As I took a number of Saudi newspaper editions with me from Jeddah to London to read in the weekend, an article in Al-Watan caught my attention. It was entitled “Ahmed Shukairy and Cunning Resourcefulness”, written by colleague Abdul Majid al-Zahrani. I thought the writer had uncovered something new about the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization that is worth publishing, or that the article was published on the anniversary of Shukairy's birth, death or perhaps even on the occasion of his centennial. However, I soon found out that the Ahmed Shukairy intended by the article is different from the one I know, and it turned out that Abdul Majid was talking about a man who falsely claims to be knowledgeable in Islamic jurisprudence and law, a man I have not heard of nor seen on television. The original Ahmed Shukairy was thus exonerated. I continue with other stories: - I am a regular reader of the weekly newspaper Al-Sannara, founded by the late Lotfi Mash'our, since it is the best source for news on the Palestinians of 1948, in what became later Israel. I read in Al-Sannara that the Haifa District Court has rejected a request by the family of a Palestinian Druze youth killed at the entrance of a barracks, to hear the testimony of a child believed to be the reincarnation of the young victim Marwan al-Qasim, and who allegedly knows all the details of the incident. As is known, the Druze believe in reincarnation, but the Israeli court doesn't, it seems. There were two other news items in the same paper: One about the demolition of the home of Fayez Khalaylah in Majd al-Kuroum and the destruction of its contents, and another about a young Palestinian man who received 9,225,000 shekels (around two million dollars) in compensation after a car crash left him disabled and unable to work. I found the first news to be a traditional ‘Israeli' story, while I found the other to be an exception to the rule of the otherwise habitual Israeli injustice. Other news in Al-Sannara include the story of the Lebanese man Wissam Azakir, who lives with the Inuit where the sun never sets, fasting 21 hours a day, and also excerpts from an article written by Soraya al-Shahri in Al-Hayat calling for a deeper study of Israel. - I believe that my Arab readers have probably missed an American news story lost amid the tsunami of the resurging global financial crisis. According to this news item, the U.S. House of Representatives has ended a tradition that was nearly two hundred years old, when it terminated a program that employed senior high school students as pages in the House of Representatives. I was living in Washington in the eighties when I first heard about the student page program. A scandal erupted involving two protagonists (or villains), the Republican Representative Dan Crane and the Democratic Representative Gerry Studds, who both had sexual relationships with the student pages, the first with a girl and the second with a boy. I also read, despite the U.S. war on Iraq, a news story in 2006 about another scandal, this time involving Republican Representative Mark Foley, who sent sexual e-mails to some children who worked as pages. After the Republican leadership of the House attempted to cover up the scandal before it became public, the Republicans lost their majority in the House in the elections that year. I ask the readers here, can they notice anything odd about the above? The Republicans did not lose the elections because they invaded Iraq on deliberately falsified premises, killing one million Iraqis, but because a perverted Republican had molested a child. - When sex is the issue, no one can outdo the French. Everyone has heard the story about the chief of the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who assaulted a hotel maid in New York in the nude, and lost his post at the IMF and also his chances to challenge Nicolas Sarkozy as a result. In truth, the maid has recently started talking. Her story in Newsweek is scary. The man had acted as though he belonged to a jungle in Africa with a woman who had fled from the law of the jungle years earlier, in the hope of finding a better life in America. - Australia is famous as being a country of macho men. Nevertheless, the country has decided to take on France, it seems. The Minister of Finance Penny Wong is pregnant. Of course, there would be nothing odd about this were it not for the fact that she is gay, and lives with her girlfriend (or wife or husband) Sophie Allouache. Australia's Prime Minister Julia Gillard is happy for the couple, but she is against gay marriage. Here, I thank God we are backwards. - Spain has forgotten its Arab background. The Duchess of Alba has declared that she will forfeit her fortune to marry a government employee. It is not strange for an aristocrat to marry an ordinary citizen. However, what's strange here is that the duchess is 85 years old, i.e. a quarter of a century older than the groom, and that she will forgo of her 3.5 billion euro fortune. In fact, she is the most highly titled aristocrat in the world, with 53 titles. Her family comes from such high nobility that they are not obligated to kneel before the pope. She is also divorced, and so are her six sons. I think that when I am eighty-five, I would have forgotten my name, let alone sex. [email protected]
