A Letter From A Palestinian Software Engineer To President Barack Obama

Dear Mr. President Barack Hussein Obama,

My name is Amr, a student and a software engineer. I build web applications to make people’s life easier. A week ago, I was wondering why not to start learning how to develop for mobiles, I made some local researches. I’m not happy.

The world needs to be easily connected, so mobiles are utilized for such purpose. We’ve noticed the difference between the number of tweets in 2009's presidential inauguration and 2013's. I guess you were tweeting too Mr. President.

Mr. president, in Palestine, most of Twitter users are tweeting from their homes, cafes and where there is an internet access. No one is tweeting from the street or from public events.

Mr. president, in Palestine, most of the Instagram photos are being uploaded after they had been shot. Most –if not all– of them are being uploaded where Internet access is available (again). I’ve never seen a photo posted saying “I'm at downtown, a great weather today!”.

While you are in Palestine, unfortunately you can never tweet that you are in Ramallah–with Mahmoud Abbas using a sim from one of the two operating communication companies in palestine , Wataniya and Jawwal.

Obama, I’m not telling you not to bring your smart phone, dont worry, we have a “good” Internet, you can handle tweeting somehow.

Well, this is only the tip of the iceberg, bring the change that you always talked about [period]

Mr. president, have a good time.

Cheers,
– Amr Tamimi

This is Obama’s first visit to Palestine. If you don’t know what Palestine is, here’s a hint: Israel. More hints? Middle East, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Westbank, Bethlehem (Jesus Birthplace).

In Palestine, we dont own our land nor our air. We don’t have airports. There are more than 5 million refugees in the diaspora since 1948.

It’s a long story, but you should know that in Palestine we teach life.