Chomsky interview & the Left Revisionists

Chomsky just came top of the Public Intellectuals poll I blogged separately, so a couple of links to old Chommers from an erstwhile fan (moi).

First, an interview with him in the Guardian:

Emma Brockes interview: Noam Chomsky
Monday October 31, 2005
The Guardian

Then a comment on the interview:

Oliver Kamm on Brockes' interview with Chomsky
Blog
Oct 2005

Then something from a current fave of mine, Paul Berman, on Chomsky:

Paul Berman on Noam Chomsky

and then a longer article on Chomsky and the "Left Revisionists" in general, about the left's hypocritical attitude, especially in regard to Bosnia:

The Left Revisionists
Marko Attila Hoare
November 2003

And all of that started by a recent comment from Dan in this thread, which referred me here.

Top public intellectuals - Prospect Poll result

Bit of harmless fun - the Prospect/FP Global public intellectuals poll. Here are my current faves from their list of 100:

5. Christopher Hitchens
9. Jared Diamond
21. Francis Fukuyama
26. Steven Pinker
28. Samuel Huntington
33. Peter Singer
34. Bernard Lewis
35. Fareed Zakaria
44. Niall Ferguson

Comfortably in last position for me - Al-Qaradawi, natch... Anyone else want to weigh in?

Skinning Galloway

Amusing account of a visit to see George Galloway on The Frank Skinner show. (Found this via Harry's Place btw.)

More Galloway posts here and here.

Faith no more...

The always interesting Uncle Johann on the subject of faith schools.

Key quote:

"[...] the Government believes faith schools achieve better results. At first glance, this seems true: look at a league table of the highest GCSE and A-Level scores in the state sector and you'll overdose on Saint this and Holy that. So, Blair says, would you really have me dismantle some of the best state schools in Britain?

But look again. The right-wing think tank Civitas - expected to back faith schools with table-thumping vigour - decided to study the figures, and found something surprising. Faith schools get better results for one simple reason: they use selection to cream off middle-class children - all kids bright and beautiful - and to weed out difficult, poor or unmotivated students who would require more work. They gave the game away last year when the Government suggested church schools educate more children who are in care, and they recoiled in horror. John Hicks, governor of St Barnabas' Church of England school in Pimlico, snapped: "We know children in care must be educated but it can be detrimental in schools that are oversubscribed." Or, not on our league tables, baby.

Civitas found that actually - once you factor in the fact they take brighter kids with far fewer problems - it turns out faith schools underperform compared to other schools. This is hardly surprising since they dedicate hours of school time to non-academic religious pursuits. The Welsh National Assembly commissioned a study that found the same thing. So the sole credible argument for faith schools is as mythical as the Christian belief that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and burped out, alive and well, a month later."

Iranian president calls for destruction of Israel

Iran president: Wipe Israel off map
The Scotsman
27 Oct 2005

Iran's ultra-conservative new president has broken his silence on Israel and declared the Jewish state was a "disgraceful blot" that should be "wiped off the map".

"Anybody who recognises Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury; any (Islamic leader) who recognises the Zionist regime is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world," state-run television quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

On Wednesday Ahmadinejad said "there is no doubt that the new wave (of attacks) in Palestine will soon wipe off this disgraceful blot (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world. As the Imam (Khomeini) said, Israel must be wiped off the map."

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

Iran leader's comments condemned
BBC
27 Oct 2005

The US said the comment highlighted concerns about Iran's nuclear programme, which Washington suspects is being used to develop weapons. Iran says its programme is for peaceful purposes only.

This is not believed to be the first time a senior Iranian leader has made such comments. In 2001, former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani called for a Muslim state to annihilate Israel with a nuclear strike. Such calls are though regular slogans at anti-Israeli or anti-US rallies.

Islamophobia myth

Islamophobia myth
Kenan Malik
Prospect
Feb 2005

[D]oes Islamophobia really exist? Or is the hatred and abuse of Muslims being exaggerated to suit politicians' needs and silence the critics of Islam? The trouble with Islamophobia is that it is an irrational concept. It confuses hatred of, and discrimination against, Muslims on the one hand with criticism of Islam on the other. The charge of 'Islamophobia' is all too often used not to highlight racism but to stifle criticism. And in reality discrimination against Muslims is not as great as is often perceived - but criticism of Islam should be greater.

In making a film on Islamophobia for Channel 4 what became clear is the gap between perception and reality. Islamophobia driven by what people want to believe is true, rather than what really is true.

...

A total of 21,577 [people] had been stopped and searched under the terror laws. The vast majority of these - 14,429 - were in fact white. Yet when I interviewed Iqbal Sacranie, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britainhe insisted that '95-98 per cent of those stopped and searched under the anti-terror laws are Muslim'. The real figure is actually 15 per cent. But however many times I showed him the true statistics he refused to budge. I am sure he was sincere in his belief. But there is no basis for his claim that virtually all those stopped and searched were Muslim - the figures appear to have been simply plucked out of the sky.

...

Every year, the Islamic Human Rights Commission organises a mock awards ceremony for its 'Islamophobe of the Year'. Last year there were two British winners. One was the BNP's Nick Griffin. The other? Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. Toynbee’s defence of secularism and women’s rights, and criticism of Islam, was, it declared, unacceptable. Isn't it absurd, I asked the IHRC's Massoud Shadjareh, to equate a liberal anti-racist like Polly Toynbee with the leader of a neo-fascist party. Not at all, he suggested. 'There is a difference between disagreeing and actually dismissing certain ideologies and certain principles. We need to engage and discuss. But there’s a limit to that.' It is difficult to know what engagement and discussion could mean when leading Muslim figures seem unable to distinguish between liberal criticism and neo-fascist attacks.

...

[W]e already live in a culture of growing self-censorship. A decade ago, the Independent asked me to write an essay on Tom Paine, the eighteenth century English revolutionary and freethinker. It was the 200th anniversary of his great polemic, The Age of Reason. I began the article with a quote from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to show the continuing relevance of Paine's battle against religious authority. The quote was cut out because it was deemed too offensive to Muslims. The irony of censoring an essay in celebration of freethinking seemed to elude the editor.

Old Man & Rivers...

or 'Come to the Darcus side...'

If you missed Joan Rivers v Darcus Howe, hear the argument here.

Read a transcript (and many entertaining comments) here.

Collapse by Jared Diamond

Currently reading Collapse by Jared Diamond. Fascinating stuff, but not exactly a comedy. Apart (so far) from this one paragraph, which cracked me up. Not easy being a 49er, it seems.

p145

In 1849, hungry gold miners crossing the Nevada desert noticed some glistening balls of a candy-like substance on a cliff, licked or ate the balls, and discovered them to be sweet-tasting, but then they developed nausea. Eventually it was realized that the balls were hardened deposits made by small rodents, called packrats. that protect themselves by building nests of sticks, plant fragments, and mammal dung gathered in the vicinity, plus food remains, discarded bones, and their own feces. Not being toilet-trained, the rats urinate in their nests, and sugar and other substances crystallize from their urine as it dries out, cementing the midden to a brick-like consistency. In effect, the hungry gold miners were eating dried rat urine laced with rat feces and rat garbage.

The House That Became a War Zone

Promised I'd post this one for JP a while ago. Occupied territories in microcosm:

The house that became a war zone

Chris McGreal
Tuesday October 4, 2005

The first soldiers to arrive on Khalil Bashir's doorstep in Gaza five years ago explained the new geography of his home in terms he understood only too well. His three-storey house was to be like the West Bank, the Israeli officer said, with its areas of divided security and administrative control.

The army designated the living room as "Area A", after the part of the occupied territories where the Palestinians have control, and told all three generations of the Bashirs, from 81-year-old Zanah to her five-year-old granddaughter, that they were confined there for most nights and sometimes for much of the day. It was the only part of the house they could still call their own.

The bathroom, kitchen and bedrooms were "Area B", where Palestinians administer themselves but Israel has security control. In the Bashir home that meant soldiers had priority and the family had to ask permission to cook or go to the toilet.

And then came "Area C", where the Israeli military government runs everything and the Palestinians have no authority. The soldiers warned the Bashirs that all of their home above the ground floor was Area C and if they ventured up the stairs they would be shot [...]

Fourteen Terrorist Attacks a Day against Israel - Pipes

This is quite a stat.

Fourteen Terrorist Attacks a Day against Israel
Daniel Pipes Weblog
September 29, 2005

The Israeli Prime Minister's Office has released the following:

Today (Thursday), 29.9.05, will mark five years since the start of the current round of Palestinian violence, during which 26,159 terrorist attacks were perpetrated against Israeli targets, in which 1,060 Israelis were murdered and 6,089 were wounded.

That comes out on average to 5,232 attacks a year or 14.33 per day, every single day. One can only speculate how many more thousands of attacks were prevented. For anyone not living in Israel or Iraq, this figure staggers the imagination.

Making a pig's ear of defending democracy - Mark Steyn

Making a pig's ear of defending democracy
By Mark Steyn
Telegraph
04/10/2005

[T]he United Kingdom's descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody. Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and "pig-related items" will be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee's box of tissues, because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. And, as we know, Muslims regard pigs as "unclean", even an anthropomorphised cartoon pig wearing a scarf and a bright, colourful singlet.

Cllr Mahbubur Rahman is in favour of the blanket pig crackdown. "It is a good thing, it is a tolerance and acceptance of their beliefs and understanding," he said. That's all, folks, as Porky Pig used to stammer at the end of Looney Tunes. Just a little helpful proscription in the interests of tolerance and acceptance. And where's the harm in that? As Pastor Niemöller said, first they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character and, if I was, I'm more of an Eeyore.

And aren't we all? When the Queen knights a Muslim "community leader" whose line on the Rushdie fatwa was that "death is perhaps too easy", and when the Prime Minister has a Muslim "adviser" who is a Holocaust-denier and thinks the Iraq war was cooked up by a conspiracy of Freemasons and Jews, and when the Prime Minister's wife leads the legal battle for a Talibanesque dress code in British schools, you don't need a pig to know which side's bringing home the bacon.

...

Only the other day, Burger King withdrew its ice-cream cones from its British restaurants because Mr Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe, after a trip to the Park Royal branch, complained that the creamy swirl on the lid resembled the word "Allah" in Arabic script. It doesn't, not really, not except that in the sense any twirly motif looks vaguely Arabic. After all, Burger King isn't suicidal enough to launch Allah Ice-Cream. But, after Mr Akhtar urged Muslims to boycott the chain and claimed that "this is my jihad", Burger King yanked the ice-cream and announced that, design-wise, it was going back to the old drawing-board.

...

When every act that a culture makes communicates weakness and loss of self-belief, eventually you'll be taken at your word. In the long term, these trivial concessions are more significant victories than blowing up infidels on the Tube or in Bali beach restaurants. An act of murder demands at least the pretence of moral seriousness, even from the dopiest appeasers. But small acts of cultural vandalism corrode the fabric of freedom all but unseen.

Is it really a victory for "tolerance" to say that a council worker cannot have a Piglet coffee mug on her desk? And isn't an ability to turn a blind eye to animated piglets the very least the West is entitled to expect from its Muslim citizens? If Islam cannot "co-exist" even with Pooh or the abstract swirl on a Burger King ice-cream, how likely is it that it can co-exist with the more basic principles of a pluralist society?

...

By the way, isn't it grossly offensive to British Wahhabis to have a head of state who is female and uncovered?