Journalism

I have written this post about three times. Gone over it about 10. I don't know why, but I felt that this one needed to be, you know, just right.


When explaining that we have Arabsat in our house, people that have never heard of the company look at me wideeyed. A satellite that can pick up arabic channels and direct them into a home in South London? One that picks up Al-Jazeera, the channel that Osama Bin Laden sends his videos to?

Yeah.

What I tend to leave out, though, is that the majority of arabic people, and all the arabs we know, living in both the arab and the non arab world, have one of these satellite dishes.

The receiver picks up hundreds of Arabic channels, from music channels to news to general lifestyle channels to channels dedicated to Egyptian soap operas. The only programme I could name, though, stars a chef called Osama that my mother watches every morning on the Dubai Channel.

I will admit, before I began to write this entry, I didn't know what the deal was with Canada, North and South America but apparently there is coverage there too.

So, what is the point of this entry, I hear you ask.

It was to tie in with a buddy of mines website: Luke Wolagiewicz.
Luke has been to Iraq a number of times since the "shock and awe" campaign, and manages to take very real pictures that I think a lot of people should check out. If you feel yourself turning your head in disgust as to what you see, think of all the people in Iraq that have to see these images everyday.

http://www.wolagiewicz.com/index.html


Luke manages to portray not only death in Iraq, but the plight of the military that he was with. I wanted to take Luke out when he got back and ask him questions about Iraq.. I might interview him here later on but for now, I want to focus on his pictures.

Whilst looking at Lukes site, I found myself not being shocked by any of the images, maybe because I am used to them, but mostly because it was not anything I hadn't seen before. The images you see on arabic news are brutally honest and there is more sadness and more shocking images than the very much toned down UK and US news.

I urge everyone to take five minutes out of their day to check out Lukes site, especially the Iraq pictures. See what we generally don't get to see.