It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Swopa of Needlenose Reports:
Needlenose | We Needle. You Decide: From the Department of Implausible Extremism. The Washington Post reports this evening:
Iraq's transportation minister... has ordered a ban on alcohol sales at Baghdad International Airport, declaring that the facility is "a holy and revered" piece of Iraq.... The alcohol ban heightened fears of some more-secular Iraqis that the Shiite Muslim majority might seek to impose a rigid interpretation of Islamic law in Iraq, traditionally considered to be tolerant in its observance of religious law. The order followed a visit Maliki made this month with other government officials to Iran, which is controlled by fundamentalist Shiite clerics....
"The issue is that the minister landed in the Baghdad airport and saw alcohol being sold there," Maliki's aide, Karim Jabiri, said Friday. "Given that the airport is a holy and revered part of Iraq's land, the minister ordered a ban on selling alcoholic drinks in the airport."
I think I speak for all of us here at Needlenose when I say that "holy and revered" is not a phrase that usually occurs to us when we think of airports. But perhaps the transportation minister's position as a government official has given him a misleading perception of the place.
I'll tell ya what, Mr. Maliki -- let 'em lose your luggage once, and you'll be humming a different tune...
