Love that this page on a website called ArabicNews.com has a full-banner ad and smaller ad for careers at the CIA across the top of the page. The article is about Bedouin hospitality traditions, and is at least intriguingly-written.

Hospitality in the desert, and by Syrian Bedouins in particular, is the recognition of want; it has grown into a social grace. The stranger who comes to a tent comes, or at least in the old days came, because there was nowhere else to go. To turn a man away was equivalent to murder.

Such a society for its own sake could not afford to be anything but hospitable. […]

In the same way the environment has made bravery a Bedouin necessity, where differences of opinion or the right to the scanty pasturage, are always, and have always been, settled by cunning and force of arms, only the wily can hope to survive. The Bedouin is both of these almost by definition. His liberty and independence of spirit are also due to the life he leads, and are a direct byproduct of his migratory habits.

Had he been settled, he would have been subjugated long ago; his mobility has ensured his freedom and the freedom that freedom brings.

Though I don’t know what exactly they mean by “the freedom that freedom brings.” A Bedouin misprint?

On another note, I’ve been noticing a proliferation of similar websites lately: they usually have an ethnicity or name of a country or a region in the URL, along with something like “news” or “times”. I’ve been wondering if their countries of origin are really the places they purport to be from…