Abdullah Al-Thani has an explanation for Arab woes that he’d like to share with you — there’s a conspiracy of “Christians and Jews” who for some reason show quite undeserved and unrequited enmity toward Muslims.
Al-Thani lists Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Mali as places where are currently troubles, caused by these non-Muslim evil-doers, but he could have added Yemen, and Bahrain, and a few other places too — is centered on a single country, “in the region,” whose Name He Need Not Speak. It begins with an “I” and ends in “L” and is about the size of Connecticut, and is too small to be labelled on most maps, but it explains all of the troubles all over Araby, twenty-two countries, 350 million people, fourteen million square miles — all of it. Quite a feat.
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2 Responses
I thought al-Thani is the Qatari ‘royal’ families name …. any connections?
You raise a matter on which I am glad to have the chance to dilate. He is called “Al-Thani” by MEMRITV and I did not change their spelling. I didn’t feel I had the right, even though I realized that
1) Al-Thani is the name of the ruling family in Qatar, the one with the good-looking Sheikha, and another art-buying female Al-Thani, gobbbling up Cezannes and suchlike for fabulous sums, since the Arabs can’t create such art — it’s strengst verboten — but can buy it, to set up their little Louvres for the locals.
2) The man identified as “Al-Thani” in the MEMRI clip — the Libyan high muckamuck who is associated, by the way, with the “good” (i.e., non-Islamic) government in eastern Libya — is referred to in stories about Libya as Al-Thinni.
So what are we to think, and what are we to spell? Perhaps Al-Thinni and Al-Thani are merely orthogrpaphical variants, in English, of the same underlying Arabic name, or perhaps they appear differently once englisheed because of some dialectal difference? Think of Gamal Nasser and Jamal Nasser. Al-Thani, Al-Thinni, I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it. Or, put another way, oedipus-shmoedipus, as long as he loves his mother.