While reminiscing the first Indiana Jones movie, with "French" villain Belloq, I just noticed this: the name sounds a lot like the national family name Behloq [hard H, guttural Q].
Score another famous Lebanese! And another case where the Lebanese is a movie villain, mixed in with a mandatory stab at the French, "friends of the ennemy, all of'em". Ah, Hollywood stereotypes!...
En repensant au premier film d'Indiana Jones, avec le méchant "Français" Belloq, je viens de remarquer ceci: le nom ressemble beaucoup au nom de famille national Behloq [H dur, Q guttural].
Et encore un Libanais célèbre de plus! Sans compter un énième cas où le Libanais est un méchant au cinéma, mélangé à l'incontournable dénigrement des Français, "tous des collabos". Ah, les stéréotypes de Hollywood!...
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Adventures of Indiana Jones in Lebanon
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12 comments:
Nobody likes the French, sorry. As for Lebanon, I doubt most people give it much thought at all.
Take this from the Simpsons episode You Only Move Twice:
Hank Scorpio: By the way, Homer, what's your least favorite country? Italy or France?
Homer: France.
[Scorpio adjusts a giant laser cannon pointing towards the sky]
Hank Scorpio: Heh heh heh. Nobody ever says Italy...
No offense, but you must clearly be from the USA or another Anglo-Saxon country. In the rest of the world, "nobody likes the Americans". Especially after the screwy politics ot the Dick and the Bush.
Not especially my opinion. Just the way things are in the "outside world".
"Heh heh heh. Nobody ever says Italy..."
LOL! Ouch, my ribs!
Of course, you have to know the social USA attitudes to appreciate it. It would probably make a typical French citizen cringe in patriotic (jingoistic?) pain.
The Simpsons were, are and always will be awesome. Unless somebody tampers with perfection. (More about that in a later post I'm planning.)
I'm definitely from an Anglo-Saxon country, in fact the country that took the Angles and Saxons and fused them into one big all-star, hard-fightin', hard-drinkin' team!
...and I was mostly kidding.
...although it's funny how people always say "no offence" before going ahead and saying something they know will be offensive! It's like saying "with all due respect" before saying something which completely lacks respect! ;-)
Have you been spying on me? How else could you know all that? 'Cause, you know, it's all true. Especially about my grandma. A little long in the tooth for that look, too, I must say!
P.S. I wonder the job they'd have to do covering up if they'd picked, say, The Nymphaeum.
Oops. I meant to post that in the one above this. Prolonged use of crack cocaine really does destroy the brain!
Well, Johnnie, it was once said that Israel had the best intelligence services in the world (at least after East Germany ceased to exist as a communist regime), and also perhaps the best army in the world. Since the world's #1 army failed to "swiftly annihilate a humble Lebanese guerilla of mountain goatherders" in the summer of 2006 (they pretty much destroyed the whole country, EXCEPT their declared target and nemesis), it should come as no surprise to you that a humble four-eyed Lebanese blogger can know everything about a random anglo-saxon citizen. Especially one who was casual enough to leave a monicker on my own blog. ("A little rusty, are we, Mr Bond?")
It's a good thing that we Lebanese absolutely hate to brag. We know we're #1, no need to rub it in! :-)
Re. that little cocaine problem, you need to shake it off, and most of all, stay awake until morning. Keep walking, Johnnie Walker! Want a scotch to boost your spirit?
I'll throw in a spoonful of the world's most delicious honey...
And don't you worry about that little posting mix-up. A Lebanese can fix anything, EVEN WITHOUT DUCT TAPE.
Don't fault the Israeli army for failing to achieve victory. Armies today are limited in what they can do. The Romans would just have defeated the Lebanese army, then destroyed Beirut, slaughtering most of the people and enslaving the rest. Then any uprising would have been put down in the most brutal fashion. It is not through anything the Lebanese did which resulted in Israel's failure.
The U.S. is having the same problem in Iraq. Really they should just have dropped atomic bombs on Baghdad and Basrah and a few other cities. Shown them who's the boss. Woosh, up, over, and wammo!
Any lebanese's "patriotic dudy" is expected to be bashing anything Israeli and jewish at any given occasion, and creating more occasions. I guess it's the "Middle Satan" to the american "Great Satan" of the arab nation. But hey, I'm feeling daring. So I'll stick to calm, objective facts. :-)
Fact #1: fighting a guerilla is nothing like conventional warfare. In summary, guerilla tactics can very efficiently impede a vastly more powerful offensive army thanks to the advantage of the terrain and methods. The hornet's paralyzing sting on the lion's nose, "can't catch me"...
Fact #2: Tsahal's reputation was earned in the early days of the birth of Israel, when it genuinely seemed like the coalition of all the arab world's armies could only "crush those intruding jews before they got to settle both feet in Palestine". They're not wimps, that's proven. But in 2006 they tried to fight a guerilla, not half-hearted conscription armies. New scenario. A highly trained, disciplined and organized, supremely motivated motivated guerilla, each man having zero fear of death in combat, and fighting to defend their birthplace (unlike those ragtag islamists in Iraq). A military commander's dream come true. In a very limited and specific context: they're not invading Tel-Aviv any day soon!
Fact #3: According to Israeli official and public record, the 2006 events were long planned and decided, "to break the Hezb's spine". And the operation was direly unprepared, uncoordinated, amateurish, etc. So admittedly, it wasn't therefore a failure of the army itself, inasmuch as its inept leaders. But facing them, impeccable "ghost commandos". The outcome was no accident.
I would immediately agree with you about "just torching the hornet's nest altogether", be it in Lebanon or Iraq, except for one tiny, insignificant detail: no remotely civilized regime today can commit such a genocide IN INVADING ANOTHER COUNTRY WITH NO VALID EXCUSE. Nuke Baghdad? Pardon me, but in what form of self-defense? Saddam's NBC (Nuclear-Biological-Chemical) imaginary arsenal?
This is precisely why a vast majority of the world hates America's guts today: after the end of the cold war, they had a unique opportunity to make friends with pretty much the whole planet, starting with the now-friendly Russians. The planetary chess game of influence and supporting dictatorships was over, victory by forfeit. But these greedy power-hungry imperialist morons decided to bully everyone into servitude. "Lets control the oil, make huge profits, charge at the open land spread before us."
The USA are, pretty undoubtedly, more powerful than anybody else in the world. What they are not, is more powerful than the whole world together. Go ahead, torch every country that won't become bow to Georgius Caesar. Nuke the planet. And then try to grow cereals in radiactive deserts.
Intelligent peace is the way, simply because war in today's world is an unprecedented madness, a lose-lose stupidity. Look at the Kosovo scenario repeating itself in Georgia, but in reverse: with the bombed separatists being friends of Moscow this time, not Washington.
Congratulations, Mr Bush. You have restarted the cold war. Should cool off this pesky global warming...
As Christopher Hitchens has said, our adrenal glands are too large and our frontal lobe is too small. Until that changes there will never be peace. People are by nature aggressive, teretorial, and xenophobic.
As one young Alice would say to the egghead, that's "aggravessive, terroritorial and xenoracist".
I just realized that my post on "Demented Sex" wasn't online yet, because I had a power shortage before I finished composing the draft. (Even cost me a hole in a new T-shirt. Don't ask.) But when it's on, I think you'll like the part about why the nazis were little more than "ordinary monsters".
And their adrenal glands weren't even that large. :-(
The experiments of the German doctors (doktors?) wouldn't be explained by aggression but the war itself would be, caused by the first one, which was caused by an arms race. Basically no different than two primitive tribes with deadlier weapons. Or sort of like two silverback gorillas, except that gorillas are smarter and usually leave it at posturing.
War might have other causes, but at the core it's about the aggression at the core which determines how we look at the world and how we tackle problems.
I agree mostly with your explanation of how the Germans justified the experiments, because the same way of thinking made possible slavery in the United States. They thought of black people as being not really people, so they were able to treat them like livestock without feeling bad about it.
You know what your problem is, Joe?
You think too much.
You and those pesky pacific (pacifist?)silverbacks. And me.
Watch out for post #101 for more, right after the #100 special.
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