The promised land won’t come with lubricants
Let us start by admitting that the Middle East is to holiday destinations what Vlad the Impaler would be to mint-flavoured toothpicks.
On the one hand you have terrorism, on the other you have celebrities.
One could easily imagine even Hezbollah sympathizing with the Israeli prime minister at some occasions:
Basic Instinct star Sharon Stone has offered to kiss “just about anybody” if it ends conflict in the Middle East.
The actress is visiting Israel on a trip sponsored by the Peres Centre for Peace, which promotes development and understanding around the region.
She told a press conference: “I would kiss just about anybody for peace in the Middle East.”
What’s harder to understand is that people are still running for that office while history insists on repeating itself:
JERUSALEM — Madonna met with Israel’s president Saturday during a visit to attend a conference on Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical sect she has embraced despite criticism from Orthodox Jews.
The pop star was seen entering Shimon Peres’ home in Jerusalem with husband Guy Ritchie after the end of the Jewish New Year at sunset Saturday. The Nobel Peace laureate gave Madonna a copy of the Old Testament that she had requested, Israeli TV reported.
Still, Israel is one of the few places in that particular neighbourhood that escaped a certain curse.
As Israel’s fourth prime minister Golda Meir once famously said:
“Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!”
With all respect to Golda, but maybe Moses wasn’t all that ‘misguided.’
An old (and non-existing) Chinese curse says: ‘May you live in interesting times.’
In the Middle East just say: ‘May you have oil.’:
The man once regarded as the world’s most powerful banker has bluntly declared that the Iraq war was ‘largely’ about oil.
Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and retired last year after serving four presidents, Alan Greenspan has been the leading Republican economist for a generation and his utterings instantly moved world markets.
In his long-awaited memoir - out tomorrow in the US - Greenspan, 81, who served as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, writes: ‘I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’
Greenspan’s damning comments about the war come as a survey of Iraqis, which was released last week, claims that up to 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq - lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.
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