About Lou Hamburger
- Buddy, not buddha
Let me begin by introducing myself. I was born in Almelo, in The Netherlands, on September 20, 1960 at 7:50 AM. I am the second of four sons to Dutch parents; I was raised in a very rural area, the ‘Maas en Waal’ region. My family did not really hold any dogmatic or religious beliefs, but we participated in the rituals that came with Catholicism, probably to blend in with our community. The priest at my grammar school appointed me as an altar boy. I found it a waste of time, but I did not have a real choice. After all, it was considered a privilege. I remember the priest drinking the remaining wine after Mass, and I wondered whether that was proper or not. We had to use last week’s prayer booklets as toilet paper. That was definitely not proper; they didn’t do the job. I may have asked some tough questions now and then and, as a result, I did not keep the role for long because I was deemed not ‘serious’ enough. By the time I was ten or eleven, we only went to church on Christmas Eve, as a tradition. I found Mass boring and the church cold, but I loved the breakfast with sausage rolls we always got afterwards! When I was very young, my parents did not have a lot of money but they saved enough to treat us to a yearly vacation. We visited Austria, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and even Yugoslavia. These travels were exceptional in the 1960s and 1970s. I am very grateful to my parents for these trips, because they broadened my view of the world from a very young age.
My Education
- Nijenrode University
My father worked as an inspector of cattle and meat and my mother was a housewife. My parents both worked very hard, but being a civil servant my father could not afford the best education for his sons. So, at the beginning of the 1970s, he and a business partner started a free weekly newspaper with local community and sport news sponsored by ads from local retailers. After five years of hard work, the newspaper made enough money to generate additional income. My father was able to afford our expensive university studies and I went to Nijenrode, a semi-private business school. I am still grateful for the efforts of my parents that allowed us to develop, think for ourselves and become independent. I don’t know much about my mother’s real family as she doesn’t discuss her childhood much. Most of my mother’s relatives died during the Holocaust. To the best of my knowledge, my mother’s mother was regarded as 100% Jewish according to Jewish and Nazi law, even though my grandmother herself abandoned her Jewish faith years before the Nazis came into power. My non-religious and non-Jewish grandfather also stayed away from dogmatic religions. He was an actor in Amsterdam. The story that was passed on to me was that he escorted my grandmother to the tram used for her deportation and either decided or was forced to join her. He died about nine months later in Dachau, a concentration camp for non-Jewish problem cases near Munich, Germany. My grandmother survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp and the Ravensbrück death camp, but died a few days after its liberation, probably as a result of diseases and exhaustion and the low priority the Dutch government gave to the timely repatriation of camp survivors. My mother survived the Dutch hunger winter of 1944-1945 as a person in hiding under the most difficult circumstances. Soon after the war she was adopted by a casual family acquaintance in Antwerp. There she was discriminated against and was mistreated once again until she eventually met my father in 1956. The wounds created by Dutch, German and Belgian citizens before, during and after the war never healed completely and had a huge impact on her, as well as on my father, my three brothers and myself.
My Travels
- Hotel Room in Al Khobar
As a business consultant, I have traveled to dozens of countries and states in the western world and the Middle East. I have never believed in any dogmatic religion, but there was no check-box for such a position on the application form I encountered when I applied for a working permit for Saudi Arabia. They pushed me to enter ‘Christian,’ and so I did. Despite that entry, I became a Muslim by mistake. The authorities had inadvertently issued a Muslim instead of a Christian iqama (work permit), and, at the end of 2003, I went to Saudi Arabia to work on the implementation of a computer system. As a Muslim I was allowed to visit Mecca, but before I could benefit from the error, it was corrected on my work permit. The Arabian project became a difficult challenge in a variety of ways. There was little progress in the contract with the agency, payments were delayed and reduced regularly, and the project itself had serious implementation issues. I discovered the hard way that I could not take the honorable way out. They stopped me at the border when I tried to escape the country and I was locked in until an exit visa was issued. When this stamp finally adorned my passport, I was punished by the agency and a month’s pay was withheld from me on account of my leaving. Eight weeks after I left, terrorists raided the village where I had lived and killed twenty hostages. Four of these hostages were shot in the hotel room where I had stayed.
My Motivation
My experiences in Saudi Arabia, and those during other projects and various vacations in many other countries, have compelled me to write this trilogy. My intention is to help the leaders and people of Saudi Arabia, as well as leaders and people everywhere else in the world find a way out. It is intimidating for me to do this because, like all the citizens of the Earth, our leaders control me. They can do what they like, and if they do not like me they can ignore, deny, threaten, scandalize, punish, torture or kill me. I can become an outcast, a fool or a terrorist, just by writing an open letter to our leaders.
Although I try to write in the most eloquent way, I understand that my message will not appeal to all leaders. What will this king, business leader, oil baron and politician think of me? I can only say that I am doing the best I can to save the planet with as many people as possible on it, including our leaders. And it should be pointed out that I do not want our leaders to go away. I want them to stay! They helped make the world into what it is today and they are the most effective people in finding a way out of this mess. After all, they are leaders.
I can only help if our leaders allow my message to be heard, although it may be very hard to swallow. In my books and on my website I just write down my vision, beliefs and solutions. No one is required to read them, let alone implement my suggestions.
I understand that there will be a lot of criticism and skepticism of my ideas, primarily voiced from our leaders through their public media channels. They feel responsible although there is not much they can do within the current system to change things for the better. For example, imagine what would happen if a president of a large banking consotium would suddenly say: "I don't think compound interest is beneficial to mankind. Let's organize a press conference to announce that we will stop charging interest on our loans." I can assure you that a press conference is organized, but another announcement will be made. They have very little room to manouvre. Like myself, they also do the best they can. But they have a choice. They can also choose to do things differently from the way they have been doing them for years. I know that most people in executive positions are older. I cannot change them easily. In fact, I cannot change them at all. They can only change themselves.
