Hello Muttah, Hello Fatwa (the blog quebecois)

Hello Muttah, Hello Fatwa

... here I am at Camp Jihad-a.

Two hours. Two hours I spent thinking up that freaking title, and I don't care if you don't think it's funny. Two hours. (If you don't get the reference, it's to a popular novelty song of the 60's, variously credited to Allan Sherman or Spike Jones.)

Anyway, I see that this is making the rounds again. Some people seem to be under the impression that it's new; in fact it dates back to March of 2004.

I wasn't surprised to read it at the time: It squared with other accounts I'd seen, usually buried so far in the newspaper that you'd have to be reading the escort agency ads to stumble upon them.

Not that I would be reading the escort agency ads. OK, I might have. Merely out of curiousity.

What did surprise me was where this was printed -- in the reflexively anti-American British magazine, the Guardian:

Tracked down to his remote village in south-eastern Afghanistan, Naqibullah has memories of Guantanamo that are almost identical to Asadullah's. Prison life was good, he said shyly, nervous to be receiving a foreigner to his family's mud-fortress home.
The food in the camp was delicious, the teaching was excellent, and his warders were kind. "Americans are good people, they were always friendly, I don't have anything against them," he said. "If my father didn't need me, I would want to live in America."

Asadullah is even more sure of this. "Americans are great people, better than anyone else," he said, when found at his elder brother's tiny fruit and nut shop in a muddy backstreet of Kabul. "Americans are polite and friendly when you speak to them. They are not rude like Afghans. If I could be anywhere, I would be in America. I would like to be a doctor, an engineer - or an American soldier."

Note: I forgot that the site requires free registration. It's nothing too onerous, though. Just a valid email address, password and country is required.

Posted by gnotalex on April 11, 2006 11:38 PM | Permalink

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Hello Muttah, Hello Fatwa

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