Can Muslim pirates drink rum?

Of course they drink rum, and whiskey and gin and anything else on offer. People are always surprised to discover how the real-life behavior of people differs from what they’ve been taught in those fantasy teach-ins about happy people in the Third World. If you go to Jolo, look for the pirate in the bar, not the mosque. I remember how a busload of tourists were wondering why the villagers were using plastic buckets instead of the wicker ones they sold to tourists. The answer supplied by one villager is “have you ever tried to draw water in a wicker basket?” Score one for plastic.

The fantasy of political correctness creates absurd situations. There was a story told some time back, about how the UN hired a “Muslim” interpreter for Kosovo, where all the real Muslim girls go around in regular dresses like any other European woman. Headquarters found them one in London with a burka and they shipped the interpreter to Kosovo where, to the astonishment of the locals, the UN people went around with their shrouded “Muslim” interpreter who looked nothing the real Kosovars had ever seen …

It reminds me of one of those Herge comic books where an Indian maharajah wants a “real British” detective and won’t believe anyone unless he wears a deerstalker and smokes a meerschaum pipe. That’s a genuine British detective,. If the UN operated in a non-racist way they’d be recruiting people in leprechaun hats and vests when filling positions with Irishmen. If political correctness weren’t so sad, it would be funny.