Thursday, January 12, 2006
A Blogger's Dinner Out
At the invitation of Sol from Solomonia.com, I went out for dinner last night with him, Greg from The Jewish Russian Telegraph, and "Sam the Sand Monkey". We met at Shalom Beijing in Brookline for kosher Chinese food.
I had a fabulous time! The discussions were wide-ranging and detailed, as you'd expect a gathering of bloggers to be. (Opinionated? Who, us??)
In many ways, Sam was the star of the show, as the Egyptian guest in town for a short time. We asked him a lot about Egypt, Arab culture in general, and his opinions on the future of Iraq. He asked us about the goings-on in Israel, and wondered what's going to happen to Kadima. (I was glad to give him a definitive answer on that one. I told him that I had no idea.)
I also had an interesting moment when I quoted Sam a great bit I read somewhere in the Internet a few days ago:
If you live in an arab country, you know you heard those 3 statements before and sometimes from the same person:It turns out that Sam wrote it! (Ooops.)
1) The Holocaust never happend.
2) Hitler is a great man for killing the Jews.
3) Sharon is as bad as Hitler.
You figure out how someone can have those 3 statements in their heads and feel utterly comfortable with believeing them despite their galring contradictions, and you will figure out how the mind of the average conspiracy-theory-obsessed jew-hating arab works.
A fun time was had by all, I think; we're hoping to get together at least one more time before Sam leaves town. In the meantime, please do check out their blogs, if you haven't already.
Oh, and I've got to get Sam to write more about the Muslim traditions that led to the Muslim Renaissance... because not too many people, Muslim or non-Muslim, seem to know much about it. (Hint: were the glorious Muslim advances in art, medicine, mathematics, and other fields made by people following Shiite dogma, or Sunni dogma? Answer: none of the above.)
