A Summer In Yemen

Wall St. Journal ^ | January 09th 2010

[Steelfish]

A Summer In Yemen 'Since women cannot bear the hot sun, why would they want to get a job?

KENT DAVIS-PACKARD

The air is thick and hazy as I tiptoe over the leaves of euphoria-inducing qat, through hoops of golden embroidered hookas, and nestle into the divan between women in Ottoman headdresses singing as frankincense wafts around them. Abeer leans towards me with her wide green eyes and whispers: "Do you know why we burn incense? It is because whenever you sing Muhammad's name, you smell heaven."

Night falls in the Old City of Sana'a as I ride the bus for five cents from this wedding celebration toward the great wall that once protected the city's 14,000 majestic tower houses, many now crumbling. From my dorm window I spot a hoopoe bird soaring over the brown castles, looking down on this high plateau that was once the home of the Queen of Sheba.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's language school is just down the winding cobblestone alleyway from the school where I study Arabic. From my classroom I can hear the call to prayer at the Great Mosque, built during Muhammad's lifetime, where Abdulmutallab prayed day and night. What could this young Nigerian man have seen of Sana'a during his stay in Yemen, before he boarded the Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit?

Perhaps he passed the boy who travels a mile to obtain a fresh bottle of water for me when his shop runs out—sprinting the whole way—and sweetly responds to my thanks: "You are welcome, my sister." Or the cook who gives me a chair hidden from the strong gaze of men chewing qat.

Or the motorcyclists narrowly missing the small boys selling tiny bottles of perfume in cardboard boxes on the ground. In the poorest country in the Arab........

[Ouderkirk]

WTF? She writes of some lunatic who admonishes her not to write of her interview with him. No discussion of what he has said, not even in the abstract?

For a Ph.D candidate she certainly doesn’t write very well.

We know Yemen is a third world craphole full of islamic nutjobs. Waste of time to read.

[Steelfish]

This is what happens when liberal scholars go to third world Islamic states to study their religions and culture. They are blinded to the squalor, ignorance and illiteracy of these masses and the tyranny of their political and religious leaders. They have to write a thesis that is “understanding” of these gutter cultures to earn their Ph.Ds

[databoss]

"Children here are more conservative than adults. Abeer's family tells me of Yemeni children returning from Saudi-supported Wahabi summer camps to denounce their parents as "non-Muslims""

Until we stop the entities that are programming the next generation of Hitler youth we are doomed to fight a losing war of attrition...it took total unrelenting and ruthless warfare to defeat the Axis and it will take the same to eliminate these vermin...the sooner we take on and utterly destroy the support system for the terror the sooner we will have peace...On To Mecca should be our battle cry, if it offends the sensibilites of the moderate Muslim world then let them whole heartily join in the fight to police their own...

"...you are either with us or against us" - Geo. Bush 2001."

[SunkenCiv]

Since women cannot bear the hot sun, why would they want to get a job?

Thanks Steelfish.