Fili’s world

This weekend's Haaretz has a long deadly article, spanned over 3 full pages, about a western perspective of Shanghai and Singapore, titled : "A little nuisance at West end - how does Israel look from the East? Traveling to Shanghai and Singapore and coming back depressed". This piece was written by one of Haaretz's finest, a well known political and social Israeli journalist.

I'll do my best to translate the introduction of this piece from Hebrew :

"… But in 15 years Shanghai has shown its ability to transform into a stylish Manhattan. What's depressing? in over double that time TelAviv has yet to build a sub-way system and the plans for a tram lingers every other year in all possible stops. It's because our outer cities look awful - with much neglect and an even worse bad taste.

Singapore gives another cause for Israeli melancholia. All we really know about it, in a way, is that throwing chewing gum in the streets is a federal offense and that homosexuality is punished. Oral and anal sex is forbidden, ruled by supreme court, unless intended as a pre-sex game for a "normal" intercourse. There were no demonstrations in the international conference held there a week ago, but the conference did approve that Singapore holds the world record in Globalization with over 6% annual growth (compared to about 2.9% for the US and 10% for China). While Israeli generals are nostalgic about training the new state in 1965, Singapore has taken the lead in the latest international bank survey in quality business environment. The city-state, third of Israel, is threatening to surpase Japan, which has a 40 times bigger economy, as the Asian bonds trading center and has been voted top place to live, before Tokyo and Hong Kong.

We thought of going over to Singapore and Shanghai to take a look at the back-scene of "Evil"… but we realized fast enough that before Asia beats America, it has already beaten us (fiLi - Israel) by most standards. Asians are "third world"? We're slowly regressing to third while they're climbing to first.

There's something troubling about observing these places, because there's no ignoring the fact that the western thinking still looks down at "far east" countries…" (bold not in original text)

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Israelis are slowly discovering Asia and while two years ago to the Israeli media the "world" mostly meant Europe and North America, the "world news" sections now contain a lot more about "The East". We get all sorts of articles, some are interesting, some plain and boring, some ridiculous, but they could all be characterized by an aroma of surprise, as if saying - "whaaoooo, what do you know? Asia is actually -fill in your favorite cliché-, who would have thought…?".

Although I've occasionally sinned doing that myself - if this blog has any "agenda" let it be this : Never assume, don't take ‘facts' for granted, go and experience things yourself and make up your own mind. You might actually be surprised with what you find.