brand awareness of all types: angry bird

Designer rebel. Rebel sell.To somehow integrate and embed social capital and status within the revolution. Give it a hipster edge with street credibility. Go Adbusters on Syria. The sectarianism and the variety of ideologies and objectives lend themselves well to the buy and sell trading that may ultimately define what Arabism is in Western eyes, a new play on the old trope of Orientalism, this time coated in branding and the eventual gentrification of the movement, like Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood as being those friendly neighbors equally concerned about crime, property values and the value of those 401K’s. Add a sprinkle of materialism and rampant individualism and soon the debt machine will be keeping everyone in bondage. Its like something out of Sorkin’s The West Wing: nominal democracy based on private property for all. One size fits all. Growing pains forgiven…

(see link at end)…The revolution is being branded. A young Turkish graphic designer from the small border town of Kilis in Turkey has been commissioned by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to design their logo.

More accustomed to creating posters declaring “girls need to go to school” for the local municipality’s education programmes, 28-year-old Sedat Akpinar looked up from his computer to find the FSA’s northern border commander, Abu Hayder, standing in his shop.

With designers and materials in short supply in Syria, the commander had crossed the border last week, hoping to find someone in Turkey who could help him create “an identifiable symbol” to be placed on cars, trucks, tanks, T-shirts, baseball caps and bandannas….

Old logo. —At present there are three main trends in the Syrian patriotic opposition – democratic, liberal and left, which is mainly a communist one. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party is the most influential party among the democratic forces. It is also the oldest party which was established in 1932. As Iliah Saman, a member of the political bureau of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party said, the party’s program is more conservative in comparison with the Baath’s program. Nevertheless there are no differences of principle between the two parties. According to him, the policy of the US, France and England is the main destabilizing factor in Syria. He said that those countries were acting in the interests of Israel and had the goal to divide Syria into five state formations on the basis of religious and ethnical differences.
The liberal trend of the opposition is represented by the recently registered secular democratic social movement led by Nabil Feysal, one of the Syrian intellectuals, a writer and a translator. He is an outright opponent of the Islamic fundamentalism, supporter of the liberal democracy. His goal is to turn Syria into “Middle Eastern Denmark”.—Read More:http://otheraspect.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/what-is-really-going-on-in-syria-insider-update/

…With him, Hayder had brought his “quality controller”: an FSA soldier with a background in design, now occupied as a full-time sniper. The recruit had a bullet wound in his arm over which he had tattooed a sword. “Designed by me!” he declared proudly.


Sedat didn’t feel like arguing, so he set about mocking up a design employing the green, white and black and three red stars of the Syrian flag superimposed with an eagle and an assault rifle “representing war”.

Speaking only Turkish, the designer then had to draft in one of his neighbours, a local smuggler who spoke Arabic. Together, they were able to build the Arabic characters for “Northern Storm Brigade”, a branch of the FSA, across the top of the insignia.

There must be money changing hands somewhere. Arafat accumulated quite a stash and maybe better to let the paper trail rot away like his corpse. Just blame israel and call it a day?—JERUSALEM (Ma’an) — The nephew of late President Yasser Arafat said on Thursday it was not necessary to re-investigate the leader’s death as everyone knows who was behind it, Al Jazeera reported.
Nasser al-Qudwa, who heads the Yasser Arafat Foundation, in July said he was behind the renewed calls for a thorough probe into the sudden death of Arafat in 2004, after Al Jazeera broadcast new findings that the leader’s belongings had traces of the radioactive element polonium-210.
But al-Qudwa said this week that the new evidence just confirms past conclusions that Arafat was poisoned, and his family accuses Israel of the murder.—Read More:http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=518043 image:http://movieglutton.blogspot.ca/2010/08/indigenes-days-of-glory.html

…Once he had approved the final mock-up, the FSA commander instructed Sedat to print 300 stickers with the logo, each with a different number, as number plates for his army’s vehicles. The printing had to be done on the spot: Hayder was returning to Syria that day. But he assured Sedat that he would return shortly to order black T-shirts and baseball caps embossed with the logo. “If we take Aleppo we want all the fighters in our brigade to look the same when we enter the town,” he explained….

—Foreign Islamists intent on turning Syria into an autocratic theocracy have swollen the ranks of rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad and think they are waging a “holy war”, a French surgeon who treated fighters in Aleppo has said.
Jacques Beres, co-founder of medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, returned from Syria on Friday evening after spending two weeks working clandestinely in a hospital in the besieged northern Syrian city.
In an interview with Reuters in his central Paris apartment on Saturday, the 71-year-old said that contrary to his previous visits to Homs and Idlib earlier this year about 60 percent of those he had treated this time had been rebel fighters and that at least half of them had been non-Syrian.
“It’s really something strange to see. They are directly saying that they aren’t interested in Bashar al-Assad’s fall, but are thinking about how to take power afterwards and set up an Islamic state with sharia law to become part of t


orld Emirate,” the doctor said.
The foreign jihadists included young Frenchmen who said they were inspired by Mohammed Merah, a self-styled Islamist militant from Toulouse, who killed seven people in March in the name of al-Qaeda.—Read More:http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/08/us-syria-crisis-jihad-idUSBRE88708W20120908 image:http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/09/09/236901.html

…Even as the bullets fly, this very 21st century rebel group appears to understand the power of branding and the media. By building a unified image, the commander told Sedat, the FSA is seeking to present itself as a force with the trappings of statehood, capable of not only looking to the future with confidence, but also taking a central role in driving change at the heart of the Syrian government.

—As for his comment on Muslim women, Dawkins writes: “Muslim women suffer physically from misogyny, their lives are substantially damaged by religiously inspired misogyny. Not just words, real deeds, painful, physical deeds, physical provisions, legally sanctioned demeanings.”
This comment elicited several more responses, including a post by Jen McCreight at her own blog, BlagHag, arguing that “words matter.” She writes:
You don’t get that because you’ve never been called a cunt, a faggot, a nigger, a kike. You don’t have people constantly explaining that you’re subhuman, or have the intellect of an animal.—Read More:http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/07/richard-dawkins-draws-feminist-wrath-over-sexual-harassment-comments/39637/ image:http://israelmatzav.blogspot.ca/2012/06/so-you-think-youre-going-to-draft.html

…The man who controls the FSA’s operations around the border with Turkey then handed the designer $300 (£187) and a flash drive full of footage and photographs of the conflict. These included interviews with senior FSA commanders and images from the frontline; even gruesome footage allegedly showing a soldier from the regime’s forces being decapitated with a chainsaw. “Sell that to CNN or the BBC and you can keep the profits!” the commander told the designer. Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/07/syria-rebels-revolution-designer-logo

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