Have you ever noticed in news reports, or in photographs of war-torn streets in the Arab Middle East, you see (every now and then) graffiti scrawled on the side of buildings in looped and curved Arabic characters? Here’s the thing – I always assume that every single scrawling like this has a foreboding message related to Allah or Jihad. Am I being prejudiced in thinking this way?
I think news organizations should make it a policy to translate such text whenever it makes its way into one of their reports (television, newspaper, or web). Maybe some of this graffiti is just graffiti. Maybe some are messages like “Abdullah loves Aisha” or ‘Mullah Omar is a Douchebag”
Man, if that were the case, it would affirm my faith in humanity!
bendingtheneedle 