Muammar Gaddafi is like a sack of coal; whichever way you hold it, you end up with dirt on your hands. Yesterday, I talked about the files that had piled up in my office following the Arab revolutions of rage. Today, I shall continue with the file on Gaddafi, and I hope the reader will sacrifice with me and read it, because it reflects my personal selections from about two thousand pages that I had kept, and I found that cannot go back to more than five years in the past, for fear of getting lost in the Colonel's labyrinth. Thus, I choose for the reader, at random, examples of the Libyan leader's policies and his genius thinking: - On 5/1/2006, the Colonel said in a speech that he could reduce the Libyan defense budget by booby-trapping every citizen, car, house, and street, as the enemy would not be able to survive that. - In an interview with local television carried on 15/4/2007, he said that North Africa in its entirety follows the Fatimid Shiite sect. He said that Al-Azhar is Fatimid, and cited the Fatima al-Zahraa Mosque, and also that Cairo is one hundred percent Fatimid, and that the biggest lie in history is that Iran is Shiite and that the Arabs are Sunni. - On 27/3/2007, he said in an interview with Al-Jazeera, that the Arab nation's time is up, and that it is on its way to disintegration. He said that he doesn't want to have anything to do with the Arabs, because Libya is an African nation. - The WikiLeaks cables exposed world leaders in front of their people, but when it comes to Gaddafi, they made people laugh as they read that he resisted submitting a photo on his passport before he went to the United Nations in New York, because his pictures are everywhere in Tripoli. We also learned that his favorite guard is the Ukrainian nurse Galyna Kolotnytska, who appeared in her photographs more like a sex symbol than a nurse. -Also, the Colonel advised Barack Obama after he entered the White House to start a dialogue with Osama bin Laden to convince him to change his positions, and said that the Taliban are not as they have been portrayed. - In February 2009, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was selected as the Chairman of the African Union. He immediately declared that he wants to establish a United States of Africa. African kings and tribal leaders then declared him as Africa's King of Kings, while others mocked him, and said that his election is the last nail in the coffin of African unity, or that it is proof of the African Union's decline or the stupidity of its fifty-three members. - He sparred with Christians around the world when he announced that the New Testament is false, and that the Torah is different from what God had revealed to Moses. He also said that the Muslim prophet was mentioned in the Bible (i.e. both the Jews' Old Testament and the Christians' New Testament), and started a dispute with European churches when he called for the Islamization of the continent. -Near the end of 2008, Gaddafi announced that he intends to scrap ministries in Libya and give the Libyan people the country's oil revenues directly, starting with the following year. Of course, he gave them nothing, and perhaps one of the reasons of the Libyan people's current uprising is that they are tired of waiting. - The Western rapprochement with Gaddafi, following his forfeiture of a nuclear program that only existed in his mind, was shameful. After 2004, Western countries rushed to appease the Colonel. Tony Blair visited him, then Gordon Brown invited him to visit Britain to participate in the G8 meeting representing Africa. Brown and Blair seem to have forgotten the poor policewoman Yvonne Fletcher and the Lockerbie bombing and its victims, to the extent that Abdul Baset al-Megrahi, who was convicted in the terrorist attack, was released in 2009, because he was ‘about to die'. However, he miraculously recovered after his return to Libya and he is still alive. But Silvio Berlusconi remains Gaddafi's best European friend. Gaddafi visited him accompanied by his harem of guards and nurses, and perhaps they spent a night in Rome comparing their concubines. Even Condoleezza Rice received Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, while Congress was investigating and protesting Megrahi's release by the UK, because oil is more important than the victims of the Colonel's terrorism. - In 2010, Gaddafi called for jihad against Switzerland under the pretext that it is demolishing mosques. However, the truth is that the dispute dates back to 2008, when his son Hannibal and his wife were arrested at a hotel in Geneva for assaulting two domestic servants. Although the charges were dropped, Gaddafi quickly withdrew his funds (those registered in his name) from Swiss banks, and he arrested two Swiss businessmen who were visiting Libya. I have run out of space, so perhaps I will soon return to Gaddafi's sons. They deserve their own article, as each one of them epitomizes the saying ‘like father like son'. But now, I will conclude with the intellectual or the ‘polymath' the Colonel. We all heard his suggestion to establish ‘Isratine', a state for both Israelis and Palestinians. I was surprised when the New York Times ran an article by Gaddafi on 22/1/2009 entitled “The one-state solution”, in which he repeats a folly that cannot possibly be accepted by the two directly involved parties. [email protected]
