Posted on 03/04/2007 7:59:10 PM PST by FairOpinion
The first year Sabah Mahdi tried to come to America for the Arnold Fitness Expo, he couldn’t get a passport to leave his war-torn country.
Later that year, Mahdi’s gym, named the Arnold Classic, was ripped apart by blasts from two truck bombs.
Last year, a tight curfew in Baghdad stopped him from making the flight — even after Arnold Schwarzenegger personally paid for the airfare.
This year, despite the continuing war in Iraq, Mahdi made it to Columbus and basked in the glory of a man he has idolized for 33 years.
And Schwarzenegger returned the admiration: He took Mahdi into his entourage at times and kept him closer than virtually any of the estimated 150,000 people who attended this weekend’s fitness event Downtown.
Soon after U.S. troops arrived and Iraqis pulled down a giant statue of Saddam in Baghdad, Mahdi renamed his gym the Arnold Classic.
Despite the war, Mahdi continues his long tradition of holding a bodybuilding competition on July 30, Schwarzenegger’s birthday.
(Excerpt) Read more at columbusdispatch.com ...
I don't know whether this quite qualifies to your Iraqi good news, but sometimes one person's story is still meaningful to show that there are "normal things" going on in Iraq too.
It's hard to envision a bodybuilder idolizing a guy who looks like Schwarzenegger does now. Arnold should get back to lifting weights, he looks awful.
He is almost 60 afterall.
Mr. Fairview is over sixty--he would not like me to say just how much over sixty!--but is in much better shape than Arnold. And he has very little opportunity to work out. Schwarzenegger has just let himself get sloppy.
This is the kind of aspiring story our useless MSM should be all over.
I remember this guy. I sent one of the first interviews/stories over to Schwarzenegger's office. There's some threads on FR, but I'd be clueless as to what KEYWORDS to use.
Found the one story I was thinking of. Nick Berg used to train there.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1136438/posts
I remember seeing photos of that gym in a fitness magazine. There were huge murals of Arnold painted on the walls. It was an open invitation to the bad guys to blow up the place.
Thanks for finding and posting the related article.
"Now, more than five weeks after the chance meeting, I have learned that Mr. Nick was actually Nicholas Berg, the 26-year-old Pennsylvania man who was beheaded by a group of hooded men in Iraq. The grisly murder was videotaped, and it's now thought that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate of Osama bin Laden, carried out the execution. "
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