Word: bedouin
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...omission and commission here. America is in a crisis, he announces gravely: The crazed Arabs, endowed only with anatomical fortuity, have put their thumb astride our jugular. These are not familiar, white-skinned Europeans, polite Belgians or Dutchmen, who will calmly accede to our reasonable requests. These are berobed bedouin upstarts, mustachioed bandit sheiks, out to black-mail Uncle Sam till his back--or at least his foreign policy--is up against the wall...
Once, he recalls, he organized his fellow high school students and led a demonstration for Nasser. "I went around to all the different merchants for cloth for the flags and banners and wrote slogans on all the walls. I always dressed in Bedouin robes with my face covered, so that when the police came looking for me, they would always be told that I was just another nomad...
Test. In the manner of Harun al-Rashid, the Arab caliph who ruled Baghdad in the 8th century, Gaddafi sometimes disguises himself in Bedouin robes and roams the city at night to see if his people are behaving properly. One time he appeared at Tripoli's Central Hospital and, to test the institution's efficiency, pretended that his father desperately needed a doctor. When a Taiwanese medic blithely suggested that a few aspirin would suffice, Gaddafi stripped off his robe and denounced the doctor: "You will regret that decision all your life." The doctor was fired...
...today. Modest but modern housing is going up everywhere. Yet, on the 20-minute drive into town from the airport, the brand-new divided highway goes by acre after acre of makeshift shacks perched precariously on the windswept desert. But the new stress is on agriculture. Gaddafi the Bedouin, brought up to revere trees as a source of food and shade, has ordered a massive land-reclamation program to make 700,000 acres of desert arable. (Cost: $800 million.) His aim is to make Libya self-sufficient in food...
Except for occasional maneuvering armies, the only people who ever lingered on the scrub-and cactus-sprinkled sand dunes of northeastern Sinai were Bedouin tribesmen. That will soon change. Within the next two months, Israeli surveyors-to be followed by bulldozers and construction workers-will begin charting the site for a new city in a 40-sq.-mi. strip of coastal land below the Gaza border town of Rafah in a corner of the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula. By the end of 1974, a settlement large enough to support 350 families will have been built...