxtaposed with other devices, fish being symbols of plenty and purity.

You may see people wearing an evil eye ring as well as a red thread around the left  wrist; these are sold by  street peddlers who claim that the threads are blessed through kabbalistic methods.  This isn’t ancient practice; no more than about 120 years old. The threads are to be tied by seven knots. In some places in Israel, “blessed” red threads are for sale at the tombs of great rabbis and sages. Vendors claim that they have walked seven times around the tomb holding the threads and praying for all good things to happen to people who wear them. And good luck to the customers, I say.

The red thread was briefly fashionable among some celebrities when Madonna began to wear them.

Jewish Eastern European tradition is to spit three times to avoid bad luck. Nowadays, people are content to simply say a phrase of deterrence in Yiddish (”K’neineh horeh”) or Hebrew (”Bli ayin harah”), meaning “No evil eye!” followed by a symbolic, spoken, “Tfu, tfu, tfu!”

Either phrase can be said in earnest, or simply politely, to show the person you’re speaking to that you have no bad intentions toward them. As in: “There haven’t been any new Corona infections in my town, tfu tfu tfu!” Or: “What a pretty child you have, tfu tfu tfu!” It’s the Ashkenazic equivalent of saying “Hamsah!” five times.

In Jewish thought, merely saying the correct name of an illness should be avoided. These days, it’s mostly the Ultra-Orthodox who say “The illness” when referring to cancer.

Maybe I’ve caught on to that way of thinking; I really dislike saying “Corona virus,” or even the more genteel-sounding “Covid-19.” In conversation, I refer to the disease scourging the world today as “the pandemic.” Do I believe that saying its name might bring it closer? Well, that lays a cold finger on the little place in the heart where superstition lurks. I just don’t like saying it.

A large dot of henna in the palm of the hand is also a sign of celebration and deterrence of the Evil Eye. A Yemenite friend brought a basin full of the orange-colored paste to an engagement party I attended, and insisted on smearing it on the young couple’s palms. I asked for some too, to be polite; so did many others.

Did it work? Well, years on, the couple are still devoted to each other and raising a family – tfu, tfu, tfu.

___________________

Images: Blue Hamsah by KOOVOX via Society6; Blue bead cluster Image by zehra saldirdak via Pixabay; Downward – pointing Hamsah with Arabic via Dreamstime.com; Henna on palms by Miriam Kresh; Red thread on left wrist via Wikipedia

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Donald Trump, the cults of violence, the treatment of refugees, unnecessary wars and Thursday’s Brexit vote demonstrate that even the wealthiest, most stable, well-educated and sensible countries can choose a self-destructive path as described in W.B. Yeat’s poem, “The Second Coming”, written in the grim aftermath of World War I:

          THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…

Charts, reports and spreadsheets can illuminate the logical side of our brain but they don’t burn at the core of our soul in the way that art, poetry and music can. The Brexit vote painted British artists into a corner along with other residents of the UK.  But as free-willed thinkers, artists can counter-balance the madness of crowds and reconnect citizens of the world to one another and to a brighter future.

Anne Frank and Studio Syria defy our one-dimensional stereotypes of refugees. Picasso illustrates the horrors of war in Guernica. Kubric and Kusterica show us its madness. In his Trois couleurs trilogy, director Krzysztof Kieślowski explores the three pillars of democracy. Composer Zbigniew Preisner gives us a powerful vision of hope, love and peace in his Song for the Unification of Europe, crucial dimensions of the European Union that many seem to have forgotten.

Artists can help us re-balance our stories of hope and fear. In the tragedy that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a whale sunk The Essex. The captain and crew considered sailing their lifeboats to nearby Tahiti, but rumors of cannibals grew into a large and well-defined fear in their minds. They ignored the more abstract fear of starvation and sailed thousands of miles to the coast of South America, and they themselves resorted to cannibalism, eight survivors having consumed seven of their mates.

This is much like the way our fear of terrorism trumps the more likely but hard to imagine risks of climate change, pollution and environmental destruction.

In a reflection of the tale of the Essex castaways, the English county of Essex had one of the highest Brexit leave votes. The imagined fear of immigrants and refugees made for a better story than the undefined fear of what happens when the UK sets itself adrift.

Photo of Nicola Telsa via Wikipedia. Tesla expressed no fear of high voltage electricity. But he was deathly afraid of pearls.

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My family and I wanted to learn about the needs of Syrian refugees. So before our recent trip to Jordan, we asked Green Prophet’s Laurie Balbo about volunteer organizations there.

Laurie was a crucial boots-on-the-ground volunteer who performed a bureaucracy-defying miracle to get thousands of donated Irish knit hats to children at Zaatari before winter’s end and long before larger relief agencies were able to complete their winter clothing distribution.

Laurie works with Studio Syria and other organizations inside the Zaatari refugee camp. She was also familiar with a French NGO named Dar Al Yasmin (DAY), which means “House of Yasmin.” It was named after Syria’s fragrant national flower. DAY was formed in 2013 to focus on the needs of families living in Zaatari village.

DAY cofounder Gaelle Sundelin has the crucial mix of organization and language skills, leadership, creativity, optimism, patience, peacemaking and enough pragmatism to recognize that she can’t do it all herself. So for this typical Habaybi (caring love) event Gaelle recruited about 50 people from France, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Sudan and Somalia. The young men from these last two countries told me that wars had forced them to leave their homelands and that they hoped to return one day.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c5-_wzPUqw[/youtube]

We met Gaelle and other DAY volunteers at a bus stop in Amman Jordan on Good Friday. We would fill two minibuses with a diverse group of teachers, artists, musicians, an acroclown circus and my family of four.

Some circus performers tuned their instruments while another handed out plastic clown noses. The troupe burst into song to lighten the mood at security checkpoints and shorten the journey to Zaatari. Our ten-year-old daughter called it the most fun bus ride she has ever been on.

While other volunteers worked on a variety of craft and entertainment projects, my family was asked to help make kites. Gaelle explained that we would make the kites out of plastic bags and cardboard so that the children would learn about recycling. During the long bus ride north, Gaelle wondered aloud whether we would have enough materials for the kites. I looked across dusty fields littered with plastic bags and wondered how we could ever run out.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6eQxkmMWSs#t=154[/youtube]

Volunteers Muhammad Husseis and Feras Hamwy had built a flying prototype kite made from a plastic bag and decorated with Barcelona football club stickers. This was two days after Real Madrid took home the Spanish cup but the Barcelona stickers were a huge hit with the kids as were the Cars, Angry Birds, Spiderman and smiley face stickers. I only knew how to say “Hello” and “Thank you” in Arabic, but “Barcelona” was a universal happy word that day.

This was the first valuable lesson for us, these kids aren’t so different from our own children or from others we’ve known in Ireland, the US and elsewhere.

We used a hot glue gun to assemble the traditional “kite-shaped” kites. It must be natural to feel somewhat useless when trying to help others overcome seemingly intractable problems. But I soon found my purpose as goalie trying to keep the children from burning themselves on the hot glue guns. I began to wish we had used duct tape! But then I noticed that these kids were different. Their level of chaotic energy was high but nothing beyond what I’d seen in the Irish Sunday school classes. The difference being that this room full of 30 kids seemed at even more manageable than my Sunday school class of 8.

When the kites were finished, the children took them outside and we began to clean up. But the kites were so popular that the word soon spread and had a new influx of children eager to turn every scrap of plastic and cardboard they could find into a kite. At first we shrugged our shoulders and thought why not?

But when the chaos rose and we decided to pull the plug on the hot glue guns. As they cooled off, a 5 year-old boy presented his half-finished kite, flicked out a cigarette lighter and offered to reheat the glue for me. I told him, “La shukran.”

That was when someone carried in the little girl. She wore a white and pink floral dress and a beaded bracelet she had made with another arts and crafts group. She handed me the broken shoe. A plastic jewel had fallen off of its buckle.

There was just enough heat left in the glue gun to stick it back on. These children did learn something about recycling on that day. And I learned that even the smallest act of kindness is never wasted.

Photos provided by Dar Al Yasmin (DAY.)

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When you Twitter, Google, or just spend leisurely hours checking facebook updates, how does this affect the environment? And think about all that data from YouTube, cloud storage, and blogger’s sites. Where does it get stored and how much energy does it consume? Whoishostingthis provides a really handy infographic giving you the breakdown of the world’s largest data centers, where they are, what they store and what company’s are consuming the most resources. It’s a great cheat sheet if you are studying data and sustainability – and when you are trying to check your carbon footprint.

Via: WhoIsHostingThis

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I know it’s a knee-jerk reaction for environmentalists to be against the tar sands, to be against fracking, to be against the oil and gas industry, just like it is reasonable for animal rights activists to be against animal testing in medicine. There are certain “evils” or moral risks we take in this world to help bring us to the next problem in need of solving.  One day there won’t be animals in a biopharma lab, but algorithms doing the dirty work. I am sure of that. But meanwhile if a cancer medicine needs to be tested on an animal to make sure that my dad with prostate cancer stays well, I will opt for the animal’s suffering over my dad. Is that selfish or immoral?

I would never want to go back to the pre-oil, pre-industrial age, but look to and applaud people, researchers, and companies that are trying to make dirty and polluting industries better, like this company Flow Industries making fracking greener – which is making fracking greener at least in theory. Should we therefor discount companies like Shell, now exploring oil in the Arctic, for being a big evil, or laud them for feeding our greedy energy needs, while still trying to make their business a bit greener? Watch the video above. You decide.

The post Walking the Middle Ground as Oil Feeds Our Energy Needs appeared first on Green Prophet.

Former English footballer Gary Neville’s $9.7 million eco-home was granted planning permission. But is this really what environmentally-smart building’s about?

The ex-Manchester United club captain’s five-bedroom subterranean mansion will be the first carbon neutral home in Bolton, a city near the West Pennine Moors in England’s north west.

The posh eco-home bears a striking resemblance to the Teletubbies’ house, where the starring foursome of  the smash BBC television hit lived and made vats of pink tubby custard.  That children’s series, running from 1997 to 2002, targeted toddlers, but the show gained cult status with British and American college  students too.  Although he’s not a university graduate, Neville’s the right age to have been a “mature fan” of the show.  Could be where he gained his architectural sensibility.

Neville told the Sun: “I wanted the best-performing property. I wanted to live in the best, most sustainable zero-carbon property.”

The design, by Make Architecture, includes a ground source heat pump and photovoltaics to generate household electricity.  It will be built from locally sourced materials, and harvest rainwater for supplemental irrigation.

“Already billed as ‘a house of the future’, the unique scheme truly tests the boundaries of current sustainable thinking in terms of design and construction,” said Make.

“The orientation, the efficiency, the thermal mass, the performance of the glazing, the performance of the rain-water recovery systems, the photo-voltaic solar cells, the wind turbine. It will have ground and air-source heat pumps. The hope is that all this technology will make it as efficient as possible.”

It’s so green it scores a “code 6” (the highest possible rating) on the UK government’s building energy benchmarking system, BREEAM.

Local councilman Andy Morgan told The Sun that the planning application was innovative,”It’s not too obtrusive for residents and it’s a building which absolutely protects the environment.

Original plans included a wind turbine, which was eliminated in response to complaints lodged by local residents. The first application for planning permission generated over 100 objections from Neville’s neighbors.  The successful final application only received two objections, the final design is significantly downsized  from original plans.

So what’s the problem with this bit of pricey eco-folly?

The project will be built on virgin moorland, in a place of outstanding natural beauty.  Just as “low-fat” doesn’t mean “healthy:  ‘zero carbon’ doesn’t mean “minimal impact”.

Consider the disruption and damage caused by excavation and construction for new utility lines,  Apart from the driveway, 6 courtyards and disruption and damage caused by utilities being installed on the site. It’s also costing around 6 million, which hardly makes it an exemplar study of sustainable housing.

Construction is due to start next year.

The post “Zero-carbon” Architecture Doesn’t Mean Eco-smart appeared first on Green Prophet.

According to Khalil, a culture of recycling and re-utilising waste is almost non-existent in Egyptian society. The Egyptian government will face this same issue as many other governments in the region. Khalil said that if waste were properly utilized, it could supply 35 percent of the raw materials used in local Egyptian production.

Maged Boulos, a pollution monitor with Egypt’s Environment Ministry, reportedly said Cairo produces nearly 10 tons of garbage each day, 13 percent of the garbage Egypt produces daily. Boulos described recent government moves to improve national waste disposal, such as the creation of a Solid Waste Agency, a new government body dedicated to addressing the waste crisis. It has now been charged with repairing, increasing and managing the nation’s recycling facilities, currently numbered at 65. Boulos said harvesting the resources in waste, through recycling and waste management, could create over one million Egyptian jobs.

::Al-Shorfa

Image of recyclable waste in the Sinai, Egypt, via Shutterstock

Read more about recycling in the Middle East:

High Waste Generation and Low Level Recycling in Iran

Lebanon Launches New Recycling Campaign, “Think Before You Throw”

Recycling Tires Can Rid Egypt Of Fumes, Mosquitoes And Rats

The post Egypt Makes Recycling A Priority appeared first on Green Prophet.

Corals reefs are an invaluable part of the marine ecosystem, fostering biodiversity and protecting coastlines. But coral reefs are increasingly endangered. Pathogenic bacteria, along with pollution, global warming and harmful fishing practices, are one of the biggest threats to the world’s coral populations today.

One of the solutions to the crisis may lie in human medicine. Prof. Eugene Rosenberg of Tel Aviv University has developed a treatment for coral infected by Thalassomonas loyana, otherwise known as White Plague disease. This deadly bacterium infects 9 percent of Favia favus corals on the Eilat coral reef in the Red Sea and readily transmits the disease to nearby healthy corals.

Rosenberg’s treatment uses viruses that infect bacteria by injecting genetic material into the bacteria, a therapy originally developed to treat bacterial infections in humans. In this case, Rosenberg and his team isolated a virus called BA3, one of a category of viruses known as phages. After laboratory experiments showed that BA3 had the ability to kill off White Plague disease, field experiments in the Gulf of Eilat demonstrated that the treatment stopped the progression of the disease in infected corals and prevented the spread of the disease to surrounding healthy corals as well.

These findings were presented at the American Society for Microbiology’s general meeting in June.

Treating bacterial infections in corals is no easy task. Because corals don’t produce antibodies like humans, they can’t be immunized. And pharmaceutical antibiotics are not a viable option because the treatment releases the drugs into the sea, harming the marine environment.

The researchers applied their treatment to two groups of diseased coral, each surrounded by a circle of healthy corals. In the test group, the researchers injected the virus into the area at a concentration of 1000 per milliliter. The control group did not receive the virus.

After 24 hours, the difference in the outcome was highly significant, says Rosenberg. In the test group, the infection of the diseased coral ceased its progression, and the disease did not spread to the surrounding healthy corals. In the control group, however, the White Plague disease progressed rapidly in the original infected coral and spread to seven out of ten of the surrounding healthy corals.

The next step is to develop an effective way to spread the viruses over large areas of an infected coral reef. Sufficient amounts of these viruses can be easily manufactured in the laboratory. After that, it’s a question of technology and funding, Rosenberg adds.

Image of coral reef, Eilat from Shutterstock

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Unlike the dubious global warming theme park in the United Arab Emirates “Ice Land”, where extraordinary amounts of water go to waste, Israelis are trying to tackle northland conservation in a more sane manner. Thanks to Greenpeace Mediterranean, a sliding glacier with polar bears will be visiting the streets of Tel Aviv, Israel this week to educate locals on the problems caused by energy companies rallying to grab their stake in the arctic and North Pole. The campaign is part of Greenpeace’s “Save the Arctic” movement.

The moving glacier is really an ice-shaped platform, and it will haul people costumed in polar bear suits who no doubt will be extraordinarily hot in their suits.

According to the JPost “in addition to transporting the glacier platform around Tel Aviv, Greenpeace activists in Israel will be sending giant polar bear escorts to recruit Israelis to protect the North Pole throughout the coming weeks, the local group said.”

Greenpeace aims to get half a million signatures against the energy companies such as Shell who want to begin experimental energy drilling in the arctic.

If you want to see the North Pole stay pristine you can sign the Greenpeace campaign to “save” the arctic. I did.

::JPost / image via Greenpeace

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If you live in the west or the east, in an economically advanced country or a repressed one, getting a blood test is always a good way to know if you have been exposed to heavy metal toxins. If you live in a large city, you can ask your own doctor about the possibility in testing your blood, but there are also a number of companies that offer mail-in and online results. Try bloodtest.org. This particular company is based in the US, but you can always call them via Skype if you live in another country to see if their nurses can help you understand what tests you might need. 

Some heavy metals can be tolerated by the body, or even necessary for survival. But exposure to high levels of some heavy metals can easily become toxic. Sometimes we get exposed to metals in our diet, from the local environment, the workplace or home. Knowing more about what’s in your body can help you appeal to local authorities where you can demand better living and working conditions. Consider the case in Turkey where one researcher discovered scary levels of contaminants in newborns and breastfeeding mothers. Local industry will need to answer to these pollutants in some way or another.

What heavy metals you can track and trace

Mercury which is often found in polluted fish and near industrial areas is very toxic to human beings and wildlife. Cadmium found in the toxic waste dumps near where e-waste is rotting is another way kids and adults in the Middle East get poisoned. Arsenic and lead are two others to watch out for.

Other heavy metals that can lead to toxic exposures include chromium, copper, fluoride, zinc, and xylenes.

According to http://bloodtest.org, “Patients who have had heavy metal exposure may have no symptoms or symptoms that vary according to the type and severity of the exposure. Some signs of metal poisoning include pain in the abdomen, vomiting and nausea, tingling or weakness in the hands and feet, organ damage, memory loss, behavioral changes and breathing problems. Anemia may also occur, and children with this problem often develop weak bones.”

Others lead to physical, muscular and neurological damages which can cause Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy and possibly allergies down the road. Exposure to some can cause cancer.

We often associate blood tests with pathological conditions, but knowing what’s lurking in the blood can help you and your community better protect its future.

:: www.bloodtest.org

Image of blood test from Shutterstock

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