European Union Press Award

As discussed in an earlier post the EU Commission in Jordan has instituted a yearly price for excellent journalism in Jordan. The awards are ment to encourage and raise the standard of investigative journalism in Jordan – which in my humble opinion is very much needed. 49 articles was submitted for the awards of which 8 was presented to the jury.

Tonight, at the award ceremony three journalists received a price. Their pieces were very different.

Third price went to Salah Abbadi for a traditional investigative reporting on bad management of medical waste. It was originally published in Al Rai last year and I remember it create some debate at that time.

Second price was – what some probably would consider controversial - a opinion about power in Jordan and how the higher public positions tend to go to particular families and business circles and how this creates a divide between the average Jordanian and those in power. The column or op-ed like piece was written by Rania al-Hindi in Arabic in/on Minbar al Umma al Hurr (I am sorry to say I don’t know this media).

First price went to a report on the way the Jordanian society treats former inmates from Israeli prisons. It was a short article, very well written by Mohammad al-Fudeilat, which exposed the difference between words and deeds, when it comes to reintegration of prisoners back into society. The news website Al Bawaba published this early last year.

The three articles will be (re)published in English and Arabic on the EU Press awards site soon.

Beyond Stereotypes – follow-ups

Thank you very much for your participation in the “Beyond Stereotype” event last night. It got nicely crowded and a little bit to warm in the theatre. The feedback I got in the lounge afterwards was very positive.

Some would have liked to have had more time for discussion – and so would I – but after 2½ hours of sitting down (not counting Nabils exercises) on Thursday night I think it was the right decision to break up. After all it was 21.30 in the evening and the music was waiting outside.

The discussion can continue – either on this site, on 7iber.com or on some of the other bloggers site as on Roba’s which have drawn a large number of comments (some agressive) on Arab stereotyping. Unfortunately I didn’t notice this until today.

A couple of follow-ups from last night:

While some would have preferred more and more political discussion another person suggested to me, that the theme was too sensitive in this part of the world for a political discussion and that we instead should focus on the more sociological aspects of stereotyping like blogger Miriam did very nicely. In some ways I agree to this, since I believe it is important to understand stereotyping not only as a negative phenomenon but also as a sometimes positive and very useful way of dealing with people. Everybody is stereotyping – not because we want to – but because our brain can only process so much information at a given moment. The trick is to move from stereotyping (generalising) into individualisation. And that is what we do, whenever we get in personal contact with somebody. I know it is a cliché but that is one of the reasons that tourism – in particular individual tourism – is very important to fight negative stereotyping.

One the other hand as a principle I do not agree that some issues are too sensitive to be discussed – quite the opposite – those issues in particular need to be discussed. That being said, my 18 months in Jordan has taught me, that the reaction to discussing some topics is so aggressive and negative that it is – today – futile to even engage in such a discussion. But stereotyping is not one of those issues.

Will Omar Marzouk be back in Jordan? Most probably – we at the Embassy will try to do our best to get him back to do a complete stand-up show – hopefully this year. If we succeed we will let you know right away.

I didn’t get the possibility to comment on a sceptical remark from the audience about the lack of Danish negative stereotypes on the net. I do not claim scientific value to my research but I actually didn’t manage to find some really negative Danish stereotypes through Wiki or Google (only in English). Maybe it is because we are just a very small population of 5.5 million (like Jordan) or simply not interesting enough as an ethnic group. Even searching for Scandinavian negative stereotypes didn’t yield much. Didn’t look for specific Jordanian stereotypes – but I guess it will be difficult as well. These three links were the best I could find for Danish stereotypes.

What are Danes like?    Yahoo Answers     Yahoo Answers 2

If you can come up with links to “better” (negative) stereotypes of Danes please do.

Where can you watch the full version of “An Arab comes to Town”? I was told that it will be released on DVD soon – in the meantime the Embassy together with the Royal Film Commission are planning an open-air screening at the Film Commission late May early June – probably in connection with a workshop with the participation of the Directors Georg Larsen and Ahmad Ghosien. We will announce the screening in the same way as we did with the “Beyond Stereotype” – through the Royal Film Commission and 7iber.com

UPDATE: An article from Jordan Times about the event.

Beyond Stereotypes

As per request my speech from yesterday evening.

 

Check against delivery

Welcome

Thanks to Municipality and Mayor Omar for use of this hall – I know he has a weak spot for stand-up so he really had no other option than to accept.

Thanks to the Royal Film Commission for all their assistance and for use of their Facebook group. We look forward to do more with you in the future.

One the Danish side this event has been created by the Danish Center for Culture and Development – with humble financial assistance from the Foreign Ministry – so to them all the credit.

I think we have a good program for tonight and with Nabil’s gentle but firm guidance we will be in good hands.

Stereotypes – you know what – I happen to belong to a somewhat exclusive stereotype – the diplomat. 80 years ago a diplomat was stereotyped by his “good temper, good health and good looks”. That was a diplomat. Little later things became less rosy – then a diplomat was a “cookie pusher” – a guy doing nothing but attending tea parties. 

Today – in my country – a diplomat – for not speaking about an ambassador – is a person always wearing tuxedo, moving around in “elevated circles” and attending cocktail parties to no good. And thanks to an often repeated TV-commercial the diplomat favours a specific type of Swiss chocolate. This is the image that is regularly being portrayed in movies, news paper articles and on TV.

I don’t deny or shy away from the fact that I belong to the diplomat category – but I find the stereotyping a bit unfair. I didn’t bring my black tie; most of my working hours are spend on political, security or trade issues and meeting with people from all walks of life in all kinds of places; and I don’t like the chocolate. I am pretty sure that my fellow colleagues feel the same way.

But it is hard to fight a well grown stereotype. In the Foreign Service we have tried for years and years – without success. It doesn’t matter how many times we are seen publicly working under extreme, dangerous or unhealthy conditions. It doesn’t matter how much we try to be of assistance to Danish companies and Danish citizens in trouble or how successful we are in doing that. It actually doesn’t matter what we do in real life – the stereotype sticks like glue.

Luckily – it is one of the more benign stereotypes – we are only hurt on our egos and we can joke about our stereotyped selves:

My experience tells me very clearly that moving beyond stereotypes takes a lot of effort and a lot of time. 

While preparing for tonight I used Wikipedia to look-up stereotypes. Couldn’t find any Danish ones. A wider search gave a few hits – one person was asking where you could find negative Danish stereotypes – he had only found a few positive ones. I searched also in vain for the negative ones – the only thing that came up a couple of times was that Danes are not very open towards strangers. The only really negative one was one that I had found earlier here in Jordan – it is made by my favourite cartoonist Emad Hajjad. He takes the Danish symbol – the national flag and twists the cross in the flag to make a nazi swastika cross – equalizing all Danes with Nazis. Serious stuff.

Arab stereotypes you find in tons on the net. On Wiki It has its own article. The Arab American community talks about the “three B’s syndrome”.  Arabs in TV or movies are Bombers, Belly Dancers or Billionaires. I think I know which one is the dominant one today.

That brings me to touch on a very well known Arab/Muslim stereotyping of Danish origin – the Cartoon. I don’t want to recall the whole story about this – just to emphasise that for many reasons this probably got a lot more media exposure than it deserved from the outset.

But it did illustrate one thing very clearly. What we do and say in our own little back yard is picked-up and reacted to in ways that was not originally intended and that can get totally out of control. It reminded all of us in my country that we are living in a global village and that we are faced with a new challenge.

How do we find the right way between behaving as we are used to do and then taking into consideration that other people in the global village may have different norms and standards?  What if the others are seriously offended? Should we care?

Many people are worried and most do care. Let me give you some numbers from a recent poll from Gallup Institute for the Danish Youth Council: They asked a large sample of Danish youth: Do you agree that Denmark is hated in the Middle East because of the Cartoons: 65% did agree and only 10% did disagree. I wasn’t asked – but I would definitely disagree with that statement.

Anyway – a follow-up question was: Do you agree that it is particularly important to have a dialogue with youth in the Middle East to improve the perception of Denmark? 67% did agree, 7% did disagree. Others questions gave answers along the same line.

Most Danes also want to live peacefully with their neighbours in the global village. So we have to discuss how we are able to protect our own society as a society that develops through un-censored free speech and open exchange of views and leaves space for different political views and religious beliefs.

Can we in the future avoid all kind of speech that could lead to a new crisis? No. It is in the nature of a free open society that we cannot – and that we will not – control all things. Any individual or group has the possibility to say and do things that might be considered provocative or offensive somewhere. But what we can do is to discuss ways to avoid that such incidents – in particular if made with bad intentions – become crises between whole populations. We all have to work to ensure strength in our relations to avoid that small incidents can become and be used for major crises. We should work together to find ways. There are three keywords: dialogue, dialogue and dialogue. Maybe we should add a fourth – humour.

And dialogue and fun is what we hopefully will have in this hall tonight. I look forward to our discussion and I thank you for participating tonight.

Stand-up stereotypes…!

Please join me at the Al Hussein Cultural Center this Thursday the 16th at 7.00 PM for an evening with stand-up comedy, film, debate and hopefully animated and heated discussion about Arab and Danish stereotypes. DJ Shadi will entertain in the Lounge after the event. More on 7iber.com 

UPDATE: My good friend Ambassador Hasan Abu Nimeh has an interesting article in Jordan Times today. In the article he discuss integration, in particular integration of muslims living in Europe: “The key words are integration, respect for the rule of law on the part of the Muslim immigrant communities, and adequate consideration for the Muslims’ religious and cultural commitments, on the part of their hosts.”

Let’s get going – Samsø shows the way

This example shows how important it is to create local “ownership” and some incentives be it financially or morally to get a positive development going. I have written about the “Samsø” experience before but always felt that it was important that Jordanians could hear directly from the people involved in making a small local community independent from fossil fuels. My collaborators at the embassy succeed in securing one of the key persons Jesper Kjems from Samsø to appear at the first Euro-Jordanian renewable energy conference that opened yesterday   in Amman. For those that did not have the possibility to attend I reproduce an interview on the Samsø experience from Jordan Times today.

But back to my point. In Jordan we need successful showcases in order to advance the use of renewable energy and lessen the near total dependence on imported energy. I am sure that we have communities in Jordan that are interested and capable of pushing things forward – but the government and parliament needs to create the right positive conditions for such a development – one of those being the adoption of a good progressive renewable energy law. And while we wait for that we can hope that the first commercial wind power plant in Al Khamsah will get off to a good start and show potential investors that renewable energy means business – also in Jordan.

Island village offers lessons in renewable energy

 By Taylor Luck

AMMAN – Jordan has much to learn from a small farming community in northern Denmark, according to energy experts.

At first glance, the Kingdom, mostly desert, has little in common with the island of Samso, an agricultural area home to 4,000.

But villages and towns across the country have much to learn from a community, which, in less than a decade, became the world’s first complete renewable energy city through local community involvement.

In 1998, the town embarked on an experiment to become 100 per cent renewable in 10 years under a Danish government initiative, with no grants, funds or assistance from the government or outside institutions.

Armed with only a renewable energy-friendly investment environment, Samso organised focused local community involvement to build the foundations for a clean-energy future.

A traditional and conservative farming community entirely dependent on oil and coal shipped from the mainland, few thought Samso could fulfil the goal – let alone in 10 years time, according to Jesper Kjems of the Samso Energy Academy.

Project officials met with local residents and highlighted the initiative not as a chance to save the environment, but as a business opportunity to breathe life into the island, which had suffered a mini-depression after the closure of a slaughterhouse vital to its economy.

Under national economic incentives, Samso entrepreneurs were provided with a guaranteed minimum price for the electricity generated by wind turbines, with insurance in case of technical failures, assuring local banks providing financing that the turbines were indeed a safe investment.

Dozens of farmers pooled together and purchased the turbines, which many found to be more profitable than the farms they had tended to their entire lives.

“In areas where private companies just throw up wind turbines, residents see them as obtrusive. But when people actually own and benefit from them, they don’t mind seeing a turbine in their backyard,” Kjems noted.

To further local ownership, wind turbines were also open to public investment through local cooperatives, allowing Samso’s private citizens to own shares in turbines and profit from the export of energy back to mainland.

Around 450 citizens, some 10 per cent of the population, bought shares in wind power plants, and the 10 one-megawatt (MW) turbines soon accounted for 100 per cent of the island’s electricity needs.

“It became locally owned. Even if one resident didn’t own a share in the wind energy, their neighbour did, their wife did. It changed the way the community looked at the entire project,” he noted.

For heating, Samso residents turned to biomass and solar energy, burning of local straw and utilising some 2,500 solar panels to heat water which is then transferred to their homes.

Owned and operated by local companies, heating districts run by elected councils of area residents, and consumer-owned heating systems, the biomass/solar heaters now account for 77 per cent of the island’s heating needs.

The largest obstacle to creating a completely carbon-neutral community, according to Kjems, however, was transportation.

“For electric cars the technology was so far off. It just wasn’t realistic,” he said.

To offset the fossil fuels used by the transportation sector, the island established ten 2.3MW offshore wind turbines in the North Sea, generating and exporting more clean energy than was consumed by cars, buses or ferries to and from the mainland.

The island has since become a leading energy destination, attracting journalists and foreign dignities from far and wide to learn from their accomplishments.

Kjems noted that officials from Egypt doubted such an initiative could be replicated on a larger scale, as the population of Samso is equivalent to just two city blocks in Cairo.

For him, the answer is simple.

“Make two city blocks 100 per cent renewable, then maybe the next two blocks will follow. You have to start somewhere local, and let everyone learn for themselves the benefits and cross over,” he noted.

Such an approach would work well in Jordan, either at the regional or municipal level, he said.

Officials in Jordan could utilise tribal or family structures to identify community leaders to support the initiative, and promote the financial incentives in the sector to local farmers and landowners.

Noting that the technology used by Samso is imported from mainland Denmark or overseas, Kjemp stressed that Jordan does not need to produce renewable energy technology to benefit. Local application of the technology and investment alone can create jobs and reduce the country’s energy bill, he added.

“The model would have to be modified for Jordan to utilise vast resources of sunshine. But it can be done in any village or any city here,” he noted, stressing that making the switch to renewable energies is in peoples’ interests is key to success.

“Not many people care about saving the polar bears. But if you tell people that renewable energy will save Jordan, will save this village, they will begin to act,” he said.