Libyan Matters

For many Libyans living outside of Libya (including myself) we do not get a lot of news about Libyan's everyday life and what goes on normally, I mean anything that is not political, for me I found out more about Libya in the past two years than I did in 25+ years before and that is mainly due to Libyan blogs writing about Libya and showing pictures, before that it was mainly websites from inside Libya would write mainly about things that never existed and were there just to make a mountain out of a seed, on the other hand we have many Libyan websites that publish from outside Libya and while many of them showed some reality of what is happening in Libya but most of it is just doom and gloom, that is why I am sometimes hungry for articles and pictures from Libya that have nothing to do with politics, just normal people, normal places, stories that talk about our culture, our heritage and so on...

One such story was about the Santa Maria Church in Tripoli and its return to Christians:

you can read the full article here, I just thought it was heart warming and showed the tolerance of the real decent Libyan people. The same website has many good articles about Libya, like this one about Libyan Tea and the world famous Libyan Truffle تِرفاس , there are many articles about Libya there, very enjoyable.

One other story that got my attention was about the Venus of Cyrene, which was stolen by the Italian invaders from Libya and put in the Rome Museum, the museum has lost its appeal to try and keep it in Rome and I am hoping inshaAllah that it is returned soon, just like the Libyan Aphrodite that was returned in 2002.

saying that, Libyans have responsibility to look after their heritage, I have read few times about how some of our artifacts are stolen and sold abroad and this is happening now, to me this is one of the worst ever crimes committed by people.

Finally I would like to wish our team at this year's Olympics the best of luck, I know it is too much to expect a medal but just taking part and participating in this major event is a reason to be proud of the 7 Libyan athletes, I wish there was more than just seven but that is how it is and inshaAllah they make us proud by being decent and fair.

Incidentally when I wrote few weeks ago about the American/Libyan swimmer Mercedes/Asmahan Farhat not being the first ever Libyan female swimmer as many Libyan and American websites were reporting, it was good to see The Tripoli Post writing exactly what I did weeks before them :o)

Top Row (from left): Asmahan Farhat, Ghada Ali and Ali Zaid; Second row (from left):Mohammad BenSalah, Ezzidin Tlish, Ahmed Belgasim and Sufian Aljaddi