This ludicrous Arab 'news' page was stuck to the window above my kitchen sink for a few years and always made a mundane task like doing the dishes a good laugh. Hehe, I'd chuckle as I scrubbed away at a stubborn piece of pasta glued to that saucepan thinking of all the dumb as hell, lazy as hell brainwashed students I've ever taught passing through my Saudi classroom and then I whiled away the time by playing a game naming the things that Saudis are actually good at, let alone excellent at, and each and every time I came up with absolutely nothing. Jack Schitt,. in fact. There's even a TV show entirely dedicated to informing Saudis that they are the perfect human beings and schools keep the egomania levels up by teaching the same message: you are the bees knees, Mohammed, no question ... not the experience I had out there. At all. "We're trying NOT to crash, Abdul Aziz!" "Crash more fun, teacher." "Hahahaha .... crash good, teacher! Dead!" "But I was Little Red Riding Hood last week, teacher. I want to be the Big Bad Wolf." "Can we play in the tree-house?" "And congratulations to Mohammed for being the very first student at our Academy of Excellence to work out how to turn on a light!" "I happy," said Mohammed. "My beard happy." "Yes, thanks for that ... and I understand you even manged it in a college record time of five days, 19 hours and 47 minutes. Well done! We'll put another grand on the next salary, OK?" All of which reminds me of a joke told to me by a routinely inebriated Englishman next to a swimming pool on a compound in Riyadh, the world's worst city by a clear margin, which went like this ... ... So Abdul Aziz comes home from the International School with his end of term report and proudly shows it to his father. "Look father I have an A in English language and in Maths and History, blah blah blah." "That's because you're a Saudi, Abdul Aziz." "Yes, I thought so too, but I have one question, father." "Ask me anything Abdul Aziz, I will know the answer because I went to the Academy of Excellence." "Yes father, you are truly excellent but what I don't understand is when we have a shower after sports I can't help but notice that my dick is twice the size of the other boys' dicks. That's because I'm a Saudi, isn't it father?" "No, Abdul Aziz, it's because the other boys are seven years old and you are 46." Nb. Random Sandy Saudi reminiscences will come and go, if you get my drift. What happens when you get out of the sand ... ... life gets green ... ... and greener... ... and woody ... ... in the woods ... ... to be continued. ... with yet more trees. They're bloody everywhere ... ... even growing in cigar shapes ... ... even the houses turn green ... Of all the jackass bullshit that was spouted at me by people pretending to be religious, one of the most repeated lines expressed by Saudis was that they liked Hitler. That initial statement of respect for the fascist devil was also intended to wind me up. These were grown men with families and camels and sneering moustaches and I've never met a race of people who so enjoy the bad and the negative aspects of life as much as the Saudis do. On hearing that statement, I’d ask if they were satanists, always having to explain the meaning of the word, which I gave in the utmost detail. They will never forget it. Surprisingly only one guy ever complained to the boss who gave me a serious disapproving look, but he knew I’d forever be an unbeliever. Fuck them. If they wanna dish it out, they gotta learn how to take it. Hitler is popular with Moslems because he killed off 6 million Jews, the chief enemy of a people with a hell of a lot of enemies. They also share a hatred of liberal democracy. Yeah! Go fascism! Another factor for admiration is that in the middle of World War II the Germans were having trouble getting oil and were eyeing up newly found wells in the Persian Gulf, controlled by the British and Americans. The Third Reich began a deliberate campaign of sycophancy towards the Arab world in an attempt to woo them and their oil away from Allied hands. To do so, religion was used. Then again, maybe old Adolf did really believe the earth is flat. Weirder things have happened. Hitler hooked up with an equally insane Moslem known as the Mufti of Jerusalem and promised that the Third Reich would not intervene in the Mufti’s kingdom, other than to pursue their shared goal: “the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space.” How charming. He missed out any mention of oil; the hook behind his kowtowing bait. If Rommel had managed to take control of the Levant and Arabia as envisaged in The Master Plan then no doubt the Nazis would have soon constructed their gas chambers on the sand not only for the darker-skinned but, in the case of the Arabian Peninsular, the inability of any of them to do a stroke of work. “Put this lot on the scrapheap, Fritz. They're useless.” What strikes me as poignant is that both Adolf and Mohammed, the Moslem prophet, kicked off their careers as megalomaniacs by robbing the Jews - Mohammed in knocking off caravans crossing the desert and Hitler starting with Kristallnacht which robbed German Jews of their possessions and lives. And on this theme, a comment from a blog in the Spectator magazine makes a direct comparison between Islam and Naziism:- Both ideologies had a leader revered as a prophet; a globally supremacist outlook and a desire to use terror and war to accomplish this ambition; a hatred of the Jews, a hatred of homosexuals; a hatred of those not of the faith be they the untermensch or the infidel, and a misogynistic attitude toward women which both Islam and Nazism deem or deemed fit only for reproduction, the kitchen and the place of prayer. On that final point, I never once saw a female anywhere near a mosque. The hatred of homosexuals gets a resounding belly laugh when my mind turns to the Saudis - the gayest men I've ever met - and is an issue that I shall address in the future. Meanwhile, you may like Hitler, I don’t. Got that? Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, huh? Or is there some god-given excuse/reason for certain people being allowed to like or dislike something and some not? Most Saudi employers take away the passports of their employees when they arrive, and keep them. This is against Saudi Labour Law and no doubt International law, but when did they ever let stuff like that get in the way of doing what they want - you should see how they drive! In this day and age you can teach monkeys and dogs to drive cars but you will never teach the Saudis. The reason for this passport confiscation is of course control and power. When my father was dying in 2011 I told my boss I was going to the UK to see him. I didn't ask him, I told him, and I'd already bought a ticket and had a multi-entry visa permanently on stand-by in my passport with which I defied the government by keeping with me. Once the guy in the office asked why I had kept my passport for so long and so I told him to look at whose name was in that document and whose photo does it show. No way on earth would the Asian labourers be able to do the same. I remember a story surfacing of an African shepherd who had not gone home for 18 years. Neither had he been paid during that time. His passport in his employers dirty hands. That evening my boss used an adjunct to call me and tell me that I can't go to see my dying father because I had work. I told the adjunct to tell my boss that I quit. He phoned back 30 minutes later to issue me a grovelling apology and the next morning at work before I flew that evening my boss said, "You're father is my father." "No, he fucking isn't," I thought and gave him a lengthy cold stare. Then he asked the key question, "Do you have your passport?" "Yep," I replied, fully aware that if it was still with the Passport Department who so kindly look after it for us, then he wouldn't have let them give me a visa and I'd have been stuck in Saudi. About a month or so later the boss went off to some distant cousin's funeral for a week and a half. Not only does the employer take our passports for 'safekeeping' but my employer stuck a fucking great government sticker on it as if to usurp the nationality on the front. I spent a good hour the other night peeling the fucker off. This photo is the easy-to-peel stage ... ... and the photo below is after 30 minutes scraping and it's still sticky. I'm now growing my right index fingernail to finish it off. The pictures are indicative of the Saudi attitude to its foreign workforce in general: treat everything with a lack of respect while demanding respect for themselves and preventing people from leaving the country if they feel like it. Some guys don't get released for months and have their salaries stopped while waiting.
I pray I never again see a KSA stamp in my little red travel book. |
Nb. Doesn't work in Google Chrome
RANDOM
FOTO BEDSIDE TABLERussell Shorto FOOD FOR THOUGHT
‘I don’t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress.’ Ed Begley Jr. * "The more I see of Humans the more I like my dog." Mark Twain * Only when the Last Tree Is Cut Down, The Last Fish Eaten, And the Last Stream Poisoned, Will Man Realize That Money Cannot be Eaten Cree Indian proverb Nb. Doesn't work in Google Chrome, no idea why not...
Archives
January 2016
|