WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has urged Syria’s president to use his power to free Austin Tice, a US journalist abducted nine years ago, on his 40th birthday Wednesday.
“I am personally committed to bringing home all Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad. We believe that it is within Bashar Assad’s power to free Austin,” Blinken said in a statement.
“Austin Tice must be allowed to return home to his loved ones who miss him dearly and to the country that awaits him eagerly.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price said that the United States was seeking the assistance of Syrian officials on finding Tice and other missing Americans.
Tice was a freelance photojournalist working for Agence France-Presse, McClatchy News, The Washington Post, CBS and other news organizations when he disappeared after being detained at a checkpoint near Damascus on August 14, 2012.
Tice appeared blindfolded in the custody of an unidentified group of armed men in a video a month later but there has been little news since.
Last year the previous administration of Donald Trump sent a White House official on a rare mission to Damascus to seek the freedom of Tice and Majd Kamalmaz, a Syrian-American doctor who disappeared at a checkpoint in February 2017. The mission yielded no visible results.
The appeals to Syrian officials come despite the absence of diplomatic relations with Damascus and continued US efforts to isolate Assad, whose forces have wrested back control of most of the country following a brutal decade-long civil war.
More than 380,000 people have died and millions displaced in the war that helped give rise to the Islamic State extremist group and triggered a migration crisis that rocked European politics.
US urges Syria to free missing journalist Austin Tice
https://arab.news/ve4zu
US urges Syria to free missing journalist Austin Tice
- US urges Syria to free journalist Austin Tice who was abducted nine years ago at a checkpoint in Damascus
- Tice was a freelance photojournalist working for Agence France-Presse, McClatchy News, The Washington Post, CBS and others
To infinity and beyond: Grendizer’s 50 years of inspiring Arabs
- 50 years after its creation, the Grendizer anime series continues to capture Arab imagination
- Arab News Japan speaks to creator Go Nagai, Middle Eastern fans and retells the story behind the UFO Robot tasked with protecting our planet
LONDON: Few cultural imports have crossed borders as unexpectedly, or as powerfully, as Grendizer, the Japanese giant robot that half a century ago became a childhood hero across the Arab world, nowhere more so than in Saudi Arabia.
Created in Japan in the mid-1970s by manga artist Go Nagai, Grendizer was part of the “mecha” tradition of giant robots. The genre was shaped by Japan’s experience during the Second World War, and explored themes of invasion, resistance and loss through the medium of science fiction.
But while the series enjoyed moderate success in Japan, its true legacy was established thousands of kilometers away in the Middle East.
The anime “UFO Robot Grendizer” arrived on television in the region in 1979, dubbed into Arabic and initially broadcast in Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war. The story it told of the heroic Duke Fleed, a displaced prince whose planet had been destroyed by alien invaders, struck a chord with children growing up amid regional conflict and occupation by Israel.
Its themes of defending one’s homeland, standing up to aggression and protecting the innocent were painfully relevant in the region, transforming the series from mere entertainment into a kind of emotional refuge.
Much of the show’s impact came from its successful Arabization. The powerful Arabic dubbing and emotionally charged voice-acting, especially by Lebanese actor Jihad El-Atrash as Duke Fleed, lent the show a moral gravity unmatched by other cartoons of the era.
The theme song for the series, performed by Sami Clark, became an anthem that the Lebanese singer continued to perform at concerts and festivals right up until his death in 2022.
By the early 1980s, “Grendizer” had spread across the Middle East, inspiring fandoms in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and beyond. For many, it was not only their first exposure to anime, it also delivered lessons on values such as justice and honor.
Grendizer was so influential in the region that it became the subject of scholarly research, which in addition to recognizing the ways in which the plight of the show’s characters resonated with the audience in the Middle East, also linked the show’s popularity to generational memories of displacement, particularly the Palestinian Nakba.
Half a century later, “Grendizer” remains culturally alive and relevant in the region. In Saudi Arabia, which embraced the original version of the show wholeheartedly, Manga Productions is now introducing a new generation of fans to a modernized version of the character, through a video game, The Feast of The Wolves, which is available in Arabic and eight other languages on platforms including PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch, and a new Arabic-language anime series, “Grendizer U,” which was broadcast last year.
Fifty years after the debut of the show, “Grendizer” is back — although to a generation of fans of the original series, their shelves still full of merchandise and memorabilia, it never really went away.
