# Can Qadaffi be serious? Saddam a hero? **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [January 5, 2007, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-qadaffi-be-serious-saddam-a-hero/386757 "2007-01-05T01:46:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2007, 8:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-qadaffi-be-serious-saddam-a-hero/386757/41 "2007-01-06T08:35:31Z")
[QUOTE=col\_10022] Qaddafi’s daughter was on Saddam Hussein’s defense team and I would guess she told her dad that Saddam Hussein was railroaded. [/QUOTE] Anyone who paid more than ten minutes researching the issue(\*) could have concluded that. (\* = A set that excludes the President of the United States, half the viewership of Fox News, and everyone on [FreeRepublic.com](http://FreeRepublic.com)😉 ) ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2007, 12:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-qadaffi-be-serious-saddam-a-hero/386757/42 "2007-01-06T12:52:44Z")
Yep, Saddam’s a hero and a martyr. [Going way beyond Qadaffi Duck’s territory.](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/06/world/middleeast/06arabs.html?ex=1325739600&en=18336ab31ea41e8c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) > [@](#): > > BEIRUT, Lebanon, Jan. 5 — In the week since Saddam Hussein was hanged in an execution steeped in sectarian overtones, his public image in the Arab world, formerly that of a convicted dictator, has undergone a resurgence of admiration and awe. > > On the streets, in newspapers and over the Internet, Mr. Hussein has emerged as a Sunni Arab hero who stood calm and composed as his Shiite executioners tormented and abused him. > > “No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed,” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt remarked in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot published Friday and distributed by the official Egyptian news agency. “They turned him into a martyr.” > > In Libya, which canceled celebrations of the feast of Id al-Adha after the execution, a government statement said a statue depicting Mr. Hussein in the gallows would be erected, along with a monument to Omar al-Mukhtar, who resisted the Italian invasion of Libya and was hanged by the Italians in 1931. > > In Morocco and the Palestinian territories, demonstrators held aloft photographs of Mr. Hussein and condemned the United States. > > Here in Beirut, hundreds of members of the Lebanese Baath Party and Palestinian activists marched Friday in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood behind a symbolic coffin representing that of Mr. Hussein and later offered a funeral prayer. Photographs of Mr. Hussein standing up in court, against a backdrop of the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, were pasted on city walls near Palestinian refugee camps, praising “Saddam the martyr.” > > “God damn America and its spies,” a banner across one major Beirut thoroughfare read. “Our condolences to the nation for the assassination of Saddam, and victory to the Iraqi resistance.” > > By standing up to the United States and its client government in Baghdad and dying with seeming dignity, Mr. Hussein appears to have been virtually cleansed of his past. > > \ > > At the heart of the sudden reversal of opinion was the symbolism of the hasty execution, now framed as an act of sectarian vengeance shrouded in political theater and overseen by the American occupation. > > In much of the predominantly Sunni Arab world, the timing of the execution in the early hours of Id al-Adha, which is among the holiest days of the Muslim year, when violence is forbidden and when even Mr. Hussein himself sometimes released prisoners, was seen as a direct insult to the Sunni world. > > The contrast between the official video aired without sound on Iraqi television of Mr. Hussein being taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose around his neck and the unauthorized grainy, chaotic recording of the same scene with sound, depicting Shiite militiamen taunting Mr. Hussein with his hands tied, damning him to hell and praising the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, touched a sectarian nerve. > > “He stood as strong as a mountain while he was being hanged,” said Ahmed el-Ghamrawi, a former Egyptian ambassador to Iraq. “He died a strong president and lived as a strong president. This is the image people are left with.” We sure handled that well, didn’t we? ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2007, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-qadaffi-be-serious-saddam-a-hero/386757/43 "2007-01-06T14:25:53Z")
[QUOTE=RTFirefly] Yep, Saddam’s a hero and a martyr. [Going way beyond Qadaffi Duck’s territory.](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/06/world/middleeast/06arabs.html?ex=1325739600&en=18336ab31ea41e8c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) We sure handled that well, didn’t we? [/QUOTE] I would add that that article was written by Hassan M. Fattah, himself an Iraqi and journalistic entrepreneur who started (or tried to start in the face of a nanny government) Bagdad’s first English language newspaper, “Iraq Today”. I knew about him because back when the war wasn’t yet longer than the US involvement in World War II, Fattah had appeared on a television program (it might have even been _The Daily Show_) outlining basically [this plan](http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5799) for Iraqi reconstruction. Naturally, he was ignored. ---
**Author:** ![Contrapuntal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e274bd/32.png) [@Contrapuntal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Contrapuntal)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2007, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-qadaffi-be-serious-saddam-a-hero/386757/44 "2007-01-06T16:53:04Z")
[QUOTE=Liberal] I knew about him because back when the war wasn’t yet longer than the US involvement in World War II, Fattah had appeared on a television program (it might have even been _The Daily Show_) outlining basically [this plan](http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5799) for Iraqi reconstruction. Naturally, he was ignored. [/QUOTE] Can you summarize the plan? I would be interested in seeing it, but your link wants 18 pounds of money from me. Or from someone. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Carrot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@Captain\_Carrot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Carrot)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2007, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-qadaffi-be-serious-saddam-a-hero/386757/45 "2007-01-06T17:20:35Z")
[QUOTE=The Flying Dutchman] It has worked very well in the Americas and it did work very well most everywhere else including Iraq except Africa. Even there, I’ve seen little evidence of boundary modification. [/QUOTE] And Yugoslavia, which broke up into Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and potentially Kosovo? Yeah, that was really well done. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2007, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-qadaffi-be-serious-saddam-a-hero/386757/46 "2007-01-06T17:38:10Z")
[QUOTE=Contrapuntal] Can you summarize the plan? I would be interested in seeing it, but your link wants 18 pounds of money from me. Or from someone. 😉 [/QUOTE] Here’s an [alternate site](http://www.altmuslim.com/perm.php?id=1164_0_25_90_C42). It’s all just very common sense stuff. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2007, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-qadaffi-be-serious-saddam-a-hero/386757/47 "2007-01-06T19:11:03Z")
[QUOTE=Liberal] Here’s an [alternate site](http://www.altmuslim.com/perm.php?id=1164_0_25_90_C42). It’s all just very common sense stuff. [/QUOTE] Is it? I don’t see “genocide” on that list. ---
**Author:** ![lowbrass](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/dc4da7/32.png) [@lowbrass](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lowbrass)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2007, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-qadaffi-be-serious-saddam-a-hero/386757/48 "2007-01-06T20:38:48Z")
[QUOTE=Contrapuntal] Can you summarize the plan? I would be interested in seeing it, but your link wants 18 pounds of money from me. Or from someone. 😉 [/QUOTE] Wow! It would take a huge pile of money to weigh 18 pounds. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-qadaffi-be-serious-saddam-a-hero/386757.md?page=2)