Ayoon Wa Azan (I will Stay in My “Petty” Job)

Every morning, I check my e-mail and find that I have woken up to a fortune that I have never even dreamt of, and as such, money and wealth pour down on me every day. Yesterday for example, I received an e-mail with the title “Come on, baby, Khazen” promising me to get rich by means of e-commerce, and another e-mail message from General Aliyu Mohammed offering me the possibility of inheriting people that I do not know, with the only condition for this being my approval. I also received another e-mail bearing the name of the automaker BMW claiming that I have won 750 thousand sterling pounds. There was also a specific amount offered to me by Gail Williams, with whom I did not know I had any relations, and which was 867,454 pounds, to be collected from Sir Richard Smith, another person that I do not know.

Of course, all the above is a sham; thus I will stay in my “petty” job in Arab politics; meanwhile, the truth is that I have a number of selected stories from around the world today:

- The Lisbon Treaty has not yet been ratified, with the continued opposition expressed by the Czech Republic against some articles of the EU constitution; however, former Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair, remains the most favourable candidate to become the next EU President, despite the waning public support for his bid, when compared with the size of the support he received only a few months ago.

This week witnessed the latest manoeuvres related to this candidacy, when Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor as Prime Minister, publicly supported the latter’s nomination. However, both Sarkozy’s and Berlusconi’s enthusiasm in supporting Blair has waned, for fear of being on the losing side. The prevailing view now is that the EU needs a candidate from one of its smaller member states, who would not cause a rift among the rest of the member states.

Personally, I think that the election of Blair would be an insult to the victims of the Iraq war, since he was an accomplice of with George W. Bush in falsifying the justifications of that war, and since he has not apologized or regretted that up until this moment. Justice would require that Bush and Blair, along with the rest of the warmongering gang, be tried before the ICC in The Hague, and not for Blair to end up as the President of the EU, because that would practically exonerate him from a crime, in which his role is firmly proven.

- If Blair is bad, then Senator Joe Lieberman is much worse. First and foremost, he represents Israel in the U.S Senate and works for its interests alone, and as such places the interests of this fascist criminal state above those of his “own” country. I can hardly remember any news story about him that does not betray the wickedness of his policies.

In fact, his own Democratic Party had cut him loose; he had won his seat in the state of Connecticut as an independent, and then went back to voting with his old party as an independent Democrat. However, he recently stood in opposition to the healthcare plan, and threatened to support a filibuster of the bill, because if he votes against it, the democrats would lose the sixty-seat majority in the senate (which is made of 100 seats).

Is there a more hypocritical figure in American politics than Joe Lieberman? I did not ask this question; it was rather asked by the American journalist Robert Scheer in a published article, where Scheer reminds us that this Senator, who is claiming that the healthcare reform plan will increase the burdens already born by the taxpayers, is the same Senator who had supported all the previous spending until the U.S Treasury went bankrupt. He is also the same Senator who supported an increase in defence bill each time, until the Department of Defence’s annual budget amounted to 680 billion dollars.

What I want to add here is that Lieberman had also supported all Israeli thefts of U.S funds which are otherwise known as economic and military "help" to Israel. Nevertheless he is now opposing the healthcare reform plan direly needed by 47 million Americans, because Israel is robbing American citizens with the help of Lieberman and his ilk.

- I conclude my article with a news story that I had followed 30 years ago, and which is now drawing to a close: Ron Smith had finally decided to agree to bury the remains of his daughter Helen who was killed after falling from a flat balcony in Jeddah. He decided to organize a funeral for her, before he and his ex-wife die while her body is still preserved in a mortuary in England.

The father has been insisting that his daughter was murdered and that the details of the story are known: Helen was at a party hosted by Dr. Richard Arnot and his wife Penny, and fell to her death from the balcony of the apartment, along with the sea captain Johannes Otten, while they were making love.

At the time of the incident, I was in London as the editor in chief of Asharq Alawsat Newspaper in May 1979. I was also overseeing the publications of the Saudi Research and Marketing Group, after having headed the “Arab News” in Jeddah. I assigned an American reporter working with the Arab News to follow up the story; what happened afterwards is that Richard Arnot divorced his wife Penny. Then, reporter John Close fell in love with the latter, married her, and moved back with her to America. However, this marriage also ended in divorce later on.

Among the other interesting details related to this story, is the fact that John Close was the son of Ray Close, who had been, as we discovered at the time, a CIA operative, who resigned and worked as the Chief Executive of an industrial company in Jeddah. He then retired and went back home. There is no secret in that, as there are over one hundred thousand news stories about the man on Google.

The poor Helen Smith will be buried next month, and the chapter will be closed forever on this 30-year old incident.