Today’s Taiwan News had a few paragraphs about him:
The veteran leader appeared before journalists and television cameras late on Monday, taking aim at "Arab intelligence agencies" for spreading the rumors [about him being in a coma from a cerebral blood clot] and threatening to sue a news agency which carried the report.
Blaming Arab intelligence agencies. Hmmm. Regarding that, I recently ran into this from p 221-222 of Georgie Anne Geyer’s Buying the Night Flight:
I would like to say that I found Qaddafi interesting, but in truth I did not. I would like to say I found him handsome, but in truth I did not. His pictures flatter him…His eyes were the eyes of the Baptist preachers of my youth who did not believe in going to the movies or to dances…They were tight, fanatic eyes.
He had just nationalized some oil firms and we got the exclusive story that he was going to nationalize more. But the only interesting thing came, again, when I could think of no more questions and asked him another "nothing" question. "How do you see Libya’s place in the world?"
His tight eyes tightened still more, until they were virtually cold slits. "We are in a jungle surrounded by howling wolves," he whispered heavily.
"Howling wolves?" I repeated, startled. "Do you mean the European countries?"
"No," he said. "I mean the Arab countries."
It’s cuz he was edumacated right here in the ROC, man, under the pariah state exchange program.
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Kinda hard to evaluate his statements. On the one hand, it’s fairly clear that he’s not dealing with an entirely full deck.
On the other, it’s equally clear that he DOES live in a pretty rough neighborhood.
For the record though, Geyer plays down the former angle. She explains why:
“Everybody wanted me to write that Qaddafi was ‘crazy,’ that he was mad. I refused to do it. That would have made it easy: pat, clear and woefully incomplete…Once a man stopped me on the streets of Chicago and asked me why, on television, I had described Qaddafi as a ‘young colonel who goes to the desert to meditate.’ He would have preferred to keep the image of a mad terrorist leader. I told him that Qaddafi was that, too, [but] that if we did not see these leaders in their entireties, we missed the reality and could fatally misjudge them.”