Wednesday, June 29, 2005

In praise of reality TV

Phillips praises reality TV for breaking down racial stereotypes
By Ciar Byrne, Media Correspondent, The Independent

All good stuff and some v. valid points. Was struck by this extract though:

"The Apprentice, in which contenders vied for a £100,000 work placement with the business tycoon Sir Alan Sugar, was singled out for commendation because the final four contestants came from immigrant backgrounds.

Mr Phillips paid tribute to the show's winner, Tim Campbell, who was at the ceremony. He said: "In spite of being a black man, who grew up with a single parent, you've turned up to work on time, and you haven't, as far as I'm aware, yet spent the whole of your first year's salary on blow."'

I'm sure TP's comments were intended to be ironic, but it looks quite dodgy out of context and on the page...

Monday, June 27, 2005

Zimbabwe

Terrible things are happening.

Good post from Harry's Place, but if you have time please follow the link to Norm's blog inside it.

Friday, June 24, 2005

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian presidential contender

Wouldn't want this dude running my country... Not sure if I care who wins the election in Iran, though - the idea that the alternative candidate Rafsanjani is a "moderate" in any normal terms is a joke, and at least with this guy it would be harder for European appeasers to make out he's a good thing.

Opposition unites to keep out Iran's Islamic 'fascist'
Telegraph
23/06/2005

Reformists and moderate conservatives will swallow their differences and join forces tomorrow in a bid to defeat the presidential ambitions of an ultra-hardline candidate who they fear could turn Iran's political clock back to its revolutionary heyday.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a seasoned radical who was involved in planning the 1979 hostage seizure at the US embassy in Teheran, surprised many by coming second out of seven candidates in the first round of voting last week to secure a place in the run-off tomorrow.

Tacitly backed by Iran's all-powerful religious establishment, he made an unexpectedly strong showing on the basis of the rigidly anti-reformist agenda he promoted while serving as mayor of Teheran.

He shut down fast food restaurants and forced male and female council workers to use separate lifts. In his city hall fiefdom, he has required all male city employees to have beards and long sleeves.

His political rivals have put aside their differences to secure the defeat of the man they label an Islamic "fascist".

"I heard Ahmadinejad say on the radio that if he comes to power women will have a choice of three colours to wear publicly - black, grey or navy," said one 26-year-old secretary.

He has shown little enthusiasm for the ballot box process, famously remarking once that "we did not have a revolution in order to have democracy".

The bedrock of Mr Ahmadinejad's support is the Abadgaran, a faction of arch-conservatives whose notions of Islamic propriety go as far as objecting to curvaceous clothes dummies in shop windows.

Lithuania's Zhirinovsky

I'm off to Estonia and Latvia for a hol this August, and have been reading the guide book about the Baltic States.

Unfortunately the one thing that keeps grabbing my attention is all the asides about how the Balts gladly bumped off their Jews (including my family, who lived near Vilnius in Lithuania), often with an enthusiasm and viciousness that trumped the SS. Here's a charming quote from Vytautas Sustauskas (great names, the Lithuanians), head of the anti-Semitic Lithuanian Freedom League:

Wikipedia - Vytautas Sustauskas
If Hitler wouldn't have killed the Jews, I'd now have to shine their shoes in the middle of Freedom Avenue

and an (out-of-date) report on Baltic anti-semitism in general:
Anti-Semitism Worldwide 1999/2000 - Baltic Republics

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Islamic separatists targeting Thai Buddhists

The Buddhists' turn now...

Islamic separatists targeting Thai Buddhists
Telegraph
23/06/2005

Islamic separatists in southern Thailand have carried out a series of beheadings and other killings aimed at scaring off the minority Buddhist population, officials have said.

Iraqi army hostage survives 22 days of torture by rebels

Jesus H Christ....

Iraqi army hostage survives 22 days of torture by rebels
Telegraph
20/06/2005

A hostage who was found shackled in a torture room in Iraq by American soldiers has described how he was tormented for 22 days with electric shocks and daily beatings for no obvious reason. ... He was locked in a darkened room, with his face covered with black tape and he was flogged with rubber truncheons. The electric shocks felt "like my soul being ripped out of my body". But when his body went into spasm, his captors would beat him. He said he was never questioned and did not know why he had been captured.

US marines who burst into the building at the weekend, during an operation to flush insurgents out of the border towns, found Mr Fathil with three other captives. One had been beaten unconscious and the two others were so emaciated that they needed hospital treatment. The room was equipped with electric wires, a noose, handcuffs and a 574-page manual entitled The Principles of Jihadist Philosophy. It included chapters on ''How to Select the Best Hostage'' and ''The Legitimacy of Cutting the Infidel's Head''.

Radical Islam as Its Own Antidote? Algeria & Iran compared

Very interesting comparison of the fate of Islamism where it is suppressed (Algeria) or succeeds (Iran), with two experts (one of them Pipes) drawing opposite conclusions about how best to combat it.

Radical Islam as Its Own Antidote
Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
June 23, 2005

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Why reading to your child is a waste of time

I bumped into Andy on the way to work this morning, he told me about an interesting-sounding book "Freakonomics" that his dad is reading. This sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn't say why. It turns out that the Times article I'd been reading on the train 20 mins earlier and was intending to blog is an extract from that book! So destiny demands the following posting:

You thought you knew how to be a parent? Wrong: it isn't what you do, it's who you are
by Steven Levitt
Times 2 - Cover Story
22/06/2005
An American economist has overturned our assumptions about society's ills in a new book, Freakonomics. In our first extract the crucial factors that will determine a child's success - or failure - at school are outlined

Consider the following list of 16 factors. According to the ECLS data, eight of the factors show a strong correlation — positive or negative — with test scores. The other eight don’t seem to matter. Feel free to guess which are which.

1. The child has highly educated parents.
2. The child’s family is intact.
3. The child’s parents have high socioeconomic status.
4. The child’s parents recently moved into a better neighbourhood.
5. The child’s mother was thirty or older at the time of her first child’s birth.
6. The child’s mother didn’t work between birth and kindergarten.
7. The child had low birth weight.
8. The child attended Head Start (America’s pre-school programme for children from low-income families).
9. The child’s parents speak English in the home.
10. The child’s parents regularly take him to museums.
11. The child is adopted.
12. The child is regularly spanked.
13. The child’s parents are involved in the PTA.
14. The child frequently watches television.
15. The child has many books in his home.
16. The child’s parents read to him nearly every day.

Monday, June 20, 2005

Al-Zarqawi is an American Agent (apparently)

JSL's technical abilities not having improved recently, here's another spot of his that I'm posting on his behalf.

His comment: Excellent piece of investigative journalism. This kind of stuff will stand up in any western court. You just can’t stop the brilliance of a middle eastern journalist once he applies his massive intellect.

Leading Egyptian Government Daily Al-Akhbar: "Al-Zarqawi is an American Agent"
Memri
17/6/05

In a June 15, 2005 editorial titled "All the Evidence Proves that Al-Zarqawi is an American Agent," a leading Egyptian government daily Al-Akhbar's states that Al-Zarqawi is working for the U.S. and is massacring Iraqis in an effort to extend the occupation in Iraq.

Steyn slams Live8 & Andy Kershaw (Shock!)

I have to admit, I found this quite funny in places:

Africa must learn the boring stuff
By Mark Steyn

Best line: "... when Midge Ure gives you an inferiority complex you know you've got a self-esteem problem." [And I quite like Midge Ure - Dan]

Thursday, June 16, 2005

Jewish graveyards attacked in the UK - Independent

Two stories from today's Indie, the first (I think) the leading article. Copied here in their entirety as the Indie makes them pay-per-view a day or two after publication.

The shocking face of anti-Semitism
At a West Ham cemetery yesterday: the 117th attack on a Jewish graveyard in 15 years
The Independent
16 June 2005

The graves of the two children - Rachel, aged 13, and Abraham, aged four and a half - had stood undisturbed side by side for almost 150 years. But yesterday their headstones lay smashed, the Hebrew inscriptions, etched on fine Portland stone, crumbling in the dust.

Only yards away on an intricately crafted tomb, the words "Jew Boy Dead. Ha Ha" were scrawled in marker pen. Swastikas defaced the headstones of some of the 87 graves desecrated at West Ham cemetery in east London, where generations of Jews have been buried since the mid-19th century.

Vandals wreaked a trail of destruction, smashing and kicking over headstones in an act which has shocked the Jewish community. The main target of the attack appeared to be a grand circular mausoleum, built in the 19th century by the Rothschilds, one of Britain's most prominent Jewish families.

It is the latest in a rising number of racially motivated attacks on Jewish cemeteries across Britain. This was the 117th Jewish cemetery desecrated in Britain since 1990 and the third to be discovered in a week.

On the wall of the Rainham Jewish cemetery in Essex, it was discovered yesterday, two giant swastikas and the words "Yids out" had been daubed in paint. Last week, vandals smashed 100 gravestones in a historic cemetery in Manchester.

The desecration is part of a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Britain, including violent attacks on children and orthodox Jews. There were 532 anti-Semitic incidents last year, the highest since records began 20 years ago.

Earlier this week, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance said it was "concerned at the considerable and steady increase of anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom."

"While these incidents usually mirror tensions in the Middle East, representatives of the Jewish communities report there now seems to be a higher level of background violence against these communities," the report by the European human rights watchdog said. "Although manifestations of anti-Semitism continue to come from extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi groups, an increasing number ... is reportedly coming from Muslim fundamentalist groups," the report said.

"It has now regrettably become commonplace to desecrate Jewish cemeteries," said a spokesman for the Community Security Trust, which offers security advice to the Jewish community. "These acts must be treated seriously by the police and the judiciary should pass deterrent sentences in these cases."

Melvyn Hartog, head of burials for the United synagogues, was picking his way yesterday through the mess of graves in West Ham. Standing before the broken headstones of children, he said: "Tell me what these kids have done to people? These are dead kids. They can't fight back. This is the greatest form of cowardice you'll find."

The circular tomb, designed for the Rothschilds by Matthew Digby Wyatt, the architect of the India office in Whitehall, had its door battered in with iron bars, ripped from the sides of tombs.

The 4th Baron Rothschild was said to be aware of the desecration but declined to comment.

Police visited the cemetery and removed items for forensic examination. Detective Inspector Steve Lane, of Newham police, described the vandalism as "a despicable racist attack" and asked anyone with information to come forward.

A clue to the identity of the those responsible was found on the side of an elegant mausoleum, where the words "A Hitler" and several swastikas were scrawled. A number of graffiti "tags", including "snow-man and Greedy" were scribbled alongside, suggesting that teenagers were involved. The scrawled swastikas were the wrong way round.

Members of the Jewish community said they had no doubt the motive was anti-Semitic. Directly next door to the Jewish cemetery is a communal graveyard that was left untouched.

-----------------------


Defaced, the Rothschild mausoleum that has stood for 140 years
The Independent
16 June 2005

The Rothschild mausoleum - the centrepiece of West Ham Jewish Cemetery - is a memorial to the tragic end of the brief but intense happiness that two of the family found at the height of the dynasty's fortunes as the kings of European banking.

When Evelina ("Evy") Rothschild (daughter of Lionel Rothschild, founder of NM Rothschild bank in London) married her cousin Ferdinand Rothschild, the son of Baron Anselm Rothschild (head of the bank in Vienna), in 1865 they formed a notably happy union.

The wedding took place at Evy's parents' mansion in Piccadilly. Benjamin Disraeli, who gave the wedding toast, found Ferdinand "a most fascinating youth". From their honeymoon, Evy wrote to her parents that she found Ferdinand "a dear old duck" (they were both 26).

In 1865 the Rothschild family was at the height of its fortunes. Just 50 years after making an international reputation their name was a byword for solid worth in world banking. Before the rise of the great American financial combines and the London clearing banks, Rothschild ruled the roost in Europe, having overtaken Barings and Hottinguers as the biggest international lenders.

The huge cousinage that spread across Europe were great patrons of architecture and collectors of art and antiquities. Ferdinand and Evy's honeymoon was as much a tour of the family empire as a celebration of their union. They returned to London at the end of the year and set up house in Piccadilly, a few doors down from her parents. After a wholesome summer holiday at Scarborough, surrounded by relations, Evy returned to London to await the birth of her first child. The boy was stillborn on 4 December 1866 and Evy died later the same day.

The shock in the family was intense. Evy's cousin Constance recorded in her diary "coming up to London and reading that terrible message in the paper. It was enough to arrive all trembling with fear and anguish. The house, all dark and shut up, confirmed our unhappy fear. And then, the sight of the mourners - oh, it went to my heart. Saw the bedroom, that gay, bright room with the motionless form on the bed, with the poor, tiny baby on the sofa. Oh, what a sight."

The mausoleum in West Ham was built to house Evy's remains. Ferdinand also built, equipped and endowed the Evelina Hospital for children in Southwark, south London, in her memory. The hospital, with 100 beds, was the most modern of its day.

Ferdinand, in the family tradition of grand philanthropy, also became a benefactor of the Hospital for Consumptives in Brompton Road, west London, and St George's Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, in central London.

In the remaining 30 years of his life as a politician - he was MP for Aylesbury, and an intimate of Gladstone and the Prince of Wales - and an avid art collector. He never remarried and dedicated his life (including the building of Waddesdon, the great mansion in Buckinghamshire) to his wife's memory.

After his father's death in 1874 he had the wherewithal not only to build Waddesdon, but to fill it with French furniture, a collection of Sèvres porcelain and the best of English portraits by Romney, Gainsborough and Reynolds. After Ferdinand's death in 1898 his Rothschild heirs kept on the house until it was given to the National Trust by Mr and Mrs Jimmy de Rothschild. When Dolly de Rothschild died in 1990, leaving the largest will proved in Britain to that date, the family interest in the house passed to Evy's great great nephew Jacob Rothschild, the present Baron Rothschild, whose continuing investment in the house was highlighted in a recent documentary series on the National Trust. The house suffered a burglary at the time of the making of this documentary. Many of the snuffboxes collected by Ferdinand and his father were lost.

When Ferdinand died in 1898 he was buried by his wife in their mausoleum in West Ham - the woman, he wrote, who "had so grown into my heart that my only wishes, cares, joys, affections, whatever sentiments in fact a man possesses were directly or indirectly wound with her existence".

Under attack

MARCH 2004: AGECROFT CEMETERY, SALFORD
A Jewish gravestone is covered in black paint, defaced with a black marker pen and repeatedly hit with a brick.

JUNE 2004: LINTHORPE CEMETERY, MIDDLESBROUGH
A total of 68 gravestones are pushed over and smashed in an attack on the Jewish quarter of the historic cemetery.

AUGUST 2004: WITTON CEMETERY, BIRMINGHAM
Two men smash or push over about 60 graves and are charged with racially aggravated offences.

SEPTEMBER 2004: DALSTON ROAD CEMETERY, CARLISLE
Swastikas and SS signs are carved into the headstone of a Jewish grave.

NOVEMBER 2004: REDAN ROAD CEMETERY, ALDERSHOT, HAMPSHIRE
Fifteen headstones are defaced with swastikas, SS signs and other Nazi insignia.

JANUARY 2005: REDAN ROAD CEMETERY, ALDERSHOT, HAMPSHIRE
Two months later, the same cemetery is attacked, one grave is daubed with C18 - the name of a far-right militant group.

JUNE 2005: RAINSOUGH JEWISH CEMETERY, PRESTWICH, MANCHESTER
About 100 headstones are vandalised, including the graves of Holocaust survivors, in the ninth attack on the cemetery in a decade.

JUNE 2005: WEST HAM CEMETERY, EAST LONDON
The doors of a mausoleum at the cemetery are forced open, 87 gravestones are vandalised, some with painted swastikas.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Grammar Schools

No, not a return to the 11+. Rather a weak pun introducing this article:

Grammatically incorrect

Almost 40 per cent of 11-year-olds fail to reach the writing standards set by secondary schools. Is it any wonder, when many teachers would struggle too?

By Steve McCormack

Here are a few examples of glaring errors spotted in reports about to be put into envelopes at a big comprehensive just outside London this week:

"Sarah should of revised more thoroughly for her end of unit test."

"Your very capable of doing well in this subject."

"Try and practise the keyboard regularly."

Houmas with Hamas?

Alright it's an appalling title for this post, but here's the indefatigable Melanie Phillips on the revelation that British diplomats have been visiting elecyed Hamas officials.

Into the sewers with Hamas

The BBC reported a genuine scoop on the Today programme (0732) this morning. In the wake of last month's victory by Hamas in the local election, reporter James Reynolds went to see the new acting mayor -- only to bump into two medium-ranking British diplomats leaving a meeting with said Hamas apparatchik. Thus the BBC stumbled across Britain's dirty little secret -- that despite the fact that it has declared Hamas to be a proscribed terrorist organisation, it has quietly started to treat it as a legitimate political party and deal with its representatives.

Here's the story as it appeared in the Guardian:

Straw confirms British contact with Hamas

Israelis pressure Straw over UK contacts with Hamas

And a leader article saying that both Britain & Israel are being hypocritical in their latest pronouncements:

Part of the solution too?

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Bush is an idiot, but he was right about Saddam - Berman

I have referred to Paul Berman and his brilliant book before. Here a summary of his views which I commend to you all.

JP

PS You had to sit through an annoying Flash ad to get access to the article on its original site, which is why I have posted it here in its entirety. Apologies for the length.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Bush is an idiot, but he was right about Saddam
Paul Berman, one of the most provocative thinkers on the left, has a message for the antiwar movement: Stop marching and start fighting to spread liberal values in the Middle East.
By Suzy Hansen
March 22, 2003

On Sept. 11, Paul Berman, political and cultural critic and author of "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968" watched from his roof as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. That day, Berman says, he "woke up" to the threat of what he calls Islamic totalitarianism. Berman lives in Brooklyn, just around the corner from the Al Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue where a Yemeni cleric was recently convicted of funneling $20 million to Osama bin Laden.

During the last year and a half he has picked his way through the Islamic bookstores in his neighborhood, hunting down volumes by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual whose "In the Shade of the Qur'an" is the groundwork for Islamic fundamentalism. Berman finds Qutb's analysis of the "hideous schizophrenia" of modern society "rich, nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt." Qutb's work also convinced Berman that in Islamism we face a threat not unlike such 20th century totalitarian movements as fascism and communism. Berman feels similarly about Baathism, the nationalist ideology of Iraq's ruling party.

In fact, Berman believes that Islamism and Baathism emerged from the same great rift in liberal society, the First World War. "Terror and Liberalism," Berman's bracing new book, suggests that just as liberal-minded Europeans and Americans doubted the threats of Hitler and Stalin, enlightened Westerners today are in danger of missing the urgency of the violent ideologies coming out of the Muslim world.

The argument put forward by Berman, who is one of the most elegant and provocative thinkers to emerge from America's New Left, will both infuriate and engage those on all sides of the political spectrum. In a recent interview with Salon, Berman insisted that while he does not support the Bush administration -- actually, he detests how President Bush has handled the case for war and warns "we will pay for it" -- he thinks it was also dangerous for the antiwar movement to ignore the threat that was posed by a ruthless Iraqi regime that killed a million people and threatened the stability of the world.

We spoke with Berman in New York, before and after bombs started falling on Baghdad.

Had you been interested in Islamism and Baathism before Sept. 11?

No. Yes, in a general way, but I hadn't paid special attention to it. Then it became obvious to me on Sept. 11 that the giant screw-up by the FBI and the CIA and the Pentagon was also a giant screw-up by the journalists and intellectuals and everyone else. We too hadn't been paying attention.

Why do you think it was easy for all of these people to miss the idea, which becomes the central argument of your book, that these Arab movements are extensions of totalitarianism?

A lot of people have misunderstood the nature of Islamism for a whole series of reasons. The biggest and most important of those reasons is Eurocentrism, which prevented people from looking at these movements at all. And the Eurocentrism has a flip side, a soft-headed multiculturalism in which movements in other parts of the world are regarded as hopelessly and wonderfully exotic and not to be judged or analyzed. In the last 20 years literally millions of people have been slaughtered by these movements and the wars they've begun. All of this has received a shockingly small amount of attention.

Another reason that these movements have received very little attention has to do with anti-Zionism, the true origin of which is anti-Semitism, the assumption that the Jews are the center of the world and therefore the center of the world's evil. So the problems of the Muslim world in the Middle East can be located in the tiny issue of a border dispute in a place the size of Connecticut. Across the world people are convinced of this. It's a preposterous idea, but this idea is really widely shared. Anybody who holds this idea therefore has carte blanche to ignore the fact that the Iran-Iraq war killed a million people or that Islamism in the Sudan has killed between 1.5 million and 2 million people, or that 100,000 people have been killed in Algeria.

So you're saying that we're likely to ignore these forms of Islamist violence because we're consumed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

No, I've outlined three reasons. These series of attitudes have flowed together to make it respectable or normal for intellectuals and journalists to pay no attention at all to these vast tragedies deploying across huge parts of the world. Only when these vast tragedies came and hit us in the face did a lot of people wake up. Among those people was me.

Does this also have to do with this idea that we think history ended in 1989?

Yes. It absolutely does. This is part of the Eurocentrism. We imagine that because the Cold War ended in Europe that the whole series of struggles that began in Europe with the First World War and then went through the different totalitarian movements -- fascist, Nazi and communist -- had finally come to an end. Many people were so caught up in the more or less victory of liberal democratic ideas and institutions that there was a tendency to imagine that problems in other parts of the world were just going to be regional problems that really weren't deeply going to affect us. All that was a scandalous delusion.

And in fact you're arguing that Islamism and Baathism grew out of the First World War in the same way that communism and fascism did?

It becomes ever more obvious that the First World War was the great trauma of modern civilization. Something huge cracked in the First World War and has never been repaired. Out of the First World War came a series of rebellions against liberal civilization. These rebellions were accusations that liberal civilization was not just hypocritical or flawed, but was in fact the single great source of evil or suffering in the world. Then the accusation was followed by the proposal to build a civilization of a completely new kind, which would not be liberal, which would have the quality of a granite rock -- eternal and perfect.

These new ideas were in a sense utopian, but they were also very bloody. Behind all the movements that made these proposals was a pathological fascination with mass death. Mass death was itself the principal fact of the First World War, in which 9 or 10 million people were killed on an industrial basis. And each of the new movements proceeded to reproduce that event in the name of their utopian opposition to the complexities and uncertainties of liberal civilization. The names of these movements varied and the traits that they displayed varied -- one was called Bolshevism, and another was called fascism, another was called Nazism.

So you're saying these movements are similar to Islamism and Baathism, but on a very deep level. You're drawing specific parallels -- what are they?

At some very deep level all these movements were the same -- they all shared certain qualities of mythology, all shared a fascination with mass death and all drew on the same kinds of manias.

My argument is that Islamism and a certain kind of pan-Arabism in the Arab and Muslim worlds are really further branches of the same impulse. Mussolini staged his march on Rome in 1922 for the purpose of creating a perfect totalitarian society that was going to be the resurrection of the Roman Empire. In 1928, in Egypt, just across the Mediterranean, the Muslim Brotherhood was formed for the purpose of resurrecting the ancient Caliphate of the Arab empire of the 7th century, likewise with the idea of creating a perfect society of modern times. Although these two movements were utterly unalike, there was some way in which they were alike.

Fascism in Italy came to power in 1922 and it remained in power until it was overthrown by the Americans and the British. Islamism came to power in various places, beginning in 1979 with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Baathism is yet another variant of the same thing, and probably in the next few days it will, in Iraq, be overthrown by the same Americans and British who overthrew Mussolini.

It seemed to me that what's different about Islamism is that there isn't a country really leading this fight. There's Osama bin Laden, but that's quite different from Hitler.

That's true and it's not true. Islamism did come to power in Iran in 1979, and the Islamic revolution in Iran was a real world force. Then Islamism came to power in the Sudan and Afghanistan, so for a while it was looking like it was advancing quite well. The Iranians are Shi'ite and the other countries are Sunni, so these are different denominations of Islam. But, still, this was a movement that until recently looked like it was advancing in a traditional way -- that is, capturing states.

What's happened with al-Qaida is a complicated situation in which Islamism as a political force capturing states is on the decline because the Taliban was defeated militarily. Also, we can see the beginnings of a liberal revolution hopefully taking root in Iran. Islamism in the Sudan fell. But in spite of that, al-Qaida represents an extremely powerful institution with multiple social bases and banks and charities and great intellectuals behind it, although it doesn't control a state anymore. Still, it's become obvious that al-Qaida's been supported or semi-supported by a variety of states and ruling elites.

And you see the same desire to rule the world in the way that Hitler or Stalin wanted to?

The desire is absolutely to rule the world. That's not a great secret. A great philosopher of Islamist radicalism, Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged by [Egyptian president] Nasser in 1966, said that all plainly. The goal of Islamism is to recreate what Muhammad did in the seventh century, which was to found an Islamic state and bring that state to the entire world. The goal of Islamism is not to resolve some particular social problem here or there, it's not to straighten out some border conflict between Israel and Palestine or between Pakistan and India or Chechnya and Russia, although those are genuine issues. The goal is absolutely grandiose and global.

Do you see that same goal in Baathism?

No. Baathism is a little more modest because Baathism is explicitly an Arab nationalism. So Baathism wants to recreate the Arab empire of the seventh century in some modern version but it's not quite so global and grandiose as Islamism. Also, Baathism is in a state of deep decay. It doesn't make Saddam Hussein any less scary because a state in deep decay can be extremely dangerous, but it's hard to imagine that Baathism has inspired enthusiastic idealism, although it used to.

But you did say in your book that after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, he captured the imagination of the Arab world.

When it looked like he was winning, he had a lot of support. That's probably the danger with him now. If he does get his weapons, if he got the atom bomb, if he was able to fend off the U.S. and Britain, he would certainly gain a lot of followers. It's just that the doctrine of a radical pan-Arabism has become a little tired. Islamism is more of a happening thing.

You argue that secularism is the most terrifying issue to the Islamists.

The Islamist doctrine is that Islam is the answer to the world's problems, but that Islam has been the victim of a giant cosmic conspiracy to destroy it, by Crusaders and Zionists. (Zionism in Qutb's doctrine is not a modern political movement, it's a cosmic doctrine extending over the centuries.) Islam is the victim of this conspiracy, which is also aided by false or hypocritical Muslims, who pretend to be Muslims but are actually the friends of Islam's enemies. From an Islamist point of view, then, the most heinous conspiracy of all is the one led by the Muslim hypocrites to annihilate Islam from within. These people are, above all, the Muslim liberals who want to establish a liberal society, which means separation of church and state.

The first and most grievous step toward the annihilation of Islam is taken by the Turks in 1924, when Kemal Ataturk created a secular Turkey and abolished the institutional remnants of the ancient Caliphate. This was a devastating blow and the whole goal of the Islamist movement has been to undo that.

What does it mean to Islamists to see Turkey as a Western ally?

From their point of view, to see the Turks line up with the U.S. now must be enraging. And the fact that Turkey is led by an Islamist party which appears to have become a liberal party in its principal instincts, this fact must be enraging beyond words.

Well, these passages in your book about anti-secularism in the Arab world really struck me. It seems that this whole neoconservative theory -- the democracy domino theory, arguing that if we bring down Saddam we're going to bring democracy to the entire Middle East -- is countered by the firm-rooted hatred of secularism. Why would we think anyone in the Muslim world would welcome democracy or this liberal secularism that you're talking about?

I don't think that that idea is so preposterous, necessarily. Bush is not proceeding in a way that instills any confidence in me that he's going to pull it off. But the notion of overthrowing Baathism -- a rival/cousin totalitarian movement of Islamism -- and being able to help the Iraqis replace it with some aspect of a liberal society would hearten liberals, people with rationalist ideas and the notion of liberal rights and separation of church and state, throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. If a liberal Iraq could be made a success, that would be hugely encouraging. Whether it could be a success is contingent on what a lot of people do. And I fear that the people who ought to be doing what they can for this are not. Bush is hugely at fault here.

It seems that you are more critical of what Bush says -- how he presents the war on Iraq -- than what he's actually doing.

Well, I thought I was criticizing what he's doing.

You do think there are reasons for going to war, though.

Yes.

So you think the way he's presenting this war to the world is really where he's gone wrong.

Yes, it has been wretched. He's presented his arguments for going to war partly mendaciously, which has been a disaster. He's certainly presented them in a confused way, so that people can't understand his reasoning. He's aroused a lot of suspicion. Even when he's made good arguments, he's made them in ways that are very difficult to understand and have completely failed to get through to the general public. All in all, his inarticulateness has become something of a national security threat for the United States.

In my interpretation, the basic thing that the United States wants to do -- overthrow Saddam and get rid of his weapons -- is sharply in the interest of almost everybody all over the world. And although the U.S. is proposing to act in the interest of the world, Bush has managed to terrify the entire world and to turn the world against him and us and to make our situation infinitely more dangerous than it otherwise would have been. It's a display of diplomatic and political incompetence on a colossal scale. We're going to pay for this.

Then what is it that the public doesn't understand? What hasn't he been able to get across?

One thing he hasn't gotten across is that there is a positive liberal democratic goal and a humanitarian goal here. Iraq is suffering under one of the most grotesque fascist tyrannies there's ever been. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, have been killed by this horrible regime. The weapons programs are not a fiction. There's every reason to think that Saddam, who's used these weapons in the past, would be happy to use them in the future. The suffering of the Iraqi people is intense. The United States is in the position to bring that suffering to an end. Their liberation, the creating of at least the rudiments of a liberal democratic society there, are in the interests of the Iraqi people and are deeply in the interests of liberal society everywhere. There are reasons to go in which are those of not just self-interest or self-defense, but of solidarity of humanitarianism, of a belief in liberal ideals. And Bush has gotten this across not at all.

Do you believe Bush has such motives?

It's not right to utterly dismiss these motives. A lot of people look at Bush and sneer a little too easily and think that these motives cannot possibly have anything to do with him or his policies. This is a mistake too.

In Afghanistan, everybody sneers at the achievements of the United States and its allies because we see the warlords in the provinces, we see the extreme suffering, we see all the things that haven't been done. But what has been done has really been quite magnificent. A hideous tyranny was overthrown, a new government was established in more or less the way that any liberal democrat would advise: Afghans were consulted from around the country, more or less democratic councils led to the forming of a new government with a new leader for Afghanistan who is not a warlord or a corrupt figure or a friendly religious fanatic but who is in fact a man of modern liberal democratic ideals.

Bush announced that the war in Afghanistan was going to be fought on behalf of women's rights. Everybody deeply laughed at that and for reasons I can understand because in the United States Bush has not been a promoter of women's rights. Still, the result of the war was in fact that women's rights in Afghanistan have made a forward leap larger than anywhere in the world in history. From a certain point of view this has been the first feminist war in all of history.

He's unable to do that partly because the man is fatally inarticulate and he's also unable to do that, I'm sure, because he's confused ideologically about whether he's really in favor of the do-good aspect of his program or indifferent to it.

He hasn't given us much of an indication that he's preoccupied with these humanitarian issues. Maybe he simply isn't.

He hasn't straightened it out in his mind. His initial instinct was to oppose this sort of thing. He was against nation-building. Events have driven him to engage in nation-building, but he's done it in a halfhearted way. Although he's done some of these things which are admirable, he has not been able to enlist the world's sympathy or support. He's left people all over the world in a position where they have no way to regard his motives as anything other than the most cynical.

But I should add that although Bush is hugely to blame for this -- it's just tragic that the United States is led by such an inarticulate and intellectually confused and unattractive figure who personally makes me cringe -- other people should be standing up and trying to fight for issues of humanitarianism and social solidarity, of women's rights and liberal freedoms.

One of the scandals is that we've had millions of people marching through the streets calling for no war in Iraq, but we haven't had millions of people marching in the streets calling for freedom in Iraq. Nobody's marching in the streets on behalf of Kurdish liberties. The interests of the liberal dissidents of Iraq and the Kurdish democrats are in fact also our interests. The more those people prosper, the safer we are. This is a moment in which what should be our ideals -- the ideals of liberal democracy and social solidarity -- are also materially in our interest. Bush has failed to articulate this, and a large part of the left has failed to see this entirely.

Tony Blair, who is more articulate and charming and smarter, has also failed to make a case to the public. Doesn't this suggest that perhaps their ideals are not in the right place?

Yes. I admire Tony Blair but I imagine that he's hobbled by the Bush policy. Bush has confused the whole situation by saying that the goal of the war in Iraq is disarmament. Disarmament has nothing to do with the establishment of liberal freedoms.

He was trying to scare us into this.

He's made it very difficult to present the war as an extension of the liberal and humanitarian interventionism of the 1990s in which Tony Blair played a distinguished and honorable and brave role.

But when did you formulate these opinions on Iraq? Was it during the war on Afghanistan? After 9/11? Have you always been concerned about the liberation of the Iraqi people or is there some threat from Iraq that suddenly became more serious to you in the last year and a half?

I formed these opinions on Iraq in 1990 when I began to pay attention to Saddam Hussein, and then when he invaded Kuwait. I came to the conclusion then that Saddam Hussein was a fascist maniac and that we had every reason to be frightened of him and act against him. I am a man of the left and I was then one of the very few people on the American left to support the Gulf War in 1991. So I have a long history of being worried about this guy.

Am I more worried about him now? Yes. One of the things that hasn't gotten through to many people is that the Sept. 11 attacks broke a taboo. There had been a taboo before against staging random massacres against the United States. Now that it's been successful, it is certainly the case that other people are going to want to do the same. So we have a lot of reasons to be much more worried than we have been in the past.

The problem of weapons of mass destruction is certainly a real problem, although as our experience with box-cutters shows, weapons of mass destruction are hardly necessary for random massacres. But we have every reason to be much more alarmed than before. Those of us who consider ourselves on the left now have to consider national security issues in a way which has never been our habit in the past. The response of many people on the left is to think that if the United States will just withdraw its troops here and there and bury its head in the sand, everything will be OK. That's delusional.

I'm sure this one line in your book will infuriate some and surprise others -- especially Europeans. You wrote: "In this country, we are all Noam Chomsky." What do you mean by that?

Chomsky is a man who thinks the entire world operates on simple and rational principles. The reason he's able to crank out these thousands of pages a year on all subjects is because he has an extremely simple analysis: Evil American corporations are acting in their own self-interest and trying to increase and spread their exploitation around the world. The American government is in their hands and is acting to expand its nefarious control over the world. The press has been corrupted by the wealth and power of corporations and spreads the propaganda messages required by the corporations. American claims to ever do any good around the world are merely hypocritical mendacities uttered for the purpose of advancing the larger cause of exploitation and oppression. And the response of other people in the world is that of resistance as inspired by an instinct for human freedom, even if the resistance sometimes takes a perverse and unfortunate form. Therefore, from Chomsky's point of view, all events are rationally explicable according to one or two tiny little factors: the self-interest of American corporations and the urge to resist the American corporations.

It's a very simpleminded view in which nothing inexplicable ever occurs. And yet although Chomsky is regarded by some people as the great anti-American, this kind of thought is entirely typical of America itself, of people across the political spectrum in America. People tend to think that everybody around the world is acting on some rational calculation, that the mad and pathological movements I describe that have emerged from the First World War really can't exist, that surely everybody is acting in some way in their own self-interest in a fashion that could be calculated and addressed. Finally, even the FBI and the CIA have obviously thought along these lines because it never crossed these people's minds -- not seriously anyway -- that somebody was going to be so mad to attack the United States directly. Sept. 11 revealed many shocking things and the most shocking was that the Pentagon had no plan to defend the Pentagon. In that sense, everybody in the United States, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, everybody is a simpleminded fool.

All this is part of your belief that good people can end up supporting horrible movements if we're not vigilant.

People ought to think coldly about it. There really is a long history of excellent people with the best of hearts and the best of intentions ending up inadvertently collaborating with the worst of totalitarians. There's a long history of this. To look into your own heart and ask yourself if you're good and honest and to examine yourself to see if your own analyses are moral and well-intended is not enough. You may have the best of intentions and the purest of hearts and the warmest of feelings of solidarity for other people and yet be led by some failure of imagination to end up more or less aligned with the baddest of bad guys.

Example?

There's a long history of this kind of thing. The simplest history is of the fellow travelers of Stalin. But there's even more grotesque examples of it -- that of the French socialists in the 1930s. They wanted to avoid a new outbreak of the First World War; they refused to believe that millions of people in Germany had gone out of their minds and supported the Nazi movement. They didn't want to believe that a mass pathological movement had taken power in Germany, they wanted to be open-minded to what the Germans were saying and to the German grievances of the First World War. And the French socialists, in their open-minded, warm-hearted effort to avoid seeing anything like the First World War occur again, went out of their way to try and find what was reasonable and plausible in the arguments of Hitler. They really did end up thinking that the greatest danger to world peace was not posed by Hitler but by the hawks in their own society, in France. These people were the antiwar socialists of France, they were good people. Yet one thing led to another, they opposed France's army against Hitler, and many of them ended up supporting the Vichy regime and they ended up fascists!

Where's the parallel to today?

It's not impossible to see something like that today. People want to avoid a war in the Middle East, they say they're not for Saddam but yet they don't really want to do anything against Saddam. They see Iraqi liberals and Kurdish democrats struggling against Saddam, and they really don't want to help these people. They see pathological movements in Palestine and elsewhere engaging in acts of random murder for the purest of irrational reasons and these people, the warmhearted, good-souled antiwar socialists of the Western countries, fall all over themselves in finding ways to justify the terrible things that are happening elsewhere and find ways to prevent themselves from showing solidarity with the victims.

We do see some of the same things. With the French socialists of the 1930s, there was even a slippage into outright anti-Semitism, and no one can doubt that some of that has been occurring in the antiwar movement in the United States and above all in Europe. Of course most people in the antiwar movement are against that. But signs of it exist and it would be foolish to close your eyes to that.

So what should the left's position be today? If your argument is that we are facing a totalitarian threat similar to those of the first part of the 20th century, what do you suggest?

The true model of what the left should be doing here is shown by the other wing of French socialism, that of Léon Blum, an antifascist who was willing to fight and did fight. This ought to be the real goal of the left in the Western countries -- to be antifascist, to be in favor of liberating the people who are suffering under these regimes which are threats not only to their own citizens but to us.

Instead, we have the Bush administration's "realist" approach, which is propelling us to war.

Yes, it's the so-called realist policies of the American conservatives that ultimately got us into this situation. We, the United States, have followed the most cynical policies in the Middle East. We've aligned with reactionary feudal monarchies of the worst sort, backing the most horrendous right-wing tyrants and dictators, thinking that liberal values ought to play no role at all in formulating American policy. All this has especially been the doctrine of American conservatism. It's what I call the Nixonian tradition. It was certainly the policy of Bush the elder and it was the original instinct of the present Bush, although now he appears to be confused.

This has simply been catastrophic for people in the Middle East and ultimately for ourselves. What we need is a politics as I describe in my book, a new radicalism which is going to be against the cynical so-called realism of American conservatism and traditional American policy, in which liberal ideas are considered irrelevant to foreign policy. And also against the head-in-the-sand blindness of a large part of the American left, which can only think that all problems around the world are caused by American imperialism and there's nothing else to worry about.

What we need is a third alternative -- a politics of liberal solidarity, of anti-fascism, a politics that's willing to be interventionist when tyrants or political movements really do threaten us and the people in their own countries, a politics that's going to be aggressive in spreading and promoting liberal ideas and values in regions of the world where people who hold those values are persecuted. A politics of active solidarity, not just expressions of solidarity, but actions of solidarity with liberal-minded people in other parts of the world.

It's scandalous to me that large parts of the political spectrum aren't acting on this now. Where are all the universities and human rights foundations and trade unions and all the other civic associations in the United States? Where are those groups now? Why aren't those groups acting now to establish links of solidarity with people of the Middle East and Muslim world? To try to foment movements, or even revolutions, on behalf of liberal ideals?

But it seems impossible to work for such ideals under the current administration.

We don't need Bush to lead us to do that, we can do that without him. Even if Bush does the wrong thing, which he's bound to do, we can act on those ideas ourselves. The notion that we, the high-minded people of the left, ought to confine ourselves to marching against Bush is a very foolish idea. There's much that we can do.

That's what I call for. It's vastly needed in Europe too. Why aren't the Germans doing this? The Germans are pacifist-minded, they don't want to participate in the war, but there's a lot Germany could do. They should have people all over the Middle East promoting liberal ideas, they should be spending billions of dollars to engage in solidarity with the liberal movements in those countries. They are not doing that. All they appear to be doing is opposing Bush but not taking on a very large role themselves, though they do have peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan and Kosovo. But there's much more that Germany and France could be doing.

Even people who think that Bush is making a blunder with his military approach can try to undo that blunder themselves in some way by going ahead and doing the things that ought to be done -- promoting liberal ideas. Promoting liberal ideas, finally, is the only real way to oppose the totalitarian movements that threaten us and threaten people in the Arab and Muslim worlds, whether they're Baathist or Islamist.

I want to be clear on something. Do you support this military invasion?

I can certainly imagine how the whole thing can be done better. Bush is probably the most inept president we've ever had in regard to maintaining foreign alliances and presenting the American case and convincing the world. He's failed in every possible way. The defeat and overthrow of Saddam Hussein is in the interest of nearly the entire world and although it is in the interest of nearly the entire world, nearly the entire world is against Bush. That situation is the consequence of Bush's ineptness.

At the same time, I think that getting rid of Saddam is in our interest and in the interest of Iraq and in the interest of the Arab world. Saddam is a mad tyrant.

So I wish Bush had gone about it differently. But now that the thing is getting under way, I fervently hope it goes well. And I think that the attitude of everyone with the best of motives who have opposed the war, should now shift dramatically. The people who have demanded that Bush refrain from action should now demand that the action be more thorough. The danger now is that we will go in and go out too quickly and leave the job half-done. The position of the antiwar movement and of liberals should be that the United States fulfill entirely its obligations to replace Saddam with a decent or even admirable system. We've done this in Afghanistan but only in most halfhearted way. We should now do more in Afghanistan and do a lot in Iraq. The people who've opposed the war should now demand that Bush do more.

Are you apprehensive?

I'm scared out of my mind! Only a lunatic could be calm and confident at such a moment.

But you do think we're doing the right thing this week?

You're trying to pin me down. I'm not going to endorse Bush's policy. I'm saying that he went about it in the wrong way but I want the U.S. to do it thoroughly. No goodhearted person should imagine that it would be a bad thing to overthrow Saddam Hussein. But we have to do it well.

Have you been watching the war coverage on the news?

A little bit. I can say that there was something truly pathetic in seeing antiwar demonstrations denounce the war at one moment and then in another moment seeing grateful Iraqis welcome their British and American liberators. If I were a member of the antiwar movement, I would have felt a moral shudder at that experience.

But we can imagine the devastation in Baghdad as well.

We have no idea what it is. Like anybody I'm hoping for the least amount of suffering. The war could certainly end up achieving the opposite of what its goals should be. History offers more than one example of that.

By which you mean? Is this campaign what you expected, for the most part? War is war?

Well, no. If it turns out that out bombs have ended up slaughtering masses of Iraqi civilians, that would be a horror. But we don't know what's happened. We won't know for a while.

So what's particularly struck you has been some of the protests.

Yes, because the role of the left ought to be to express solidarity with the Iraqi people, to hope for the defeat of the fascist tyrant and to see their freedom and our own self-defense. This in fact became visible today, when some Iraqis at least, celebrated their liberation.

Has Amnesty given up on human rights?

Rather good article by Nick Cohen:
Keep fighting for human rights

Is Amnesty International forsaking its time-honoured role as champion of the oppressed?

Nick Cohen
Sunday June 5, 2005
The Observer
"To Khan[*], the human-rights agenda is passe and maybe an example of cultural imperialism. 'Amnesty has a middle-class, Western, complacent, white image in many parts of the world,' she told the Financial Times magazine. The stereotype would be rectified by expanding the remit and campaigning against poverty. 'More children die of lack of food or water than [are] killed by torture and the death penalty,' explained a supporter."
*Irene Khan, the new secretary general of Amnesty International

(By the way I was alerted to this article by a post in the always interesting Harry's Place.)

Melanie Phillips & the rape of justice

Provocative article from Ms. P responding to "the growing discrepancy between the number of rapes that are alleged to have taken place and the number of convictions that result."

Rape of justice

Daily Mail, 6 June 2005

Would love to post an opposing view for balance but the annoying Indy won't give you Deborah Orr's article for free.

Anyway, here's the news story itself as reported in the Guardian.

Also, although it's not part of the same story I'd like to draw your intention to this sexual discrimination case. (It's an old one but there's a new law suit attached.)

Last year Mrs Weston claimed a senior lawyer, Nathaniel Norgren, made "disgusting" comments about her breasts at a Christmas office lunch in 2003 in a London wine bar.

He allegedly said "Elizabeth has great waps", before drunkenly arguing with a colleague about whether the correct slang for breasts was "waps" or "baps". Having knocked over a table, sloshing red wine down her front, he was also accused of saying her husband was a "lucky man" and joking about their sex life.

Mr Norgren allegedly pestered Mrs Weston with questions such as: "How many times a week?" He was also accused of making an offensive comment about the bottom of a woman seated at a nearby table.

Am I alone in thinking that £1m is a helluva payout for some crass lunchtime banter. Wouldn't the phrase "Shut up you twat" do the job just as well?

Israel should ignore appeasing Europe - Aznar

JSL put me on to this, so I'm posting it on his technically-challenged behalf:

Spain's ex-PM to Israel: Ignore Europe
The Jerusalem Post
Jun. 6, 2005

Israel need not pay much attention to Europe, which is using its Middle East policy to separate itself from the US, has a tendency toward appeasement and is largely pro-Palestinian, former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar told The Jerusalem Post Monday. "Europe likes appeasement very much; this is one of the most important differences between us and the States," Aznar said in an interview on the Bar-Ilan University campus. "Europeans don't like any problems. They prefer appeasement."

...

"For many people in Europe, when they watch television and see the image of the democratically elected prime minister of Israel, for them the image is that of an autocrat. But when they see the image of an Islamic elected prime minister, they see someone they want to engage in dialogue." Asked to explain the phenomenon, Aznar replied: "This is Europe."

Monday, June 06, 2005

Does Terrorism Advance the Islamist Cause? Pipes & Steyn disagree

Does Terrorism Advance the Islamist Cause?
Daniel Pipes Weblog
May 23, 2005

Here Pipes disagrees with another of my faves, Mark Steyn, over whether Bali, Madrid, Beslan, 9/11 etc further the Islamist cause or not. Steyn says they do, Pipes says they don't.

British intelligence refused to believe reports of mass murder of Poland's Jews

I have read elsewhere on this subject that the motivation for British officials keeping silent on this was not wanting to provide Jews with an unanswerable moral case for emigration to Palestine at a time when the British were actively keeping them out, a policy that continued post-war.


Why British intelligence refused to believe all reports of the mass murder of Poland's Jews
Times
06/06/2005
Information about the gas chambers was kept from Churchill because officials would not accept the evidence of witnesses

Britain's drearily similar high streets

It often struck me living in Berlin and Madrid that (compared to London) there were many more independent shops and much more of an individual, local flavour to the high streets. This article echoes that view.

No doubt Wembley, an Exeter resident, will tell us if his adopted home town deserves the criticism or has been meanly libelled.

It's so wonderful to be here in Exeter. Or is this Clapham?
Times
06/06/2005

EXETER is named today as the worst “clone town” in Britain with its High Street dominated by chains of fashion shops. The city tops the league of 42 towns now offering identikit shopping with little local character. It has only one independent shop in its main street.

Settling the settlements

What should happen to the settlements left behind by the evicted settlers of the Gaza Strip?

Israel tastes bitter fruit of the Gaza settlements

The eviction of settlers from the Gaza Strip has created a dilemma for the authorities: what to do with the farms they will be leaving behind. Donald Macintyre reports

[Some extracts:]



'When Mr Sender first arrived 27 years ago in this Palestinian territory seized from the Egyptians in the Six Day War, 10 years earlier, Gannei Tal was nothing but desert and sand dunes. Married with two young children, he had been head of the export branch of the Bank Mizrahi in Tel Aviv. "I was looking for a moshav [farming community] in a good area for a better quality of life. I looked all over the country and Gaza wasn't even our first choice. We didn't come for ideological reasons."

The ideology came later. His ancestors came from Lithuania to the Holy Land eight generations ago. "We are the true Palestinians," he says, defiantly. Asked whether he didn't always think he might one day have to leave, he gets up from his chair, takes a bible from the shelf, bangs it down on the table and exclaims: "This is my Kashun [deed of property entitlement]. This says to the Jews that Israel is your country, not that of the Arabs or anyone else."'

'In the Israeli media, the issue has been treated as one of public relations. Television pictures of Israeli bulldozers destroying homes will be bad for the Sharon government; pictures of Hamas flags fluttering from the red-tiled roofs of the settlers' ample villas, let alone jubilant bands of Gazans marauding through will be bad for the Palestinians.

But that is only part of the story. The army doesn't want the extra time - up to three months - and risk involved in destroying the houses and, as they would surely be obliged to do under law, of clearing the rubble.

For the PA, the houses, mainly, though not exclusively, large and in gated California-style communities, could prove a major headache; unconvertible into badly-needed high density housing, an obstacle to efficient land use, from extraction of desperately needed water-to promoting productive agriculture. (8,000 settlers and their military protectors occupy 17 per cent of the land; 1.3 million Palestinians occupy the rest).

Convinced the Israeli cabinet will reverse its earlier decision to destroy the houses, Saleh Abdel Shafi acknowledges a real risk of looting and destruction. "Settlements are the biggest symbol of the occupation in the eyes of the people," he says.

"People are very emotional about this and there could be a spontaneous reaction."

To try to prevent that, he says, civic groups have prepared a campaign in schools and elsewhere to persuade the population "what Israel is leaving behind is the property of the Palestinian people, no longer of the enemy, and we have to protect it."

Mr Abdel Shafi acknowledges that one option, apart from the possibly inevitable one of the PA eventually destroying them, is for the PA to bring in revenue by selling them privately at market value. "But if that happens they have to be very careful," he says. "The process will have to be very transparent to ensure they don't simply become houses for senior PA security people or ministers."'

Thursday, June 02, 2005

Good civil law makes bad military law - John Keegan

A good article (as usual) from Britain's most eminent military historian:

Bad law is making a Just War so much harder to fight
By John Keegan
Telegraph
02/06/2005

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Circumcision cuts HIV risk

Two articles from BBC Health:

Background Briefings - Aids
Male circumcision significantly reduces the spread of the HIV virus to men, according to research.

Circumcision cuts HIV risk
Uncircumcised men are at a much greater risk of becoming infected with HIV from heterosexual sex than circumcised men, say researchers. They found a man who is circumcised is up to eight times less likely than one who is not to acquire HIV from "straight" sex.

Jihad through History - Pipes

Jihad through History
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
May 31, 2005