How Saif Gaddafi and Friends Fooled the Euro-Left
They laid on a dinner, a tented hotel, flights in private jets, the works.
It was hailed by environmentalists as the “world’s largest sustainable development.” Lord Foster told the attendees about the project:
This is one of the most beautiful and little-known landscapes on Earth. We’ve been give a unique challenge: to establish a sustainable blueprint for future development which will be sensitive to the history of the Green Mountain and to its conservation.
The heart of the environmentally sustainable complex was to be a series of exclusive hotels.
The attendees at the environmental gala seemed oblivious that while they partied in excess, 40% of Libya’s people lived below the poverty line. And half of Libya’s young are unemployed. This for a nation with the largest oil reserves in Africa.
Saif wasn’t the only Gaddafi sibling to deceive the West and to receive plaudits for work on behalf of humanity. Until the Arab Spring erupted, his sister Aisha Gaddafi had been an official goodwill ambassador for the UN Development Program. Aisha and her brothers Muhammed and Hannibal were the ones who surfaced in Algeria on Monday.
Hannibal was the bad boy in the family. He was nicknamed “Hannibal the Cannibal” because of his repeated acts of violence and ruthlessness against his staff and his model wife. Still, he remained a big hit throughout Europe, throwing parties with such stars as Beyonce, Mariah Carey, and Usher. He was best-known for driving his Ferrari 90 mph the wrong way on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. As with other problems with the authorities, he invoked diplomatic immunity.
Then there are the wives and daughters of Arab leaders. A month after Vogue profiled Syria’s first lady in a glowing article, Asma Assad proclaimed Syria the “safest country” in the Middle East. As my colleague Claudia Rosett wrote earlier this week in PJMedia: “It’s just six months since the first lady of Syria, Asma al-Assad, was on a roll as the plushly accessorized human face of Syria’s Assad regime.” Asma, the wife of Syria’s Bashar Assad, has disappeared from the society circuit since her husband began gunning down his own citizens. Slate cattily calls Asma ”the Marie Antionette of the Middle East.” A 2009 Huffington Post slide show also put out a puff piece on Asma titled: “Asma Al Assad: Syria’s First Lady and All-Natural Beauty.”
There is Jordan’s cosmopolitan Queen Rania al-Abdullah. She was Glamour‘s woman of the year in 2010, and named in Vanity Fair‘s Best-Dressed International Hall of Fame. As Slate’s Noreen Malone notes, Rania is unfavorably compared by Jordan’s tribes to the “unapologetically spendy Leila Trabelsi, wife of deposed Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and the so-called ‘Imelda Marcos of the Arab world.’”
Princess of Qatar, Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, is one of the wives of the emir of Qatar. According to the Sunlight Foundation: “The UN recognizes Sheikha Mozah as a special envoy of its UNESCO Celebrity Advocates.” The left-wing American PR firm Fenton Communications once represented Mozah.
For decades the Eurosocialist political leadership and liberal American activists convinced themselves that by mouthing the right words and dressing right and appearing to identify with Western culture, the next generation of Arabs were moving toward reform.
Now we know many were frauds. Will it make any difference?
If this doesn’t prove that people who are without any principle are easy to buy then there is really no hope for the West. If our leaders thought it was repugnant to deal, dine with, or doodle with a leader that refused democracy then we’d be much better off. Better yet, our government refusing visas to citizens from countries that do NOT support the First Amendment would pretty much draw the line between free and tyrannical states. NO VISAS, NO AID, NO SUPPORT using taxpayer dollars for ANYBODY coming from a country refusing the First Amendment. Simple. Principled.
That may be a reasonable approach for the top leaders of foreign nations, the ones who have the power to make their country respect the First Amendment or at least sufficient influence to push in that direction.
But this principle falls down for people from that country who simply don’t have the clout to make their country adopt something like the First Amendment.
For example, we could well use your principle to refuse to welcome Kim Jung Il of North Korea. We know he has the power to make officials in his country respect freedom of speech if he wants to do so. But a starving North Korean refugee simply can’t be held to that same standard since such a person is utterly unable to influence government policy.
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One other point. Are you proposing to abandon all diplomacy with nations that follow the First Amendment? Historically, we have typically had at least some kind of diplomatic connections with even some very appalling people even if they weren’t full diplomatic relations….
Priceless, just bloody priceless, this Saif kid wasn’t all that bad after all. What is going to be just as amusing is how the left will explain away out of this relationship. Their back sliding and slithering routine should place this gullible lot in the top ten of America’s got talent.
Well, according to the Analysts over at Stratfor.com (people who actually know what they’re talking about..
“The assault appears to have consisted of three parts. The first was the insertion of NATO special operations troops (in the low hundreds, not thousands) who, guided by intelligence operatives in Tripoli, attacked and destabilized the government forces in the city. The second part was an information operation in which NATO made it appear that the battle was over. The bizarre incident in which Gadhafi’s son, Seif al-Islam, announced as being captured only to show up in an SUV looking very un-captured, was part of this game. NATO wanted it to appear that the leadership had been reduced and Gadhafi’s forces broken to convince those same forces to capitulate. Seif al-Islam’s appearance was designed to signal his troops that the war was still on.”
While “Eurosocialists” and “liberal American activists” may have been duped by Saif Gadhafi, they were at least in good company. In August of 2009 John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman traveled to Tripoli to meet with Gadhafi himself and other members of his regime. Ever mindful of our interests, the three discussed delivery of LM aircraft which had previously been sold to Libya. Raising the issue of public relations in light of the release of the Libyan terrorist responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, they stressed it was in the “strongest spirit of friendship and respect”. Unfortunately our guys didn’t do a very good job, Italy got the oil.
How did Saif, et. al. fool them? They wanted to be fooled.
Mr. Crawford hit the nail on the head. Too many people wanted to see something that wasn’t really there.
Nobody wants to think of exactly how a dictator maintains grip on power. They would much rather believe the hype and propaganda. And of course the dictators want to be portrayed that way so that people will like them, when they’re not busy being feared.
Self delusion is easy. Thinking is hard. That’s why this happened.
Since when has there ever been anything but corruption, cruelty, and tyranny coming from a Muslim head of state? They’re ALL that way.
“Democratization” (or more properly, the installation of a civil society built upon a republican form of government) cannot work without first going through de-Islamization. Until we can figure out how to do that, our policy toward Muslim countries should be quarantine and containment.
I’ve been blogging about this for years, and before that, I ran an email list. All of this pandering to Muslim dictators keeps happening over and over. Part of it is simple greed, and part of it is because our self-anointed Western political elites want to feel important and to be invited to all the parties with the “cool kids” (who are actually third-world Muslim bullies and nothing more). Shame on them.
Roses are red,
violets are blue,
It’s “do as I say,
not as I do”….
Good grief! Now David Welch (ex-Bush Administration State department official and now with Bechtel) met with senior Libyan officials a month ago (while we were already bombing the Gaddafi regime as part of NATO) reassuring them that he would advocate on their behalf in the US. Does this make Mr. Welch a foreign agent…or a traitor? No, I don’t think so, he is now just a private citizen acting on his own (and Bechtel’s) behalf. Just what we need, multiple foreign policy tracks by both governmental and private industry actors. Pity he didn’t get the oil either.
I bet it wasn’t a hard sell at all. Just like the Soviets when they would go “Ha, ha. We like the jazz and the scotch, so we are civilized and reasonable,” all Saif and Friends would have to do is put on some of the trappings that the EuroLeft like – the SWPL markers – and mouth the right platitudes and they would swoon.
Libya–the Mideast Cuba?
I was just a teenager back in 1959 but I can still recall the great hullabaloo, predominantly positive hulabaloo, over Fidel Castro, with the media referring to him as the “George Washington of Cuba” and exulting over their darling’s victory over the evil Fulgencio Batista, with teachers all a-bubble with excitement since Cuba was finally free.
Not only was Batista, El Hombre, a dictator but he had illegally seized power, had consorted with gamblers and known criminals, and suffered from the severe liability (to American leftists) of being friendly toward the United States.
Similar to the 2008 hype for Barack Hussein Obama, his successor, Fidel Castro was hailed a a savior, a man of the people who would bring joy and prosperity to his island nation. Fidel couldn’t quite walk on water as Obama could but he seemed to share most other Obama qualities and oratorical skills, sans teleprompters.
Not known at the time, with the able assistance of his fellow Marxist revolutionary, Che Guevara, Fidel would imprison and murder tens of thousands of his countrymen, come close to initiating World War III, and reduce Cuba to an economic basket case.
An added bonus for leftist Castrophiles is that, unlike Batista, Fidel hates America.
Although they may not smoke cigars because Islam and Allah frown on tobacco products, the Libyan rebels now on the verge of deposing Muammar Khadaffi and hopefully doing unto him what Iraqis did unto Saddam Hussein may very well turn out to be far worse for U.S. interests than both “mad dog of the Middle East” and the mad dog of the Caribbean.
Khadaffi was certainly not one of America’s best buddies and continued to support international Islamic terrorism yet he, allegedly, abandoned his efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction in 2003, after America massively visited mass destruction on Afghanistan and Hussein’s regime.
Nevertheless, “The devil you know . . . ” and Libyan rebel devils may soon make the United States yearn for the good, old Muammar days.
Our president, peace-lover that he is, refused to concede that our war in Libya was even a war.
The White House opted to describe the conflict as a “kinetic military action” while we kinetically led NATO forces against Khadaffi loyalists, launched hundreds of kinetic Tomahawk cruise missiles against Tripoli and loyalist strongholds, and gave Syria’s equally-treacherous Bashar al-Assad a free pass.
You see, war bad, kinetic military action good in Obamaese. As for Assad, the Obamians haven’t a clue what to do.
Like Fidel Castro who was deemed good contrasted with Fulgencio Batista, the Libyan rebels are likewise considered the good guys compared to Khadaffi. Like Castro, they are likely to bite America on its collective arse, only more severely. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5353.)
The Gaddafi regime did not “fool” the left (either in Europe or the United States – where Rev. J. Wright and so on, were supporters of the regime).
Gaddafi was a life long socialist – his supporters in the “Euro” (and American) left were socialists also.
So no “fooling” anyone.