Dr. Saif Gaddafi and Mustafa Zarti

Up to London to collect my Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. My name is Dr. Taki from now on, and Jeremy Clarke can eat his heart out. If he’d stay out of pubs and do some research instead, he might one day get a Ph.D. like Dr. Gaddafi and Dr. Taki. Actually, my thesis was on the environmentally friendly method of converting Gaddafis into waste. The ceremony did not last long. It took me less time to write my thesis on how to convert a Gaddafi into s—-. Still, Professor David Held pronounced that I “cut an impressive figure, have a calm, articulate manner, and make many intelligent and perceptive points.” He also said that I was “genuinely popular.” What makes me laugh about the infamous Saif Gaddafi, Ph.D., is that he insists he never plagiarized anything. His ghostwriter did. Like the rest of his family, Saif Gaddafi cannot string a proper English sentence together and never will.

This aside, the LSE is not the only institution to totally make a fool of itself by taking Gaddafi blood money. The press has been full of reports about the Rothschild and Mandelson connection to the ghastly Saif, but it was Fiat, the Italian automaker, which first brought his father in from the cold back in 1976. I remember being on Gianni Agnelli’s boat off Corfu sometime in May or June of that year when the deal was finalized: 5% of Fiat for 400 million greenbacks. The 5% was bought back after a while, but Gaddafi still owns 7.5% of Juventus, the Torino football giant, and I’d hate to think what else in Italy. Uncle Sam, who pretends to be appalled by European greed in cozying up to the bloody dictator, speaks with forked tongue. The heads of multi-billion-dollar investment funds Blackstone and Carlyle—Stephen Schwarzman and David Rubenstein, respectively—attended the wedding of Mustafa Zarti, a close friend of Saif’s and the real power behind Libya’s Sovereign Wealth Fund and its $70-billion assets. What I find bizarre is how amateurish and unprofessional the Libyan fund is, with a lack of investment expertise and bureaucratic inertia ruling the day. Zarti is a real horror, the Arab equivalent of Avigdor Lieberman, but both Schwarzman and Rubinstein bent and kissed his ring in Tripoli back in 2009, brown-nosing the vile Zarti in the best Tony Blair manner.