Thursday, October 05, 2006

A Jordanian academic sent me this (he does not want to be identified): "King Abdullah of Jordan
(increasingly known as Abdullah Gardiner --his mother Toni Gardiner's last name) wants also someone like him to represent all Arabs at the UN. Zayd is the son of Ra'd and his Swedish wife. Ra'd's mother was a Turk, hence Zayd is a quarter Turkish, half Swedish, and a quarter Hijazi. He is married to an English woman who worked at the UN and whom he met there after King Hussein dispatched him to work at the UN, even though he knows nothing about international relations, and his Arabic competes with that of King Abdullah Gardiner himself. The point is that the man has never had any connection to Arabness [my source is mentioning that because the chief Jordanian propagandist, Nasir Judah, referred to this Zayd as "the cadidate of the Arab nation] or even Jordanianness, just like his half-English master."