Not exactly. The Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience is being designed by the by the firm that developed Disneyland. Err.. wouldn’t that be Walt Disney? Sort of. Exporting American style amusement parks like Euro Disney have been about as successful as the Iraq War, and these are in countries we didn’t invade. From the Times Online: A $1 million skateboard park, the first phase of the development, will open in July. Parts for 200,000 skateboards and materials to build ramps will be shipped from America to Iraq for assembly at state-owned factories and distributed free to Iraqi children along with helmets and knee pads. Shipping materials to build ramps? Is this going to be a $1 million prefab park? Do they want to make Iraq’s youth hate the U.S. even more? Does Haliburton own a piece of SkateWave? We don’t want to actually help the people of Iraq, we just want to make them love America. (Warning: Crackpot alert on that previous link.) This is not going to be a state owned Iraqi public park. The company developing the park is leasing the land for 50 years, so they’ll need to charge money. Are they going to give away skateboards…

Welsh Pete via Sleestak found this video of some Arab skateboarding action that complements some of the stuff we’ve posted lately. Rather than reinterpret, I’ll poach use his own words: So between the ages of 10 and 17 I lived in Bahrain. The only kids that really skated were us Brits and Yanks. Not many Bahrainis skated. So its good to see them getting into it. One of my friend’s was just out there and he sent me this vid of the locs trying to kill themselves…. Thats right you can have all these preconceived ideas about Muslims and Arabs but some like skateboarding, fucking about and heavy metal just like you…. Well, I don’t like heavy metal, (except Dethklok and the Darkness) but I like skateboarding. This is the kind of thing Pete should be posting on Skate and Annoy instead of making be poach it from him.

I heard the President of my country on the radio lying this morning. He must have been lying because he was talking. Anyway, mentioned something about the recent escalation in violence in Iraq, which is a great excuse to post this retread of a retread story about skateboarding during the time of operation Desert Storm. The story has resurfaced on a sketchy website called Skateboarding Magazine. I say sketchy because it is brand new and is mostly populated with generic articles that seem like they are more designed to drive traffic for Google Ad Words than they are to actually express a point of view about something. Kind of like what you might hire a room full of monkeys for. Originally this story was associated with a web property called sk8shop.com, and was circulated in an email from Louie Bar. I got two of them back in ’03 and ’04. Right now sk8shop.com is dedicated to selling you photos of pro skaters taken at different public events. It’s Louie Baur’s story, so maybe he’s behind the Skateboarding Magazine. It’s titled “Skateboarding in Desert Storm” but that’s actually a little misleading since all the skateboarding action takes place in Turkey, well…

Boards, bikinis, bombs and boneheads is the working title for this post, but I don’t want people to get the wrong idea. I’ve got a mish mash of skateboarding action from Dubai and Israel. Some of it has more serious overtones, and some of it is stupidity. The rest falls in between.

This spot is called Yad Lebanim, and it’s in Jerusalem, Israel. It’s a memorial for soldiers killed in the IDF, or Israeli Defense Force. Something tells me that any skateboarding on the premises would be met with a swift response. Something more forceful than what happens when dipshits in the U.S. decide to skate on war memorials, no matter where they might have gotten the inspiration. Seth Levy sent in these pictures after seeing the Yad Kennedy spot check. I guess “yad” means “memorial” in Hebrew then.

Dave Tobin sent me a picture to tie in with the Israeli energy bar commercial that has skateboarding in it. It’s some very skateable architecture by David Resnick designed as a memorial for John F. Kennedy outside of Jerusalem, Israel. I had a hard time finding pictures of the “Jerusalem Kennedy Memorial” online, but if you type in “Yad Kennedy” you get better results. Must be hebrew. Still, there’s not a whole lot of information available on this site. The monument was built in 1966 with funds donated by Jewish communities in the USA. Would this be called street skating even though it has tranny?

What about all the skateboarding Jews? We just don’t see Hanukka skateboarding marketing tie ins like we do with Christmas. Jew, Gentile, regular, goofy… it’s all the same. I don’t even know when Hanukkah is, it’s probably over already. Here’s an Israeli TV commercial for what looks like an exploding energy bar that blatantly rips off the Girl Yeah Right! video. Who knows, Maybe Spike Jonze directed this one too.