Annapolis: Overheard on line
November 28th, 2007 . by MartySo ahead of me on line at Chick and Ruth’s is the foreign minister of Mauritania. Real impressed with himself. He’s with a young overweight woman, college age, naive, horny, American Jewish would be my guess, waiting for a table. She asks him something that I couldn’t make out, something along the lines of why Mauritinia was invited to an Israel-”Palestine” summit. He answers and I quote “In the Middle East we all love your Thanskgiving, the changing colors, the crisp fresh air, the turkey, pumpkin in all the foods. It’s nice for us.”
There you have it. Even dictators and tyrants with multiple wives and real torture chambers (not the joke waterboarding we do) can’t help but see the superiority of Western holidays and seasons. That’s why in the end, we always win, like the British before us. Christianity versus Islam, I’ll take trees and gifts over jihad and sexual repression any day.
A roundup of Annapolis links:
Blog responses from the Middle East (no one has much faith in it, suffice it to say)
h/t to Debbie Schlussel for alerting us to these interesting letters to the WSJ
Stark statement from Boker Tov, Boulder
The German view from Der Spiegel
my friends at the Council on Foreign Relations have their take on Annapolis
Traffic on the Beltway being what it is, I couldn’t make it back to the District for the Brookings event, but here’s a great excerpt: from Foreign Policy
Saeb Erekat, the veteran and colorful Palestinian negotiator, told a good joke at today’s Brookings event on Annapolis. It was his way of explaining why we need new negotiations after nearly two decades of failed diplomacy. I’m going to paraphrase it here:
An Israeli and a Palestinian are watching a Western. In the movie, a cowboy is riding bareback on a particularly wild horse. The Israeli, being aggressive, says to the Palestinian, “I’ll bet you 10 shekels he falls.” The Palestinian, being impulsive, replies immediately, “I’ll bet you he doesn’t.”
The cowboy falls, and the Palestinian forks over 10 shekels. The Israeli, feeling that famous Israeli guilt, refuses them. Then he admits, “I’ve seen this movie before.”
The Palestinian replies, “So have I. But I thought he would learn from his mistake.”
