Hulleye Comes By!

two conversations between an egyptian and a jordanian taxi cab driver in amman, jordan.

Here are some of my cab conversations from the past couple of days.

Ride 1:
Cab driver listening to the local Qur’an station (”Give us 22 minutes, or your whole day for that matter, and we’ll give you background Qur’an recitations. It’s muzak for the righteous.”)

Me: “Assalamu Alaykum”
Driver: “Wa alaykum assalam… you’re Muslim. You know it’s best to just listen to Qur’an all the time, because music and TV watching is munkar (sinful)–you have to avoid it or you’ll go to hell.”
Me: “You mean you’ve never listened to Umm Kulthum?”
Driver: “I used to, but that was before I realized it was munkar.”
Me: “But shouldn’t we worry about worse things first?”
Driver: “Music and TV only lead to worse things, so it’s best to avoid them.”
Me: “I don’t know… I enjoy my music.”
Driver: “By the way, if you’re staying here a couple of more nights, there are some really nice erotic massage places that opened up in Amman that I can take you to.”

***

Ride 2:

Me: “Assalamu alaykum.”
Driver: “Wa alaykum assalam. You are Muslim. I am from Hebron.”
Me: “Yes, that’s great… it is a place of great struggle.”
Driver: “But more important than that, we are proud that we have no churches in Hebron, only mosques.”
Me: “Oh… is that Four Seasons Hotel over there new? I don;t remember seeing it last time I was here.”
Driver: “Yes, it’s only a couple of years old. Bin Laden was building it, but then he had to stop and Walid Bin Talal finished the job… God will bless Bin Laden and take him to Paradise.”
Me: “Paradise? Did God tell you he’s taking Bin Laden to Paradise?”
Driver: “Why not… he is doing many great things.”
Me: “Really, if he’s going to Paradise, then may be the rest of us are going to hell.”
Driver: “By the way, did you hear that Bill Gates has converted to Islam?”
Me: “No that’s news to me. Where did you hear that?”
Driver: “From the Imam at the Friday prayer last week in his sermon.”
Me: “And you think he’s right?”
Driver: “Of course… he is always right and very reponsible. You see, all the imams are being closely watched by the government here, so they have to always be sure that everything they say is compeltely accurate.”
Me: “Well in that case, that’s good news, may be we’ll all get free computers over here.”
Driver: “Yes, may be.”

thanks MWU!

most people have no clue who galloway is. well he’s in the news now, and hopefully pretty soon everyone will. well he just spent a long, long time giving the US senate a royal finger on msnbc. here is the video. a brief excerpt from his speech.

“Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

“Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

“Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let’s be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had ‘many meetings’ with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

“I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as “many meetings” with Saddam Hussein.

“As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.

…

“You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

“There were 270 names on that list originally. That’s somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

“You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I’ve never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he’s your prisoner, I believe he’s in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

“I’m not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

. . .

“Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you’re such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

“In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there’s nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

“The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It’s a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

“Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life’s blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

“Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

more at http://www.crooksandliars.com