"There’s no place on Symi for this US/Israeli propaganda"
“He is the Bush of Symi. There’s no place on Symi for this US/Israeli propaganda.”
It is one of the hottest days of the year and in the few minutes I have been in the bar that Ali runs with his wife, Pat, he has been non-stop making iced coffee and squeezing oranges for his customers. He looks up straight into my eyes and adds “He knew 100% what he was doing. It was intentional.”
Nobody who knows Ali is in any doubt that the Lebanese national has been bitterly hurt and offended by the article that appeared two weeks previously in the August edition of The Symi Visitor, the free paper that is available all over Symi and which many people consider to be the community’s voice to the thousands of tourists that visit the island every year.
Two of the men sitting outside the bar are reading a copy of the offending paper and I catch a few of the words that Ali says to them when he delivers their drinks. When he comes back in, he smiles and says “I’m doing a bit of my own propaganda now.”
I ask him what it is that he finds so offensive about the article. He once again fixes that gaze on me, very intense and the smile is gone. “Because it’s all a lie and he knows it. It’s not the first time he has written bad stuff like this. I knew days before the paper came out that he was going to write something nasty. I knew one hundred percent, and he didn’t disappoint me. It didn’t even take me one minute to find it.”
The article “Live from Larnaca – Dodecanese Pride at Beirut Evacuation, Midday 24 July 2006” was written by The Symi Visitor’s editor, Nicholas Shum and is mostly taken up with facts about how the boat (Dodecanese Pride), owned by the Spanos brothers, was chartered by the Swedish Government to evacuate their nationals from the Lebanon in the face of the bombardment of the country by Israeli forces. It is not until the penultimate paragraph that Mr Shum writes the words that have upset many who have read it.
“The Israelis have said that they will bear no responsibility for what happens to any vessel which overstays its timeslot in the harbour. It seems, though, that the perceived danger is not from the Israelis but from Muslim radicals who may wish to disrupt the evacuations. So many groups of western subjects gathered together make a tempting target.”
“He is after supporting a Bush-ist propaganda” says Ali, “Islamic radicals do not exist in Lebanon. They may be in Iraq, Afghanistan, but not in Lebanon. But this isn’t the point. Life on Symi is one of respect. There shouldn’t be this type of politics in the paper. It's meant to represent the island and this is what the tourists think. It’s supposed to promote the island. Everyone on Symi hates this attitude.”
I ask Ali what his immediate reaction to reading the article was. He is preparing more fresh-squeezed orange juice but for a moment this seems forgotten. “Within two minutes I called their office”, he says “and Halkitis answered.” (Nikos Halkitis is the owner of The Symi Visitor). “He said he had no idea what was in the paper, and that I should talk to Shum.” I was about to ask him how come the owner of the paper doesn’t know what's in it but Ali must have guessed as he shrugs and adds “Halkitis only cares about the ads in the paper, everybody knows this.”
Ali continues, “I tried to call Shum, but his phone was off. I tried many times to call him that day and always his phone is turned off. The next morning I went to the office to find him. Adriana and Wendy were there and they lie to me and say that the words were not Nicholas’s but those of Spanos.”
Adriana, the wife of Nicholas Shum, and Wendy Wilcox, partner of Nikos Halkitis, run the Symi Visitor’s accommodation business from the imposing building on the southern side of the harbour in Symi. To readers of The Symi Visitor paper, Adriana is as well known a figure as Nicholas. Each month, about half of the paper that is not advertisements is written directly by one or other of the Shums.
A British woman comes into the bar and asks for two orange juices, and two full English breakfasts. It is nearly one o’clock in the afternoon with temperatures in the sun above forty degrees Celsius. Ali sets about the task immediately but carries on “I said to Wendy, be careful what you say, that’s not the truth. I was so upset I left the office. Later that day Wendy came to the bar and she says to me ‘he didn’t mean Lebanese, you know’ and I said to her that it’s not about that, that Shum shouldn’t be writing this sort of stuff in the paper for this island. It’s just his view, not the truth. I know that.”
“I tried for six days, maybe a week to get Shum on his phone and always it is turned off. After about four days I called Adriana in the office to ask her why his phone was always turned off and what hole he was hiding in. She said to me ‘For Christ’s Sake, Ali, let it go.’ And I said I won’t let it go. Suddenly a couple of days later Wendy calls me to say that Shum wants to come to my bar and talk to me.”
“He comes to the bar and he’s shaking and very nervous, and he sits in the corner. He has this article that he once wrote years ago about how nice Lebanon is and I said to him that I don’t care what he wrote then, that it’s irrelevant, that I’m not interested in that. I told him that I was only interested in what he had written in The Symi Visitor.”
“He sits there and denies responsibility for it, and that he was only saying what Spanos said and that the words weren’t his.”
As Ali is talking he is preparing the cooked meals and drinks for other customers. He is also keeping an eye on how my own drink is going.
“He says in the article that he was on the phone to Spanos’s man who was saying that Beirut is in a mess. He then starts another paragraph and it’s no longer quotes, its comments like his personal view. I told him he was a liar, that he should step down for saying these lies, and if he won’t do that he should be sacked. He won’t accept responsibility for it. He said ‘Ali, I am not resigning’ and then he left. A couple of minutes later and he’s back telling me that if I want to complain I should do it in a different way, giving me a lecture, telling me that I should write to the paper.”
It is now past one o’clock and the bar is getting busier. Ali is popping in and out of the bar as he talks, and the two cooked breakfasts are almost ready. When he is sure that all his customers are happy, he comes back in. “Have you ever tried to go on their chat page and say anything?” he asks me.
I reply that I am very well acquainted with the Symi Visitor chat page, though less so in its recent incarnation. The new chat page which has existed for a couple of months has abandoned the free-to-all format that it had for several years. At the moment anyone wishing to post a message has to register first with an e-mail address and then wait for a reply from the chat page confirming their registration, which is usually within a few minutes. When the newly registered user posts a message however, up pops a reply saying that the message will be read by a moderator (which can take many hours) and will only be posted if it is acceptable. Ali says “I tried to put up a message on their internet chat page but it proved too difficult. I realised that there was no point, that they could change what I said and make it look like anything they like. I’ll write a letter but they could do the same with that. I don’t want anything I write to be changed or censored. That’s a problem for them. I’m afraid they won’t publish it. They’ll say that they can’t because it’s a tourist paper.”
Ali has finished putting the two cooked breakfasts onto the plates and carries them outside. He comes back inside and carries on. “You know what Wendy said to me? She said ‘No Shum, no paper’. I said to her that this wasn’t my problem. I told her that they should start advertising for a new editor…this one doesn’t fit. They should find one who’s not going to push their personal political agenda through a community paper.”
This is not the first time this week that a business owner on Symi has complained to me about the editor of The Symi Visitor. One very animated Greek bar owner was furious that with mayoral elections coming up, Mr. Shum has published a double page article heavily critical of the mayor’s plans for development of the island. To the bar owner, this is seen as gross interference. “I took the paper to the Mayor and said that he should do something about it, that this guy Shum wants him out. Only non-Greeks here support what this man says.”
Ali answers the phone when it rings and has a short conversation. When he puts the phone down he turns straight back to me and says “I called them again yesterday to complain about how difficult it was to use their website and Adriana gets all upset and said to me that we all have to live here together on Symi and that I should drop it, let it go…leave it, why are you making trouble?”
“We have our own Bush on Symi and I won’t let it drop. He should be sacked. He won’t apologise.”
I ask Ali what he wants to happen, and his energy seems renewed.
“Here on the island the council is collecting for the people of Lebanon and Palestine and this man writes this. He is stabbing them in the back. He has offended the people of Symi and of all Greece. How can he stay? He misled the people here, but they won’t fall for this. When The Symi Visitor started up it was a good paper, it had a good editor who knew journalism. This guy Shum he comes out of nowhere with his iffy past and agendas.”
Ali roots around among some papers by the till in the bar and pulls out a printout of the recent SymiGreece.com editorial. “I love this part” he says and is soon reading to me “We recommend that Mr Shum stay out of politics, both in the World at large and also on Symi. Especially regarding the former, his views would maybe have found more sympathetic ears in the old South Africa which he and his wife chose to abandon soon after Apartheid fell, but on Symi they are neither desirable nor welcome.”
“Fifteen years I’ve been here and you hear things. Nobody here trusts him. You can tell how he is. You just have to look at what he writes. Every issue has something about the War. It’s so boring, and everyone I know finds it so boring. It’s supposed to be a paper for tourists. How is a German tourist supposed to think, especially if they come here a lot, when every time they have to read about the war and are made to feel guilty and bad? They come for a holiday, they don’t want to have this pushed at them where they go on holiday. I don’t want it for the customers in my bar. Why is this man so obsessed about war. Symi is not a place of war, it’s a beautiful place for people to come and enjoy. Nobody but his type of person wants to read this. He doesn’t understand this at all, not even a little bit.”
It’s getting very busy in the bar again, and I am beginning to feel that I’m taking up too much of his time. I ask one more question.
“What are you going to do? Apart from this interview, what else?”
“I will use whatever means I have to” he says. “Hardly any of the people on Symi know what he has written. They don’t read his or his wife’s boring articles telling them how they should live. They’re not aware of how he’s making Symi look. I’m sure he knows the Greeks wouldn’t like it. You write this interview up in Greek and I’ll take it around. The people here aren’t stupid as he thinks. I want the council and political parties here on Symi to know what’s being said. They’ll be very concerned about what’s happened. I want newspapers, internet, even television to know what he’s saying.“
“What about Τhe Symi Visitor paper,” I ask him, “will you continue to stock it?”
“No.”, he replies, “The young lady she came around the other day delivering new copies and we told her we didn’t want them. I’m not going to have it here any more.”
“You want a boycott of the paper?” I ask, and he nods. “Yes, definitely. I have spoken with a lot of people, and they don’t like it. This situation needs to change.”
I thank Ali and say that I will write up the interview quickly and will also ask The Symi Visitor for a comment. He thanks me with a firm shake of the hand.
As I leave, a group of people have arrived and Ali, a dutiful host even when giving an interview, heads into the bar to prepare their drinks...
Postscript:
Two days after this interview, Ali has received some bad news about his family’s home in the village of Aitaroun in Southern Lebanon, including the picture below. The house where Ali was born and lived for the first twenty-two years of his life was hit by the Israelis. Fortunately, there was nobody in the house at the time.
The Symi Visitor was asked three days ago for their comments about the events reported in this interview. We have had no reply.
It is one of the hottest days of the year and in the few minutes I have been in the bar that Ali runs with his wife, Pat, he has been non-stop making iced coffee and squeezing oranges for his customers. He looks up straight into my eyes and adds “He knew 100% what he was doing. It was intentional.”
Nobody who knows Ali is in any doubt that the Lebanese national has been bitterly hurt and offended by the article that appeared two weeks previously in the August edition of The Symi Visitor, the free paper that is available all over Symi and which many people consider to be the community’s voice to the thousands of tourists that visit the island every year.
Two of the men sitting outside the bar are reading a copy of the offending paper and I catch a few of the words that Ali says to them when he delivers their drinks. When he comes back in, he smiles and says “I’m doing a bit of my own propaganda now.”
I ask him what it is that he finds so offensive about the article. He once again fixes that gaze on me, very intense and the smile is gone. “Because it’s all a lie and he knows it. It’s not the first time he has written bad stuff like this. I knew days before the paper came out that he was going to write something nasty. I knew one hundred percent, and he didn’t disappoint me. It didn’t even take me one minute to find it.”
The article “Live from Larnaca – Dodecanese Pride at Beirut Evacuation, Midday 24 July 2006” was written by The Symi Visitor’s editor, Nicholas Shum and is mostly taken up with facts about how the boat (Dodecanese Pride), owned by the Spanos brothers, was chartered by the Swedish Government to evacuate their nationals from the Lebanon in the face of the bombardment of the country by Israeli forces. It is not until the penultimate paragraph that Mr Shum writes the words that have upset many who have read it.
“The Israelis have said that they will bear no responsibility for what happens to any vessel which overstays its timeslot in the harbour. It seems, though, that the perceived danger is not from the Israelis but from Muslim radicals who may wish to disrupt the evacuations. So many groups of western subjects gathered together make a tempting target.”
“He is after supporting a Bush-ist propaganda” says Ali, “Islamic radicals do not exist in Lebanon. They may be in Iraq, Afghanistan, but not in Lebanon. But this isn’t the point. Life on Symi is one of respect. There shouldn’t be this type of politics in the paper. It's meant to represent the island and this is what the tourists think. It’s supposed to promote the island. Everyone on Symi hates this attitude.”
I ask Ali what his immediate reaction to reading the article was. He is preparing more fresh-squeezed orange juice but for a moment this seems forgotten. “Within two minutes I called their office”, he says “and Halkitis answered.” (Nikos Halkitis is the owner of The Symi Visitor). “He said he had no idea what was in the paper, and that I should talk to Shum.” I was about to ask him how come the owner of the paper doesn’t know what's in it but Ali must have guessed as he shrugs and adds “Halkitis only cares about the ads in the paper, everybody knows this.”
Ali continues, “I tried to call Shum, but his phone was off. I tried many times to call him that day and always his phone is turned off. The next morning I went to the office to find him. Adriana and Wendy were there and they lie to me and say that the words were not Nicholas’s but those of Spanos.”
Adriana, the wife of Nicholas Shum, and Wendy Wilcox, partner of Nikos Halkitis, run the Symi Visitor’s accommodation business from the imposing building on the southern side of the harbour in Symi. To readers of The Symi Visitor paper, Adriana is as well known a figure as Nicholas. Each month, about half of the paper that is not advertisements is written directly by one or other of the Shums.
A British woman comes into the bar and asks for two orange juices, and two full English breakfasts. It is nearly one o’clock in the afternoon with temperatures in the sun above forty degrees Celsius. Ali sets about the task immediately but carries on “I said to Wendy, be careful what you say, that’s not the truth. I was so upset I left the office. Later that day Wendy came to the bar and she says to me ‘he didn’t mean Lebanese, you know’ and I said to her that it’s not about that, that Shum shouldn’t be writing this sort of stuff in the paper for this island. It’s just his view, not the truth. I know that.”
“I tried for six days, maybe a week to get Shum on his phone and always it is turned off. After about four days I called Adriana in the office to ask her why his phone was always turned off and what hole he was hiding in. She said to me ‘For Christ’s Sake, Ali, let it go.’ And I said I won’t let it go. Suddenly a couple of days later Wendy calls me to say that Shum wants to come to my bar and talk to me.”
“He comes to the bar and he’s shaking and very nervous, and he sits in the corner. He has this article that he once wrote years ago about how nice Lebanon is and I said to him that I don’t care what he wrote then, that it’s irrelevant, that I’m not interested in that. I told him that I was only interested in what he had written in The Symi Visitor.”
“He sits there and denies responsibility for it, and that he was only saying what Spanos said and that the words weren’t his.”
As Ali is talking he is preparing the cooked meals and drinks for other customers. He is also keeping an eye on how my own drink is going.
“He says in the article that he was on the phone to Spanos’s man who was saying that Beirut is in a mess. He then starts another paragraph and it’s no longer quotes, its comments like his personal view. I told him he was a liar, that he should step down for saying these lies, and if he won’t do that he should be sacked. He won’t accept responsibility for it. He said ‘Ali, I am not resigning’ and then he left. A couple of minutes later and he’s back telling me that if I want to complain I should do it in a different way, giving me a lecture, telling me that I should write to the paper.”
It is now past one o’clock and the bar is getting busier. Ali is popping in and out of the bar as he talks, and the two cooked breakfasts are almost ready. When he is sure that all his customers are happy, he comes back in. “Have you ever tried to go on their chat page and say anything?” he asks me.
I reply that I am very well acquainted with the Symi Visitor chat page, though less so in its recent incarnation. The new chat page which has existed for a couple of months has abandoned the free-to-all format that it had for several years. At the moment anyone wishing to post a message has to register first with an e-mail address and then wait for a reply from the chat page confirming their registration, which is usually within a few minutes. When the newly registered user posts a message however, up pops a reply saying that the message will be read by a moderator (which can take many hours) and will only be posted if it is acceptable. Ali says “I tried to put up a message on their internet chat page but it proved too difficult. I realised that there was no point, that they could change what I said and make it look like anything they like. I’ll write a letter but they could do the same with that. I don’t want anything I write to be changed or censored. That’s a problem for them. I’m afraid they won’t publish it. They’ll say that they can’t because it’s a tourist paper.”
Ali has finished putting the two cooked breakfasts onto the plates and carries them outside. He comes back inside and carries on. “You know what Wendy said to me? She said ‘No Shum, no paper’. I said to her that this wasn’t my problem. I told her that they should start advertising for a new editor…this one doesn’t fit. They should find one who’s not going to push their personal political agenda through a community paper.”
This is not the first time this week that a business owner on Symi has complained to me about the editor of The Symi Visitor. One very animated Greek bar owner was furious that with mayoral elections coming up, Mr. Shum has published a double page article heavily critical of the mayor’s plans for development of the island. To the bar owner, this is seen as gross interference. “I took the paper to the Mayor and said that he should do something about it, that this guy Shum wants him out. Only non-Greeks here support what this man says.”
Ali answers the phone when it rings and has a short conversation. When he puts the phone down he turns straight back to me and says “I called them again yesterday to complain about how difficult it was to use their website and Adriana gets all upset and said to me that we all have to live here together on Symi and that I should drop it, let it go…leave it, why are you making trouble?”
“We have our own Bush on Symi and I won’t let it drop. He should be sacked. He won’t apologise.”
I ask Ali what he wants to happen, and his energy seems renewed.
“Here on the island the council is collecting for the people of Lebanon and Palestine and this man writes this. He is stabbing them in the back. He has offended the people of Symi and of all Greece. How can he stay? He misled the people here, but they won’t fall for this. When The Symi Visitor started up it was a good paper, it had a good editor who knew journalism. This guy Shum he comes out of nowhere with his iffy past and agendas.”
Ali roots around among some papers by the till in the bar and pulls out a printout of the recent SymiGreece.com editorial. “I love this part” he says and is soon reading to me “We recommend that Mr Shum stay out of politics, both in the World at large and also on Symi. Especially regarding the former, his views would maybe have found more sympathetic ears in the old South Africa which he and his wife chose to abandon soon after Apartheid fell, but on Symi they are neither desirable nor welcome.”
“Fifteen years I’ve been here and you hear things. Nobody here trusts him. You can tell how he is. You just have to look at what he writes. Every issue has something about the War. It’s so boring, and everyone I know finds it so boring. It’s supposed to be a paper for tourists. How is a German tourist supposed to think, especially if they come here a lot, when every time they have to read about the war and are made to feel guilty and bad? They come for a holiday, they don’t want to have this pushed at them where they go on holiday. I don’t want it for the customers in my bar. Why is this man so obsessed about war. Symi is not a place of war, it’s a beautiful place for people to come and enjoy. Nobody but his type of person wants to read this. He doesn’t understand this at all, not even a little bit.”
It’s getting very busy in the bar again, and I am beginning to feel that I’m taking up too much of his time. I ask one more question.
“What are you going to do? Apart from this interview, what else?”
“I will use whatever means I have to” he says. “Hardly any of the people on Symi know what he has written. They don’t read his or his wife’s boring articles telling them how they should live. They’re not aware of how he’s making Symi look. I’m sure he knows the Greeks wouldn’t like it. You write this interview up in Greek and I’ll take it around. The people here aren’t stupid as he thinks. I want the council and political parties here on Symi to know what’s being said. They’ll be very concerned about what’s happened. I want newspapers, internet, even television to know what he’s saying.“
“What about Τhe Symi Visitor paper,” I ask him, “will you continue to stock it?”
“No.”, he replies, “The young lady she came around the other day delivering new copies and we told her we didn’t want them. I’m not going to have it here any more.”
“You want a boycott of the paper?” I ask, and he nods. “Yes, definitely. I have spoken with a lot of people, and they don’t like it. This situation needs to change.”
I thank Ali and say that I will write up the interview quickly and will also ask The Symi Visitor for a comment. He thanks me with a firm shake of the hand.
As I leave, a group of people have arrived and Ali, a dutiful host even when giving an interview, heads into the bar to prepare their drinks...
Postscript:
Two days after this interview, Ali has received some bad news about his family’s home in the village of Aitaroun in Southern Lebanon, including the picture below. The house where Ali was born and lived for the first twenty-two years of his life was hit by the Israelis. Fortunately, there was nobody in the house at the time.
The Symi Visitor was asked three days ago for their comments about the events reported in this interview. We have had no reply.