Muammar al-Qaddafi, the de facto leader of Libya, loomed large on a screen before dozens of students and faculty gathered in the ICC Auditorium on Wednesday morning. Appearing via satellite from Libya, al-Qaddafi, who is often referred to as a dictator, shared his views on the Israeli-Palestinian “headache” in the Middle East and answered questions about oil, missing dissidents, and terrorism.
See no evil: Al-Qaddafi adjusts his glasses before his lecture.
“If you take the Jews to Honolulu, or Alaska, or some island, they can live in isolation and preserve their purity,” he said, explaining his arguments from “Isralestine,” a pamphlet that outlines his suggestion for reaching peace in Palestine.
“If you truly want to preserve your purity, you can give them an island in the Pacific. In the Middle East, it is impossible,” he said.
During the conference’s question-and-answer session, students and faculty focused their questions on Libya’s past.
Michael Hudson, professor in the School of Foreign Service and Director of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, asked about the fate of the former chair of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Mansour Kikhia, an outspoken critic of Libya’s civil rights violations who disappeared from a Cairo hotel in 1993. Many believe the Libyan government is connected to his disappearance.
Al-Qaddafi replied that Kikhia “preferred to live abroad” because of his disagreements with the revolutionary committees, and that when he disappeared, the Libyan government attempted to find him, but his family abandoned the search.
The question-and-answer portion of the conference also included discussion of Libya’s vast oil supply, which al-Qaddafi said his nation has seriously considered nationalizing in response to diving oil prices. He also responded to a question about his country’s independent decision to dismantle its nuclear arms program.
Asked about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, which international tribunals have attributed to several Libyan terrorists, Qaddafi quickly deflected the question.
“My son, my son, this file has been closed,” he said. “It is not in the interest of anyone that we start in what we call grave digging. If you want to go to arbitration, Libya will turn out to be innocent of anything.”
After the conference, members of the families of two men who died on Pan Am Flight 103 revealed that they had been in the audience.
“There is a Libyan terrorist incarcerated in a Scottish prison for this,” Kathleen Flynn, the mother of three Georgetown graduates whose oldest son died in the crash, said. “When you think about terrorism, you now have a human face to place on it—ours. And now you have another.”
