As the Dubai  assassination  is accumulating more and more ‘evidences’ the mystery is growing in the same proportion.

…”UK probes fake passports in Hamas killing..
British PM Brown pledges ‘full investigation’ into how fake British passports were linked to killers of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.’ in Dubai, see here.

But in some way the underlying real story is that of the digital cameras  monitoring the people entering the hotel’s main entrance. With their benevolent help the Dubai police says she was able to reconstruct a plausible plot pointing to the group who presumably perpetuated the assassination of al-Mabhoud.

“The Group”, click to enlarge.

Should it come as a surprise? No, today in the era of the pixel, when every urban corner is infested  by digital devices screening,  filtering and distorting the visual space beyond the monitor display, you may use the title of the celebrated James Joyce’s novel,  “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”   paraphrased into  ‘You the citizen as a Fake digital Portrait of Yourself”‘.

You may  ask: why equating  ‘citizen’ to ‘fake portrait of himself’? Are Rembrandt’s auto portrait not some sort of fake of himself? Well no, a priory  he was  himself and himself is what he painted to finally be exhibited in the.. Tate gallery. The digital camera is not you and a priory know nothing about your existence while being busy at filming you.

But in terms of being exhibited, you are exhibited, but  not in a gallery. You are exhibited for your lifetime and afterward in the digital archives basements of your own country or elsewhere, with the help of your Gmail, facebook, Twitter, MySpace, You Tube … and I forget, your blog and your cellular.. and so on. You model and promote yourself into a pixelike  fake auto portrait available to anyone on the information highway.

But again, why ‘Fake”? Because the pixel  created in a monitor is only pure photon energy radiated into our eyes and brain without palpable substance. It’s you and not you. This sort of faking  the assassination in Dubai is something impersonal automatically performed on the fly by the cameras, created  by cutting out a very partial digital picture from the monitored space and inferring from this digital snapshot on the whole peripheral space of your own live. Is that not a fake re-creation of yourself ..far away from a printed photo,  drawing or painting and sculpture who embodied  something from the people who created them via yours and  their own personality, reverberating an intimate proximity with you.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, click to enlarge,

Now, the whole Mahmoud al-Mabhouh affair is almost an Hollywood espionage thriller, where the acting role  of the digital cameras monitoring the hotel entrance, the cameras monitoring the airport the customs, the town and  putting it shorty our entire living space are well worth an Oscar in the category of the best acting actor .

When I read about identity theft of innocent citizens from the UK, Ireland France and Germany I smile. Dubai  is monitoring her entire human traffic and is perpetuating a massive identity theft, copying passports visas and anything that can be stored digitally for any purpose legal or illegal. The UK, Ireland, France and Germany do the same..but ultimately it is a gigantic fake portrait inviting or forcing you to agree with.

This is far away from the meticulous investigations of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson where the reality was dust, blood, stains and some lost handkerchief in a modest local neighborhood in contrast to the third millennium digital globalization.

So putting aside for a moment the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, lets admit that we live in  ‘A brave new world’….rewritten in terms of a global digital scanning machinery putting in danger any one of us now or in the future . If the Mossad did the assassination, he knows how to defend himself. We, the ordinary people.. ‘don’t know which way to go…’ .

As a footnote, way not, for us living in the digital era, here is the pixelization of Haifa Whebe and Lady Gaga,

done with the Photoshop threshold tool, reducing them to some binary form… 010001001111..being kept in some dusted mystery house basement.      Click to enlarge.