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Certainly a surprising turn of events. Especially for a teenager.
In Iraq, going viral can bring fame, and the threat of violence
Ali Adil reached out to President Biden in video from his hot, dusty rooftop. The video brought millions of likes. It also left him afraid to leave his house.
By Jane Arraf
Ali, 17, who has been video blogging since he was 13 and has a devoted following on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, set up his phone on the dusty roof, positioned a camera light and started recording.
“Peace and the mercy of God be upon you. How are you Biden dear heart?” he says on the video. Dressed in baggy knee-length shorts and a tan T-shirt, he spoke in a mélange of Arabic and English before he got down to business: “Biden — if you don’t help me, I will jump,” he says, a bit of mischief in his voice. He plays it straight in the video, saying he is not joking. (Sitting in his home last week, he said he would never do that.)
Then he starts to list his troubles. His troubles, it turns out, are the troubles of a nation.
It's one of the fundamental things that go wrong when Westerners and (at least parts of) the Arabic world meet: Very different formulas. A friend of mine sailed on Maersk ships and at Suez, he noticed that the Arab translator was way more verbose in Arab - very long sentences to communicate simple concepts. So he asked.
It was simple local politeness, as it turns out. A Westerner would say "We were delayed in our last port and will not be able to make our assigned ETA, please re-assign us to the first available southbound slot after 1800." But in Arabic, the translator literally would open with something like "A misfortune has befallen us and we are now at the mercy of the kindness of strangers..." and carry on in that vein. The intent of the words was the exact same - a perfectly businesslike change of plans - but the tenor was entirely different.
Anyway, it's very easy to misstep gong back and forth between Arabic and a Western language.
It's one of the fundamental things that go wrong when Westerners and (at least parts of) the Arabic world meet: Very different formulas. A friend of mine sailed on Maersk ships and at Suez, he noticed that the Arab translator was way more verbose in Arab - very long sentences to communicate simple concepts. So he asked.
It was simple local politeness, as it turns out. A Westerner would say "We were delayed in our last port and will not be able to make our assigned ETA, please re-assign us to the first available southbound slot after 1800." But in Arabic, the translator literally would open with something like "A misfortune has befallen us and we are now at the mercy of the kindness of strangers..." and carry on in that vein. The intent of the words was the exact same - a perfectly businesslike change of plans - but the tenor was entirely different.
Anyway, it's very easy to misstep gong back and forth between Arabic and a Western language.
Particularly considering the rhetorical heights we'd gotten used to.
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