Re: Dzungar genocide
I just got a long anti-Islamic screed from my Arabic Parisian pal. He's a professor at the Sorbonne, teaching Arabic, ancient Arabic and Arabic literature. He speaks 27 languages but not English, so he's put it through Google Translate which has mangled most meaning.
His family moved to Paris from Algeria after his communist grandfather shot an imam. Which is dark, but he told me a lovely story. He and his brother asked their father why they couldn't go to the mosque with all the other children. "Your mother is our god, and to worship any other god would be blasphemous."
He insisted I went to the Latin-quarter mosque, though he wouldn't go in because he didn't feel safe. It was a beautiful building, nicer than most cathedrals.
He visited me in Scotland when I had excruciating toothache. We spent the time drinking whisky and used dictionaries to translate ancient atheist Arab poetry into English for the first time. I think the Arabs wrote more poems praising alcohol than even the Celts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
