Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Saudis propose Middle East peace plan

Will be interesting to keep an eye on this one. It certainly makes an interesting contrast with the three no's of the Khartoum Resolution. And as the article hints, Saudi fear of Iran is at least as much behind this as any desire for a lasting resolution with Israel. If they don't lead the Arab world, the Persians might.

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Accept peace plan or face war, Israel told
Telegraph
28/03/2007

The "lords of war" will decide Israel's future if it rejects a blueprint for peace crafted by the entire Arab world, Saudi Arabia's veteran foreign minister warned yesterday.

As leaders began gathering in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, for today's summit of the Arab League, Prince Saud al-Faisal told The Daily Telegraph that the Middle East risks perpetual conflict if the peace plan fails.

Under this Saudi-drafted proposal, every Arab country would formally recognise Israel in return for a withdrawal from all the land captured in the war of 1967.

This would entail a Palestinian state embracing the entire West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. Every Arab country will almost certainly endorse this blueprint when the Riyadh summit concludes tomorrow. Prince Saud said Israel should accept or reject this final offer.

"What we have the power to do in the Arab world, we think we have done," he said. "So now it is up to the other side because if you want peace, it is not enough for one side only to want it. Both sides must want it equally."

Speaking inside his whitewashed palace, surrounded by luxuriant lawns and manicured flower beds resembling a green oasis in the drabness of Riyadh, Prince Saud delivered an unequivocal warning to Israel.

"If Israel refuses, that means it doesn't want peace and it places everything back into the hands of fate. They will be putting their future not in the hands of the peacemakers but in the hands of the lords of war," he said.

Prince Saud dismissed any further diplomatic overtures towards Israel. "It has never been proven that reaching out to Israel achieves anything," he said.

"Other Arab countries have recognised Israel and what has that achieved?

"The largest Arab country, Egypt, recognised Israel and what was the result? Not one iota of change happened in the attitude of Israel towards peace."

Israel has numerous reservations about the Arab peace plan - which was previously proposed at a summit in 2002. Israel fears any hint that Palestinian refugees would have the right to return to their homes in the event of a peace settlement.

...

The menacing spectre of Iran, the rising Shia power with nuclear-tipped ambitions for regional dominance, looms large across the waters of the Gulf. Saudi Arabia is quietly moving to contain its bellicose neighbour. Prince Saud offered conciliatory words to Iran, laced with coded criticism.

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Saturday, March 17, 2007

The Guardian's Simon Jenkins on The Guardian

This article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian is extraordinary.

I don't know sure what I'm more shocked by:

(1) That the Guardian ran a supplement that appeared to be it's own editorial but was in fact paid for by the Government.

or

(2) That the Guardian published an article by Jenkins on the same story where he effectively accuses his own newspaper of being an accesory to Government sleaze.

Here are the money quotes:

'Inducing newspapers to dress public relations as journalism in a ministerial spat with the Treasury is close to sleaze'

and

'None of the writers (nor The Guardian's readers) was told of this, or that their fees were being paid, in effect, by the Blair government. Some were given to understand that they were writing for The Observer.'

Friday, March 09, 2007

Thursday, March 08, 2007

In search of an Arab Schindler

Did anyone else know of the "104 labour and punishment camps built by the Nazis and their allies in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco"? I didn't till I read this book review:

In search of an Arab Schindler
The Sunday Times
February 25, 2007
Howard Jacobson

Review of:
Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands
by Robert Satloff


This book has a twofold ambition: first, to remind us that the Nazis and their collaborators exported their persecution of Jews to Arab north Africa; second, to find an Arab Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg who stood out against that persecution, and to have him honoured as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s monument to the Holocaust, where no Arab has yet been recognised. Thus it is not simply as a historian that Robert Satloff sets about raking through the ashes, but as a man on a mission of peace — to discover evidence of as much or as little humanity as it will take for all parties to Arab/Jewish hostilities over the past 60 years to feel better about one another.

Considering which, Among the Righteous is a surprisingly muted book — an act of gentlemanly civility amid the shouting that seems to concede its ineffectiveness almost before it starts. Indeed, so careful is Satloff not to raise our hopes that he dashes them before the opening sentence is cold on the page. “Did any Arabs,” he asks, in a diminuendo of expectation, “save any Jews during the Holocaust?” Do I hear a hundred, do I hear fifty, do I hear one?

It all but gives the game away. Whatever humanity he is going to find among those ashes, it won’t put the world to rights. Such realism is not a general reflection on the character of Arabs. Satloff has an axe to grind, but it is not that one. As the search progresses — from anecdote to official record to actual sites of recorded human kindness — we are not surprised to learn that Arabs behaved the way everyone behaves in time of war. Some were benevolent, some were brutes, some just looked the other way.

What makes it difficult for Satloff to return from his travels and researches with evidence more compelling than this is the silent world in which he is obliged to operate. A silence of general ignorance — for who now knows or recalls that the Holocaust extended its reach to Arab countries, or could name a single one of the 104 labour and punishment camps built by the Nazis and their allies in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, or has heard of the tombeaux , or torture tombs of Morocco, where Jews, under the supervision of Arab guards, were ordered to lie in their own waste for weeks on end? A silence of fading memory and disappearing witness. But above all a silence of refusal typified by the “forbidden room” of the library at the University of Jordan where Satloff did his doctoral research, and that contained books frowned upon by the ruling royal family. In the instance of Satloff’s search for evidence of Arab kindness to Jew, the “forbidden room” is Arab resolve to wipe every trace of the Holocaust from its consciousness. And if that means wiping out every trace of its own humanity to Jews caught up in the tragedy, so be it.

“Soon after 9/11,” Satloff writes — and it’s here that his nerves begin to fray — “I surveyed Holocaust and tolerance-related institutions and found that not a single module, text, or programme for Holocaust education existed in an Arab country, even within the context of studying 20th-century history, modern genocides, or tolerance education.” This is not Holocaust denial but Holocaust negation. Because, in Arab eyes, the Holocaust was deployed to legitimise Zionism and Zionism was the cause of the Arabs’ own “Catastrophe”, it had to be expunged. So much Satloff knew before he started on his trek to find his Arab Schindler. But what he had not prepared himself for was how deep this negation ran even away from official discourse, and how hard it was therefore going to be to find friends or relatives of a Righteous Arab prepared to acknowledge the good he’d done, let alone accept thanks for it.

Thus the desolating emptiness at the heart of Satloff’s quest. He hears stories of heroic generosity but the corroborations he seeks are walled up in that “forbidden room”. When he finally tracks down the grandson of Si Ali Sakkat, a Tunisian Arab of noble descent, who threw open his farm to a group of Jews fleeing a nearby labour camp, lodging, feeding and protecting them, he is warned not to discuss these actions in front of the present farm labourers, who “just would not understand”. Even when an acknowledgment of past helpfulness is made, it is accompanied by irritation, embarrassment, blankness. Our times have seen many examples of history airbrushing what it finds inconvenient. But things are terrible indeed when goodness itself becomes a guilty secret to be banished from our sight.

That no Arab might want to be honoured as Righteous in an Israeli memorial to the Holocaust Satloff knows and understands, but cannot quite bear to admit. In this, there is something of the Don Quixote about him, foisting a troublesome idealism on an unwilling world. And it would be ungenerous not to allow that he does, at the last, put together a modest collection of little, unnamed, unremembered acts of kindness and of love, even identifying, just about, a solitary Schindler — Khaled Abdelwahhab, a wealthy, hedonistic Tunisian, who spirited away a Jewish family and hid them, at great risk to himself, until the Germans left.

No less importantly, Satloff’s researches have played a part in getting the German government to agree compensation to survivors of almost 100 labour camps in Arab north Africa. Which is itself a contribution to our education into the “Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands”. But how long it will be before the Arab world accepts that it, too, was touched by the Holocaust — and by that I do not only mean catastrophically — and how long it will be before both sides accept that there is no hope of peace until each agrees to swim in the other’s past, is anybody’s guess. Among the Righteous taps politely on the door. But there is no answer from the “forbidden room”.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Is The Guardian institutionally racist? Theodore Dalrymple

Brilliantly and humourously argued.

Is The Guardian institutionally racist?
Theodore Dalrymple
Social Affairs Unit
23/09/05

Is The Guardian - the best newspaper in Britain - institutionally racist? Alas, I think the answer must be a resounding Yes.

I had long had the impression that blacks were over-represented in photographs published in the newspaper by comparison with people from the Indian subcontinent or with the Chinese, and I tested the accuracy of my impression by counting the photographs in the edition of 19th September 2005.

There was only one photograph of an Indian, and that was in a commercial advertisement, over the content of which The Guardian, presumably, had little or no control. By contrast, there were 26 photographs of blacks. Surely this was a discrepancy that could not have arisen by chance, and is proof positive of a systematic bias amounting to racism. After all, there are more people of South Asian descent in Britain than of African and West Indian descent, and yet Indians were the subjects of fewer than 4 per cent of all the photographs of ethnic minorities to appear in the newspaper.

How are we to explain this? Does it mean that The Guardian, if it systematically ignores Indians, harbours specially friendly feelings towards blacks? By no means: I think the most likely explanation is quite otherwise. I admit that my hypothesis cannot be proved and is somewhat speculative, but I think it is more plausible than the alternatives.

The people who run and write The Guardian have deep, suppressed and subliminal doubts about the equality of human races. To prove to themselves that they do not have such doubts, they overcompensate by publishing as many photographs of blacks as possible in their pages.

They don't have any such doubts with regard to the Indians and the Chinese. Moreover, these two groups have a horrible and fatal vice, as far as the mindset of The Guardian and its readers is concerned: grosso modo, these two groups can shift for themselves, and require no help from the coalition of intellectuals, moral entrepreneurs and bureaucrats in order to thrive. On the contrary, they are well on the way to outstripping the white population in achievement, thus demonstrating the redundancy of that coalition.

By contrast, blacks are regarded in the pages of The Guardian much as conservationists regard endangered species, in need of special protection. They therefore represent a goldmine for the coalition.

No doubt my hypothesis will be regarded as far-fetched by some, and founded on the spurious assumption that the numbers of photographs in a newspaper can tell you something important about the views and feelings of those who write and publish it. But in essence I am only applying to them the methods and arguments they so easily, frequently and earnestly apply to others.

more...

Friday, March 02, 2007

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel

This is simply one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Got through it in a weekend, absolutely unputdownable. Get it, read it, buy copies and distribute them:

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Here she and her book are the subject of an Observer feature, and some interesting stuff comes out about a debate she had with Tariq Ramadan (some more links at the end).

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Taking the fight to Islam
Sunday February 4, 2007
The Observer

...

Strictly speaking Hirsi Ali is not an infidel but an apostate, a designation that in the Koran warrants the punishment of death. The distinction is not without significance. In a poll published last week, one in three British Muslims in the 16-24 age group agreed that 'Muslim conversion is forbidden and punishable by death'.

This figure comes as no surprise to Hirsi Ali. She argues that Europe's determination to maintain cultural difference will lead increasing numbers of alienated Muslims to seek the unambiguity of fundamentalism. Liberals, she says, have shirked the responsibility of making the case for their own beliefs. They need to start speaking out in favour of the values of secular humanism. And they need to make clear that they are not compatible with religious bigotry and superstition. 'You have to say that if you want the Prophet Muhammad to be your moral guide in the 21st century and you are aware of the choices the Prophet Muhammad made towards unbelievers, women, homosexuals, do you really think you're going to succeed? You will get into some sort of cognitive dissonance if you at the same time want to adapt to a life here.'

Without an open and robust critique of the nature of the prophet's teachings, she goes on, 'these clerics proselytising radical Islam make much, much more sense. Because the radical Muslims say that democracy is bad, and the young Muslim mind says "Why is it bad?". Because the Koran says it's bad. That makes more sense than democracy is good, the rights of individuals must be observed but you can also hang on to what the Koran says. I say stop that and appeal to and challenge young minds.'

When it comes to words, Hirsi Ali is not one to look for the mincer. She speaks in a language that makes no concessions to the softening euphemisms of political correctness. Those immersed in circumspection and ever vigilant to the contemporary sin of offence are bound to ask themselves if she's allowed to say what she says. In this respect her predicament is reminiscent of the moment in Basic Instinct when Sharon Stone lights a cigarette under interrogation in a police station. She's told that's it's non-smoking environment and she replies: 'So arrest me.' Hirsi Ali's life is already in jeopardy. She's long past the point of polite restraint.

Some observers find her forthright approach refreshing and, indeed, intoxicating, but many recoil from her unadorned conviction. Writing in the New York Review of Books, the historian Timothy Garton Ash described Hirsi Ali as a 'slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist'. Last year when Garton Ash chaired a discussion with Hirsi Ali at the ICA, he seemed both to admire the incisiveness of her quietly spoken logic and to wince at its unshakeable conclusions.

'For him,' Hirsi Ali laughs, 'the Enlightenment is complex. For me, it isn't. There's nothing complex about it.' A student of 17th- and 18th-century political ideas, she doesn't mean that she thinks the Enlightenment was some kind of uniform philosophical movement. The simplicity, for her, is the legacy of the Enlightenment, the things we take for granted about Western sociopolitical culture: the rule of law, the rights of the individual, freedom of expression. To Hirsi Ali these are bedrock precepts that should not be compromised in the name of cultural diversity.

Most of the political classes would agree with her in principle but like to take a more nuanced, and often evasive, stance in practice. She was one of the few intellectuals, for example, who rushed to support the Danes in the cartoon crisis last year. If you believe in the right of freedom of expression, she says, you have to defend that right. In a debate a few years back, Hirsi Ali challenged the Swiss Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan, something of a poster boy for the multicultural left, to be more consistent and clear-cut in what he said. Was the Koran the word of God or a man-made text that was out of date? Ramadan responded by questioning Hirsi Ali's adversarial style. 'The question,' he said, 'is whether you want to change the mentality or please the audience.'

Does her bald delivery not further alienate Muslims, forcing them to cling to traditional values? Hirsi Ali is too smooth of skin and composure to bristle, but it is obviously an accusation she finds irritating.

'Tariq Ramadan is filled with contempt for Muslims because he believes they have no faculties of reason,' she replies in a beguilingly friendly tone, as though she had remarked that he had an excellent taste in shirts. 'If I say that terrorism is created in the name of Islam suddenly they take up terrorism? He gives me so much more power than I have. Why don't my remarks make him turn to terrorism? Because he's above that. Like many believers in multiculturalism, he puts himself on a higher plane. The other thing is that it's not about your style, it's about your content. Are my propositions right or wrong? Is it social, cultural and religious beliefs that cause economic backwardness or is it the other way round? My take on this is the cultural and religious elements are far more important to look at. That is what we should be looking at and not how I say it.'

All the same, it's fair to say that her audience is made up largely of white liberal males, rather than the Muslim women she wishes to liberate. In Holland, a female Muslim politician named Fatima Elatik told me: 'She's appealing to Dutch society, to middle-class Dutch-origin people. She talks about the emancipation of women but you can't push it down their that you didn't bring John Stuart Mill and left us only with the Koran. It doesn't help to say my forefathers oppressed your forefathers, and remain guilty forever.'throats. If I could talk to her, I would tell her that she needs to get a couple of Muslim women around her.'

Hirsi Ali dismisses this as 'a very silly remark. I started off in a position where none of these women were visible anyway except as proxies to be put forward to get subsidies from the government. Just keep singing we're discriminated against. No Muslim women are allowed into this debate by their own groups. So it's way too early. By the time these women are assertive enough, I won't be around. It will be one generation on.'

She also argues that it's important to address white liberals because they need to overcome the self-censoring effects of post-colonial guilt. 'If you want to feel guilty,' snaps Hirsi Ali, 'feel guilty

There is no zealot like the convert, goes the old saying, and many commentators have concluded that Hirsi Ali is a prime secular example. 'In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals,' wrote Garton Ash, 'she has gone from one extreme to the other'. The word on Hirsi Ali is that she is 'traumatised' by her upbringing and her subsequent adoption of a Western lifestyle. It's the word that Ian Buruma uses to describe her condition in his book Murder In Amsterdam.

Needless to say, she finds this appraisal of her ideas patronising. It was, she says, partly in an effort to combat this impression that she wrote Infidel. 'People can see that there is not much trauma in my story.'

That depends on what you think constitutes trauma. The account of being held down by the legs, aged five, and having her clitoris and inner labia cut off with a pair of scissors will certainly alarm many readers. 'I heard it,' she writes, 'like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat.' The fierce beatings she receives at the hands of her embittered mother, and the fractured skull inflicted on her by a brutal religious teacher, these too would leave psychological scars on most of us.

But as Hirsi Ali writes, they were normal events in her childhood and in the lives of people she knew. Death and illness were commonplace in Africa, and by African standards she lived well. There is nothing melodramatic in Hirsi Ali's prose. It's matter-of-fact and also, as she is quick to point out, entirely subjective. It's possible, she says, that her family will remember things differently. 'But it's my story and if you undertake such an endeavour you have to be honest. Usually people make excuses for their culture and family etcetera. I could tell the story that we in the Third World have things that the West could learn from, which is obviously true, but that isn't what I wanted to show. My argument is that western liberal culture is superior to Islamic tribal group culture.'


...

Hirsi Ali, say her opponents, is an arch exponent of Islamophobia. One such critic has written a stinging attack on Hirsi Ali in this month's Times Literary Supplement. Maria Golia, an Egyptian-based academic, writes: 'Hirsi Ali seems far more interested in indicting Islam than helping damaged women, whose horror stories she conveniently trots out whenever she needs to bludgeon home a point.'

She takes Hirsi Ali to task on female genital mutilation which, she points out, is not an Islamic practice. Hirsi Ali wanted the Dutch government to institute medical checks on young girls in vulnerable circumstances. Golia calls the idea 'institutionalised violence' and prefers an approach that 'requires understanding of context and coalition-building, not to mention compassion and subtlety'.

It should be said that in Infidel Hirsi Ali specifically states that FGM predates Islam, is not limited to Islam and that it is not practised in many Islamic countries. However, she adds, it is very often 'justified in the name of Islam'. Indeed one need only look at the advice of the leading Egyptian cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is considered one of the most influential scholars in Islam. Qaradawi has been promoted by London mayor Ken Livingstone as a moderate voice, but on his Islam-online website he writes of female circumcision: 'Anyhow, it is not obligatory, whoever finds it serving the interest of his daughters should do it, and I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world.'

She characterises the manner in which liberals sidestep such details as a confusion of facts and strategy. 'Some people will accept that Islam is backward but they're not going to say that because Muslims will be offended. "We want them to become liberals, so we're just going to trick them into a secular humanistic way of thinking."' At this she lets out a giggle, as if tickled by the absurdity of the idea. 'But people are aware of what's going on. That's why many Muslims are suspicious of liberals. Because they know they are not being taken seriously.'

Perhaps a more telling symbol of the growing cultural gap between mainstream Western society and doctrinaire Islam is the veil. Again Hirsi Ali does not look around for a fence to sit on. 'The veil,' she says, 'is to show that women are responsible for the sexual self-control of men.' It's a surgical observation, cutting right through to the bone of the issue. She goes on to note that in all communities where the veil is actively observed boys are not taught to restrain themselves. 'They look upon all those who are not veiled as women who are looking for sexual contact and they just go about molesting and being a nuisance.'

But what about those women who say that the veil has nothing to do with sex, that is a demonstration of their love of Allah. 'That is a very small group of women?' But are you to deny them their right to dress as they please? 'No,' she insists, 'I don't want to deny them that and I don't want anyone to deny them that.'

Her solution is secular civic space - for example in schools and government offices - in which all religion is removed. The French model then? That's hardly been a great success. 'It's never been tried,' she counters. 'The French have voiced it but never implemented it. They've created these zones outside Paris where people from Third World countries are put together and excluded from the secular neutral model. They've preached secular Republicanism and practised multiculturalism, that's the whole French hypocrisy.'


...

But of course in voicing her opinion in the style she does, she risks lumping together over a billion people from different nations, cultures and traditions as a single 'problem'. For Hirsi Ali, the problem is one of self-definition. If Muslims want to assert a religious text as the basis of their public identity, then they have to accept public debate of that text and its ideas with all the discomfort and offence that may involve.

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More on Ali v Tariq Ramadan

Lessons from the Cold War about reforming Islam
pulpmovies.com
Sunday 25 Jun 2006

Muslim pundits clash over future of Islam in Europe
FT
June 17 2006