My late father told me the story. He was in Istanbul in 1968 for a parliamentary conference. He took a cab with then speaker Sabri Hamadi to the hotel. The cab driver asked them where they were from. They said that they were Arabs from Lebanon. According to my father: the cab driver did not say a word for the whole ride but kept spitting out of the window for the duration (and in disgust) and muttering some words that sounded obscene to my dad.