Aloysius Update: Too Many Siddiquis for One Dummy to Behold

Early Saturday morning, about the time the rooster was crowing and the buckwheat cake was in our mouth, we caught a TV rebroadcast of the March 2 Houston City Council meeting, or at least most of the public comments portion of that convocation, which featured several speakers associated with the ISGH Mosque on Old Galveston Road in southeast Houston. They had come before the council to complain about a false report of a hostage-taking allegedly phoned in to HPD by two Muslim gentlemen who, if we caught the speakers' drift, are also somehow associated with facility and one of whose name is "Siddiqui."

It was difficult to discern exactly what was the nature of the mosque-goers' complaint(s)––one seemed irked that HPD had responded to the call with (according to him) guns drawn, while another, a hijab-clad lady who for upcoming Census purposes most likely will check off "non-Hispanic white," seemed to be complaining that no criminal charges had been filed in the incident, although, thanks to deft questioning by the mayor and some council members, it apparently* was established that no one had bothered to file a formal complaint about what was described several times as a "prank." (We suspect that such "pranks" aren't commonly used to settle disputes or get attention at, say, Second Baptist Church, but we could be wrong, as usual.)

The mayor and several council members lobbed forth some queries in an effort to suss-out the murky episode, then the wheel of misfortune spun 'round to our very own non-resident council member from District F, the less-than-honorable Aloysius D. Hoang, who, while addressing the above-mentioned hijab-clad complainant, veered off into a little vocal jag we can only accurately describe as "bizarre." As best we could tell, Al D. appeared to be suggesting that this "Siddiqui" was a cop or some kind of city employee who had done a lot of good for the community, the city, whatever, by translating documents to or from Urdu as well as some other stuff and that the hijab-clad complainant ought to balance and take into account all the good that Siddiqui had done against this one apparently isolated incident, or something exactly like that. We began paying very close attention at that moment, for it appeared that not only had Al Hoang revealed that someone stupid enough to phone-in a false report of a hostage-taking to the police was in the employ of Houston taxpayers but that this person was deserving of some kind of preferential treatment. (When Aloysuis D. is indicted on some criminal charge or another, don't say you weren't warned.) The mayor, seeming to sense that the episode had entered new territory, told the complainant that she needed to take the matter up with so-and-so at the back of the council chambers, apparently because an open council meeting was not the proper venue to discuss such an allegation against a city employee.

At that point, Council member Clarence Bradford, who's been impressing us with his crisp, Joe Friday-approach to council discourse, interjected, "Mayor, I believe this is a different Siddiqui."

"Well," laughed the mayor, looking relieved, "as we know, there are a lot of Siddiquis."

We interpreted this as a factual (there are indeed a lot of Siddiquis) and diplomatic stab at bringing the proceedings back to Earth from Planet Hoang. We, however, have no use for diplomacy in our line of work (truth-telling), so let us unequivocally state what everyone around the council cul-de-sac was thinking at the moment: "My God but AL HOANG IS ONE COLOSSAL DUMBASS."

*We must employ such weasel words because this entire mosque incident was very poorly explained by the complainants, although it sounds as if it'd be a fascinating subject for some credentialed member of the Mainstream News and Infotainment Media (MNIM) to explore at length.