This is an extraordinarily powerful review of what appears to be an extraordinarily powerful book:
Real Crime, Fake Justice
Theodore Dalrymple
City Journal, Summer 2006
For the last 40 years, government policy in Britain, de facto if not always de jure, has been to render the British population virtually defenseless against criminals and criminality. Almost alone of British government policies, this one has been supremely effective: no Briton nowadays goes many hours without wondering how to avoid being victimized by a criminal intent on theft, burglary, or violence.
An unholy alliance between politicians and bureaucrats who want to keep prison costs to a minimum, and liberal intellectuals who pretend to see in crime a natural and understandable response to social injustice, which it would be a further injustice to punish, has engendered a prolonged and so far unfinished experiment in leniency that has debased the quality of life of millions of people, especially the poor. Every day in our newspapers we read of the absurd and dangerous leniency of the criminal-justice system. On April 21, for example, even the Observer (one of the bastions of British liberalism responsible for the present situation) gave prominence to the official report into the case of Anthony Rice, who strangled and then stabbed Naomi Bryant to death.
Rice, it turned out, had been assaulting women since 1972. He had been convicted for assaulting or raping a total of 15 women before murdering Naomi Bryant, and it is a fair supposition that he had assaulted or raped many more who did not go to the police. In 1982, he grabbed a woman by the throat, held a knife to her, and raped her. Five years later, while out of prison on home leave, he grabbed a woman, pushed her into a garden, held a knife to her, and raped her for an hour. Receiving a life sentence, he was transferred to an open prison in 2002 and then released two years later on parole as a low-risk parolee. He received housing in a hostel for ex-prisoners in a village whose inhabitants had been told, to gain their acquiescence, that none of the residents there was violent; five months after his arrival, he murdered Naomi Bryant. In pronouncing another life sentence on him, the judge ordered that he should serve at least 25 years: in other words, even now the law has not quite thrown away the key.
Only five days later, the papers reported that 1,023 prisoners of foreign origin had been released from British prisons between 1999 and 2006 without having been deported. Among them were 5 killers, 7 kidnappers, 9 rapists and 39 other sex offenders, 4 arsonists, 41 burglars, 52 thieves, 93 robbers, and 204 drug offenders. Of the 1,023 prisoners, only 106 had since been traced. The Home Office, responsible for both prisons and immigration, still doesn’t know how many of the killers, arsonists, rapists, and kidnappers are at large; but it admits that most of them will never be found, at least until they are caught after committing another offense. Although these revelations forced the Home Secretary to resign, in fact the foreign criminals had been treated only as British criminals are treated. At least we can truly say that we do not discriminate in our leniency.
Scandal has followed scandal. A short time later, we learned that prisoners had been absconding from one open prison, Leyhill, at a rate of two a week for three years—323 in total since 1999, among them 22 murderers. This outrage came to light only when a senior policeman in the area of Leyhill told a member of Parliament that there had been a crime wave in the vicinity of the prison. The member of Parliament demanded the figures in the House of Commons; otherwise they would have remained secret.
None of these revelations, however, would have surprised a man called David Fraser, who has just published a book entitled A Land Fit for Criminals — the land in question being Great Britain, of course. Far from being mistakes—for mistakes repeated so often cease to be mere mistakes—all these occurrences are in full compliance with general policy in Britain with regard to crime and criminality.
Fraser was a probation officer for more than a quarter of a century. He began to doubt the value of his work in terms of preventing crime and therefore protecting the public, but he at first assumed that, as a comparatively lowly official in the criminal-justice system, he was too mired in the grainy everyday detail to see the bigger picture. He assumed also that those in charge not only knew what they were doing but had the public interest at heart.
Eventually, however, the penny dropped. Fraser’s lack of success in effecting any change in the criminals under his supervision, and thus in reducing the number of crimes that they subsequently committed, to the great misery of the general public, was not his failure alone but was general throughout the system. Even worse, he discovered that the bureaucrats who ran the system, and their political masters, did not care about this failure, at least from the point of view of its impact on public safety; careerist to the core, they were only concerned that the public should not become aware of the catastrophe. To this end, they indulged in obfuscation, statistical legerdemain, and outright lies in order to prevent the calamity that public knowledge of the truth would represent for them and their careers.
The collective intellectual dishonesty of those who worked in the system so outraged Fraser—and the Kafkaesque world in which he found himself, where nothing was called by its real name and language tended more to conceal meaning than to convey it, so exasperated him—that, though not a man apt to obtrude upon the public, he determined to write a book. It took him two and a half years to do so, based on 20 years of research, and it is clear from the very first page that he wrote it from a burning need to expose and exorcise the lies and evasions with which he lived for so long, lies and evasions that helped in a few decades transform a law-abiding country with a reputation for civility into the country with the highest crime rate in the Western world, with an ever-present undercurrent of violence in daily life. Like Luther, Fraser could not but speak out. And, as events unfolded, his book has had a publishing history that is additionally revealing of the state of Britain today.
By example after example (repetition being necessary to establish that he has not just alighted on an isolated case of absurdity that might be found in any large-scale enterprise), Fraser demonstrates the unscrupulous lengths to which both bureaucrats and governments have gone to disguise from the public the effect of their policies and decisions, carried out with an almost sadistic indifference to the welfare of common people.
He shows that liberal intellectuals and their bureaucratic allies have left no stone unturned to ensure that the law-abiding should be left as defenseless as possible against the predations of criminals, from the emasculation of the police to the devising of punishments that do not punish and the propagation of sophistry by experts to mislead and confuse the public about what is happening in society, confusion rendering the public helpless in the face of the experimentation perpetrated upon it.
The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate their political masters. Their first line of defense is to refuse to record half the crime that comes to their attention, which itself is less than half the crime committed. Then they refuse to investigate recorded crime, or to arrest the culprits even when it is easy to do so and the evidence against them is overwhelming, because the prosecuting authorities will either decline to prosecute, or else the resultant sentence will be so trivial as to make the whole procedure (at least 19 forms to fill in after a single arrest) pointless.
In any case, the authorities want the police to use a sanction known as the caution—a mere verbal warning. Indeed, as Fraser points out, the Home Office even reprimanded the West Midlands Police Force for bringing too many apprehended offenders to court, instead of merely giving them a caution. In the official version, only minor crimes are dealt with in this fashion: but as Fraser points out, in the year 2000 alone, 600 cases of robbery, 4,300 cases of car theft, 6,600 offenses of burglary, 13,400 offenses against public order, 35,400 cases of violence against the person, and 67,600 cases of other kinds of theft were dealt with in this fashion—in effect, letting these 127,900 offenders off scot-free. When one considers that the police clear-up rate of all crimes in Britain is scarcely more than one in 20 (and even that figure is based upon official deception), the liberal intellectual claim, repeated ad nauseam in the press and on the air, that the British criminal-justice system is primitively retributive is absurd.
At every point in the system, Fraser shows, deception reigns. When a judge sentences a criminal to three years’ imprisonment, he knows perfectly well (as does the press that reports it) that in the vast majority of cases the criminal in question will serve 18 months at the very most, because he is entitled automatically, as of right, to a suspension of half his sentence. Moreover, under a scheme of early release, increasingly used, prisoners serve considerably less than half their sentence. They may be tagged electronically under a system of home curfew, intended to give the public an assurance that they are being monitored: but the electronic tag stays on for less than 12 hours daily, giving criminals plenty of opportunity to follow their careers. Even when the criminals remove their tags (and it is known that thousands are removed or vandalized every year) or fail to abide by other conditions of their early release, those who are supposedly monitoring them do nothing whatever, for fear of spoiling the statistics of the system’s success. When the Home Office tried the tagging system with young criminals, 73 percent of them were reconvicted within three months. The authorities nevertheless decided to extend the scheme. The failure of the British state to take its responsibilities seriously could not be more clearly expressed.
Fraser draws attention to the deeply corrupt system in Britain under which a criminal, once caught, may ask for other offenses that he has committed to be “taken into consideration.” (Criminals call these offenses T.I.C.s.) This practice may be in the interests of both the criminal and the police, but not in those of the long-suffering public. The court will sentence the criminal to further prison terms that run concurrently, not consecutively, to that imposed for the index offense: in other words, he will in effect serve the same sentence for 50 burglaries as for one burglary, and he can never again face charges for the 49 burglaries that have been “taken into consideration.” Meanwhile, the police can preen themselves that they have “solved” 50 crimes for the price of one.
One Probation Service smokescreen that Fraser knows from personal experience is to measure its own effectiveness by the proportion of criminals who complete their probation in compliance with court orders—a procedural outcome that has no significance whatever for the safety of the public. Such criminals come under the direct observation of probation officers only one hour a week at the very most. What they do the other 167 hours of the week the probation officers cannot possibly know. Unless one takes the preposterous view that such criminals are incapable of telling lies about their activities to their probation officers, mere attendance at the probation office is no guarantee whatever that they are now leading law-abiding lives.
But even if completion of probation orders were accepted as a surrogate measure of success in preventing re-offending, the Probation Service’s figures have long been completely corrupt—and for a very obvious reason. Until 1997, the probation officers themselves decided when noncompliance with their directions was so egregious that they “breached” the criminals under their supervision and returned them to the courts because of such noncompliance. Since their own effectiveness was measured by the proportion of probation orders “successfully” completed, they had a very powerful motive for disregarding the noncompliance of criminals. In such circumstances, all activity became strictly pro forma, with no purpose external to itself.
While the government put an end to this particular statistical legerdemain, probation orders still go into the statistics as “successfully completed” if they reach their official termination date—even in many cases if the offender gets arrested for committing further offenses before that date. Only in this way can the Home Office claim that between 70 and 80 percent of probation orders are “successfully completed.”
In their effort to prove the liberal orthodoxy that prison does not work, criminologists, government officials, and journalists have routinely used the lower reconviction rates of those sentenced to probation and other forms of noncustodial punishment (the word “punishment” in these circumstances being used very loosely) than those imprisoned. But if the aim is to protect the law-abiding, a comparison of reconviction rates of those imprisoned and those put on probation is irrelevant. What counts is the re-offending rate—a point so obvious that it is shameful that Fraser should have not only to make it but to hammer it home repeatedly, for the politicians, academics, and journalistic hangers-on have completely obscured it.
By definition, a man in prison can commit no crimes (except against fellow prisoners and prison staff). But what of those out in the world on probation? Of 1,000 male criminals on probation, Fraser makes clear, about 600 will be reconvicted at least once within the two years that the Home Office follows them up for statistical purposes. The rate of detection in Britain of all crimes being about 5 percent, those 1,000 criminals will actually have committed not 600, but at least 12,000 crimes (assuming them to have been averagely competent criminals chased by averagely incompetent police). Even this is not quite all. Since there are, in fact, about 150,000 people on probation in Britain, it means that at least 1.8 million crimes—more than an eighth of the nation’s total—must be committed annually by people on probation, within the very purview of the criminal-justice system, or very shortly after they have been on probation. While some of these crimes might be “victimless,” or at least impersonal, research has shown that these criminals inflict untold misery upon the British population: misery that they would not have been able to inflict had they been in prison for a year instead of on probation.
To compare the reconviction rates of ex-prisoners and people on probation as an argument against prison is not only irrelevant from the point of view of public safety but is also logically absurd. Of course the imprisoned will have higher reconviction rates once they get out of jail—not because prison failed to reform them, but because it is the most hardened, incorrigible, and recidivist criminals who go to prison. Again, this point is so obvious that it is shameful that anyone should have to point it out; yet politicians and others continue to use the reconviction rates as if they were a proper basis for deciding policy.
Relentless for hundreds of pages, Fraser provides examples of how the British government and its bloated and totally ineffectual bureaucratic apparatus, through moral and intellectual frivolity as well as plain incompetence, has failed in its elementary and sole inescapable duty: to protect the lives and property of the citizenry. He exposes the absurd prejudice that has become a virtually unassailable orthodoxy among the intellectual and political elite: that we have too many prisoners in Britain, as if there were an ideal number of prisoners, derived from a purely abstract principle, at which, independent of the number of crimes committed, we should aim. He describes in full detail the moral and intellectual corruption of the British criminal-justice system, from police decisions not to record crimes or to charge wrongdoers, to the absurdly light sentences given after conviction and the administrative means by which prisoners end up serving less than half their time, irrespective of their dangerousness or the likelihood that they will re-offend.
According to Fraser, at the heart of the British idiocy is the condescending and totally unrealistic idea—which, however, provides employment opportunities for armies of apparatchiks, as well as being psychologically gratifying—that burglars, thieves, and robbers are not conscious malefactors who calculate their chances of getting away with it, but people in the grip of something rather like a mental disease, whose thoughts, feelings, and decision-making processes need to be restructured. The whole criminal-justice system ought therefore to act in a therapeutic or medical, rather than a punitive and deterrent, fashion. Burglars do not know, poor things, that householders are upset by housebreaking, and so we must educate and inform them on this point; and we must also seek to persuade them of something that all their experience so far has taught them to be false, namely that crime does not pay.
All in all, Fraser’s book is a searing and unanswerable (or at least so far unanswered) indictment of the British criminal-justice system, and therefore of the British state. As Fraser pointed out to me, the failure of the state to protect the lives and property of its citizens, and to take seriously its duty in this regard, creates a politically dangerous situation, for it puts the very legitimacy of the state itself at risk. The potential consequences are incalculable, for the failure might bring the rule of law itself into disrepute and give an opportunity to the brutal and the authoritarian.
You might have thought that any publisher would gratefully accept a book so urgent in its message, so transparently the product of a burning need to communicate obvious but uncomfortable truths of such public interest, conveyed in such a way that anyone of reasonable intelligence might understand them. Any publisher, you would think, would feel fortunate to have such a manuscript land on his desk. But you would be wrong, at least as far as Britain is concerned.
So uncongenial was Fraser’s message to all right-thinking Britons that 60 publishers to whom he sent the book turned it down. In a country that publishes more than 10,000 books monthly, not many of which are imperishable masterpieces, there was no room for it or for what it said, though it would take no great acumen to see its commercial possibilities in a country crowded with crime victims. So great was the pressure of the orthodoxy now weighing on the minds of the British intelligentsia that Fraser might as well have gone to Mecca and said that there is no God and that Mohammed was not His prophet. Of course, no publisher actually told him that what he said was unacceptable or unsayable in public: his book merely did not “fit the list” of any publisher. He was the victim of British publishing’s equivalent of Mafia omerta.
Fortunately, he did not give up, as he sometimes thought of doing. The 61st publisher to whom he sent the book accepted it. I mean no disrespect to her judgment when I say that it was her personal situation that distinguished her from her fellow publishers: for her husband’s son by a previous marriage had not long before been murdered in the street, stabbed by a drug-dealing Jamaican immigrant, aged 20, who had not been deported despite his criminal record but instead allowed to stay in the country as if he were a national treasure to be at all costs cherished and nurtured. Indeed, in court, his lawyer presented him as an unemployed painter and decorator, the victim of racial prejudice (a mitigating circumstance, of course), a view that the prosecution did not challenge, even though the killer had somehow managed alchemically to transmute his unemployment benefits into a new convertible costing some $54,000.
The maternal grandmother of the murdered boy, who had never been ill in her life, died of a heart attack a week after his death, and so the funeral was a double one. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the killer killed not one but two people. He received a sentence of eight years—which, in effect, will be four or five years.
I asked the publisher the impossible question of whether she would have published the book if someone close to her had not had such firsthand experience of the frivolous leniency of the British criminal-justice system. She said she thought so: but what is beyond dispute is that the murder made her publication of the book a certainty.
A Land Fit for Criminals has sold well and has been very widely discussed, though not by the most important liberal newspapers, which would find the whole subject in bad taste. But the book’s publishing history demonstrates how close we have come to an almost totalitarian uniformity of the sayable, imposed informally by right-thinking people in the name of humanity, but in utter disregard for the truth and the reality of their fellow citizens’ lives. Better that they, the right-thinking, should feel pleased with their own rectitude and broadmindedness, than that millions should be freed of their fear of robbery and violence, as in crime-ridden, pre-Giuliani New York. Too bad Fraser’s voice had to be heard over someone’s dead body.
Monday, September 18, 2006
Thursday, September 14, 2006
The Liberal case for controlled Immigration
This article on US immigration probably isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I thought it was interesting to hear the Libertarian case against unlimited immigration. It's a thought provoking piece and makes a powerful arguement that open borders actually threaten the freedoms of a Liberal society.
The Fallacy of Open Immigration
'To the degree that a nation is like a house, and requires the security of a house, its inhabitants must have the ability to decide whom they wish to invite inside, whom they wish to enjoy the many investments already made in it. If the house is designed to protect individual liberty, its maintenance requires the exclusion of people whose ill-advised decisions might endanger liberty's protective mechanisms.'
No one has the right to move to a free country and destroy its freedom. But this is precisely what happens when people who are unused to the political culture of individual liberty, or who disapprove of it, swing the balance of national decisions.
Many libertarians imagine that all economic and political problems will be solved if only the proper economic and political framework is established: free enterprise, limited government, clear recognition of individual rights. But the question is, How can such a framework, such a "house," be preserved? It can't be preserved if people must continually be convinced, by the tens of millions, that liberty is a good idea, better than the welfare state or some structure of political repression and intolerance. It can be preserved only by a culture in which the vast majority of people assume that individual liberty and responsibility are the ultimate political good. Not every culture makes these assumptions.
There is no foreign army occupying Mexico, Canada, or Saudi Arabia. The political systems, the political errors, of these countries are the result of their own political cultures, just as America's political errors result from its own political culture. An essentially libertarian political system must be supported by essentially libertarian cultural assumptions, by a culture in which virtually no one sees a cartoon satirizing a religious figure and immediately concludes, "Somebody should be punished for this."'
The Fallacy of Open Immigration
'To the degree that a nation is like a house, and requires the security of a house, its inhabitants must have the ability to decide whom they wish to invite inside, whom they wish to enjoy the many investments already made in it. If the house is designed to protect individual liberty, its maintenance requires the exclusion of people whose ill-advised decisions might endanger liberty's protective mechanisms.'
No one has the right to move to a free country and destroy its freedom. But this is precisely what happens when people who are unused to the political culture of individual liberty, or who disapprove of it, swing the balance of national decisions.
Many libertarians imagine that all economic and political problems will be solved if only the proper economic and political framework is established: free enterprise, limited government, clear recognition of individual rights. But the question is, How can such a framework, such a "house," be preserved? It can't be preserved if people must continually be convinced, by the tens of millions, that liberty is a good idea, better than the welfare state or some structure of political repression and intolerance. It can be preserved only by a culture in which the vast majority of people assume that individual liberty and responsibility are the ultimate political good. Not every culture makes these assumptions.
There is no foreign army occupying Mexico, Canada, or Saudi Arabia. The political systems, the political errors, of these countries are the result of their own political cultures, just as America's political errors result from its own political culture. An essentially libertarian political system must be supported by essentially libertarian cultural assumptions, by a culture in which virtually no one sees a cartoon satirizing a religious figure and immediately concludes, "Somebody should be punished for this."'
Did you hear the one about the Prophet's penis?
An alleged quip about the Prophet's penis led to torture and 13-years in jail in Saudi Arabia.
Brian Whitaker
Hadi Saeed al-Mutif grew up in the countryside in southern Saudi Arabia and at the age of 18 started training to become a policeman. Two months into his training, Hadi had gathered with other recruits for afternoon prayers, as required by the rules. "Let us pray upon the Prophet .." the Imam said - at which point Hadi allegedly quipped: "... and upon his penis".
A couple of his fellow recruits reported Hadi to the authorities at the training centre and he was ordered to stand under the Saudi flag for two hours as a punishment.
That might have been the end of the matter, except that a military inspector happened to be visiting at the time. Instead, this silly incident set in motion a train of events which is still continuing after almost 13 years, involving every level of Saudi Arabia's Byzantine justice system and even reaching the ears of the king.
Read on...
Makes you grateful for the freedom to tell the joke about Jesus saying "I can see your house from here..."
Brian Whitaker
Hadi Saeed al-Mutif grew up in the countryside in southern Saudi Arabia and at the age of 18 started training to become a policeman. Two months into his training, Hadi had gathered with other recruits for afternoon prayers, as required by the rules. "Let us pray upon the Prophet .." the Imam said - at which point Hadi allegedly quipped: "... and upon his penis".
A couple of his fellow recruits reported Hadi to the authorities at the training centre and he was ordered to stand under the Saudi flag for two hours as a punishment.
That might have been the end of the matter, except that a military inspector happened to be visiting at the time. Instead, this silly incident set in motion a train of events which is still continuing after almost 13 years, involving every level of Saudi Arabia's Byzantine justice system and even reaching the ears of the king.
Read on...
Makes you grateful for the freedom to tell the joke about Jesus saying "I can see your house from here..."
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Monday, September 11, 2006
David Cameron outlines his vision for US-UK relationship
Not the catchiest heading I've ever written, but I felt uncomfortable writing (or at least beginning) with anything too flippant on the five year anniversary of 9/11.
David Cameron, however, has marked the occasion with a speech in which he distances his Conservatives from the "failures" of neo-con foreign policy, while outlining his own vision of a "liberal conservative" one.
According to the FT he 'hit out' with an 'outspoken attack'. The Times has him in a 'clash' with Baroness Thatcher.
Given the hyperbolic use of nouns in (even broadsheet) news reporting you might be forgiven for thinking that Cameron showed the sensitivity of a Chelsea footballer, calling Bush a cunt before wiping his arse on the stars and stripes.
This is not the case. Indeed, I strongly recommend reading the whole speech, which you can find here.
I think it's quite a clever speech. It looks like he's laying the groundwork for a post-Bush White House (which of course there will be in 2008). Regardless of whether the new occupant is a Democrat or a Republican there will no doubt be some degree of distancing from the Bush strategy. It also struck me that the speech potentially outflanks Gordon Brown, staking out the 'I'd do things differently' ground before he gets there. (Though it's very much worth reading the Fink's analysis, which is is essentially that he denies being a neo-con while supporting neo-con policies.) And the bit that really tickled me (purely as a close reader) was the bit in which he implied that the Conservatives were the only ones who really 'got' the special relationship, that they were the traditional custodians of it and that Tony Blair (and New Labour) were too inexperienced and were generally ballsing it all up. (DC's chosen metaphor is the diffenece between old and new friends.) I also liked his apparent repudiation of democracy as an end in itself.
Of course, there are things I don't like - I wasn't thrilled with the word 'disproportionate' popping up again (though I'll give him that Israeli air strikes may not have been the best strategy - that particular debate goes on elsewhere.) Also his use of the 'junior partner' metaphor seems curiously unironic. I believe (though can't cite a reliable source) that it was orginally a slightly more rueful phrase and certainly a post-war one. I'm not sure it is correct to apply it to Churchill / Roosevelt (or for that matter Thatcher / Reagan).
This would be the point where I would ordinarily sum up and offer some form of conclusion. But I don't really have one. I thought it was a good speech overall with a decent grasp of some of the challenges. What he would do (or would have done) differently I'm not sure.
David Cameron, however, has marked the occasion with a speech in which he distances his Conservatives from the "failures" of neo-con foreign policy, while outlining his own vision of a "liberal conservative" one.
According to the FT he 'hit out' with an 'outspoken attack'. The Times has him in a 'clash' with Baroness Thatcher.
Given the hyperbolic use of nouns in (even broadsheet) news reporting you might be forgiven for thinking that Cameron showed the sensitivity of a Chelsea footballer, calling Bush a cunt before wiping his arse on the stars and stripes.
This is not the case. Indeed, I strongly recommend reading the whole speech, which you can find here.
I think it's quite a clever speech. It looks like he's laying the groundwork for a post-Bush White House (which of course there will be in 2008). Regardless of whether the new occupant is a Democrat or a Republican there will no doubt be some degree of distancing from the Bush strategy. It also struck me that the speech potentially outflanks Gordon Brown, staking out the 'I'd do things differently' ground before he gets there. (Though it's very much worth reading the Fink's analysis, which is is essentially that he denies being a neo-con while supporting neo-con policies.) And the bit that really tickled me (purely as a close reader) was the bit in which he implied that the Conservatives were the only ones who really 'got' the special relationship, that they were the traditional custodians of it and that Tony Blair (and New Labour) were too inexperienced and were generally ballsing it all up. (DC's chosen metaphor is the diffenece between old and new friends.) I also liked his apparent repudiation of democracy as an end in itself.
Of course, there are things I don't like - I wasn't thrilled with the word 'disproportionate' popping up again (though I'll give him that Israeli air strikes may not have been the best strategy - that particular debate goes on elsewhere.) Also his use of the 'junior partner' metaphor seems curiously unironic. I believe (though can't cite a reliable source) that it was orginally a slightly more rueful phrase and certainly a post-war one. I'm not sure it is correct to apply it to Churchill / Roosevelt (or for that matter Thatcher / Reagan).
This would be the point where I would ordinarily sum up and offer some form of conclusion. But I don't really have one. I thought it was a good speech overall with a decent grasp of some of the challenges. What he would do (or would have done) differently I'm not sure.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Steyn on John Howard
Here's Mark Steyn writing in his inimitable style on John Howard, the Australian PM:
'Look, I'm a supporter of the Bush doctrine to spread liberty throughout the Muslim world, but I support it on hard-headed grounds of national security. You only have to watch a couple of minutes of the lads in Gaza and southern Lebanon on the telly every night to realise freedom comes pretty low down on the list of their hearts' desires. So, when the US President insists on reprising the line week in week out, he begins to sound utopian, if not utterly deluded. American conservatives would appreciate a rationale less hermetically sealed from reality.*
By contrast, the Prime Minister's rhetoric meets what the law used to regard as the "reasonable man" test. When Howard refers to blokes "raving on about jihad" and the way that those so inclined are "utterly antagonistic" to a free society, he's merely stating the obvious in a way that other Western leaders can't quite bring themselves to do. His words align with reality, and one can't underestimate the value of that.
[...]
The day after the London bombings, Blair said that the terrorists would not be allowed to "change our country or our way of life". Of course not. That's his job, from accelerating European integration to his "reform" of the House of Lords. The British Prime Minister has turned the upper chamber into a house of cronies, the Islamists would like to make it a house of imams.
But once you accept the idea of tearing up a thousand years of history, the rest is largely a difference of degree. After a decade of modish vandalism, Blair has abandoned a lot of his sillier novelties because he's belatedly understood the dangers that arise when your citizens start to feel unmoored from their past. Howard didn't need to learn that on the job.'
*If even Steyn is qualifying his support for Bush, the President is really in trouble.
'Look, I'm a supporter of the Bush doctrine to spread liberty throughout the Muslim world, but I support it on hard-headed grounds of national security. You only have to watch a couple of minutes of the lads in Gaza and southern Lebanon on the telly every night to realise freedom comes pretty low down on the list of their hearts' desires. So, when the US President insists on reprising the line week in week out, he begins to sound utopian, if not utterly deluded. American conservatives would appreciate a rationale less hermetically sealed from reality.*
By contrast, the Prime Minister's rhetoric meets what the law used to regard as the "reasonable man" test. When Howard refers to blokes "raving on about jihad" and the way that those so inclined are "utterly antagonistic" to a free society, he's merely stating the obvious in a way that other Western leaders can't quite bring themselves to do. His words align with reality, and one can't underestimate the value of that.
[...]
The day after the London bombings, Blair said that the terrorists would not be allowed to "change our country or our way of life". Of course not. That's his job, from accelerating European integration to his "reform" of the House of Lords. The British Prime Minister has turned the upper chamber into a house of cronies, the Islamists would like to make it a house of imams.
But once you accept the idea of tearing up a thousand years of history, the rest is largely a difference of degree. After a decade of modish vandalism, Blair has abandoned a lot of his sillier novelties because he's belatedly understood the dangers that arise when your citizens start to feel unmoored from their past. Howard didn't need to learn that on the job.'
*If even Steyn is qualifying his support for Bush, the President is really in trouble.
Friday, September 08, 2006
Wanker
I must begin with an apology as this post will undoubtedly be of very limited interest to some impdecers, but the epithet that headlines this entry was what sprang from my lips when I saw which minister is having to explain the government's wonderful 'shop a smoker' hotline.
Plans for 'shop-a-smoker' hotline
Plans for 'shop-a-smoker' hotline
Have a break... or else!
I wonder how many of us have at some time in our working lives failed to comply with this particular EU directive?
Business forced to adopt EU six-hour work limit
By David Charter, Europe Correspondent
EMPLOYEES will be banned from working for more than six hours without a break after a defeat for the Government in Europe.
Businesses were ordered yesterday to ensure that their staff took minimum rest periods, after existing guidelines were dismissed as “meaningless” by the European Court of Justice.
The ruling means that employers must ensure that staff take off at least 11 hours between working days, and have a minimum of 1 day off a week, as well as a 20-minute rest after every 6 hours of work. Business groups said that employees would be unable to choose to work long hours to earn more money because they would be forced to take breaks against their will.
But Brussels said that the decision simply brought Britain in line with the rest of Europe.
Read on...
It's a tricky one. On the one hand I do think that employees have a right to avoid being forced to work lengthy hours without a break. However, I have also been part of businesses that frequently required (and indeed thrived) on midnight oil burning sessions and to be completely honest I look back on the days when I regularly worked a 70-80 hour week with a certain measure of pride. (It's worth mentioning that I was paid overtime.)
The bit that bothers me is this:
The ruling from the court in Luxemburg stated: “The [DTI] guidelines are liable to render the right of workers to daily and weekly rest periods meaningless because they do not oblige employers to ensure that workers actually take the minimum rest period, contrary to the aims of the Working Time Directive.”
Not being forced to work long hours is one thing. Being forced NOT to work long hours is another. Can anyone suggest a sensible balance between regulation and personal freedom on this issue? (A genuine question, not a rhetorical gauntlet.)
Business forced to adopt EU six-hour work limit
By David Charter, Europe Correspondent
EMPLOYEES will be banned from working for more than six hours without a break after a defeat for the Government in Europe.
Businesses were ordered yesterday to ensure that their staff took minimum rest periods, after existing guidelines were dismissed as “meaningless” by the European Court of Justice.
The ruling means that employers must ensure that staff take off at least 11 hours between working days, and have a minimum of 1 day off a week, as well as a 20-minute rest after every 6 hours of work. Business groups said that employees would be unable to choose to work long hours to earn more money because they would be forced to take breaks against their will.
But Brussels said that the decision simply brought Britain in line with the rest of Europe.
Read on...
It's a tricky one. On the one hand I do think that employees have a right to avoid being forced to work lengthy hours without a break. However, I have also been part of businesses that frequently required (and indeed thrived) on midnight oil burning sessions and to be completely honest I look back on the days when I regularly worked a 70-80 hour week with a certain measure of pride. (It's worth mentioning that I was paid overtime.)
The bit that bothers me is this:
The ruling from the court in Luxemburg stated: “The [DTI] guidelines are liable to render the right of workers to daily and weekly rest periods meaningless because they do not oblige employers to ensure that workers actually take the minimum rest period, contrary to the aims of the Working Time Directive.”
Not being forced to work long hours is one thing. Being forced NOT to work long hours is another. Can anyone suggest a sensible balance between regulation and personal freedom on this issue? (A genuine question, not a rhetorical gauntlet.)
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Anti-Semitism on the rise in the UK
Today the Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism in the UK was published. Panel chairman is Denis MacShane, and here's his comment:
Anti-semitism is back
Guardian
07/09/06
Our parliamentary report finds that many British citizens who happen to be born Jewish face unacceptable harassment, intimidation and assault.
Another report:
British Jews facing more anti-Semitic sentiment than ever
Haaretz
09/07/06
Ian Duncan-Smith and the loathsome Bunglawala debated it on the Today Program this morning:
0730 There has been a disturbing rise in anti-Semitism in Britain. Listen
Here's what the loathsome one is defending:
Muslims boycott Holocaust remembrance
The Sunday Times
January 23, 2005
On the same Today Program there was another very interesting debate between the even-more-loathsome Steven Rose (organiser of the academic boycott of Israel) and Shalom Lapin, a peacenik left-wing Israeli academic. An unusually good choice of debating partner for Rose, Lapin does a great job of exposing the moral and factual bankruptcy of Rose's position. Well worth a listen
Related:
Important Decisions: Jewish graveyards attacked in the UK
Important Decisions: Ditch Holocaust day, advisers urge Blair
Anti-semitism is back
Guardian
07/09/06
Our parliamentary report finds that many British citizens who happen to be born Jewish face unacceptable harassment, intimidation and assault.
Another report:
British Jews facing more anti-Semitic sentiment than ever
Haaretz
09/07/06
Ian Duncan-Smith and the loathsome Bunglawala debated it on the Today Program this morning:
0730 There has been a disturbing rise in anti-Semitism in Britain. Listen
Here's what the loathsome one is defending:
Muslims boycott Holocaust remembrance
The Sunday Times
January 23, 2005
On the same Today Program there was another very interesting debate between the even-more-loathsome Steven Rose (organiser of the academic boycott of Israel) and Shalom Lapin, a peacenik left-wing Israeli academic. An unusually good choice of debating partner for Rose, Lapin does a great job of exposing the moral and factual bankruptcy of Rose's position. Well worth a listen
Related:
Important Decisions: Jewish graveyards attacked in the UK
Important Decisions: Ditch Holocaust day, advisers urge Blair
Tony Blair R.I.P?
This battle between Tony Blair and the rest of the Labour Party feels like Politics at its most absurd to me (the leaked memo of Blair's farewell tour was really beyond parody).
Gordon Brown might want to hold off popping the champagne corks just yet though. Westminster Blogger Guido has an interesting take on Blair's statement today. According to him Blair has left himself what he calls the Aznar option (where he would stand down as Party Leader BUT not as PM).
Here's Blair's statement:
"The next party conference in a couple of weeks will be my last party conference as party leader, the next TUC conference next week will be my last TUC - probably to the relief of both of us." (nothing about standing down as PM)
Interestingly, Blair has been rumoured to have asked the Cabinet Secretary and Cabinet office to look into the constitutionality of him remaining PM after resigning as Leader of the Labour Party.
Interesting theory, personaly, I still think he's toast.
For more on this story see here & here.
Gordon Brown might want to hold off popping the champagne corks just yet though. Westminster Blogger Guido has an interesting take on Blair's statement today. According to him Blair has left himself what he calls the Aznar option (where he would stand down as Party Leader BUT not as PM).
Here's Blair's statement:
"The next party conference in a couple of weeks will be my last party conference as party leader, the next TUC conference next week will be my last TUC - probably to the relief of both of us." (nothing about standing down as PM)
Interestingly, Blair has been rumoured to have asked the Cabinet Secretary and Cabinet office to look into the constitutionality of him remaining PM after resigning as Leader of the Labour Party.
Interesting theory, personaly, I still think he's toast.
For more on this story see here & here.
Monday, September 04, 2006
Inheritance tax - the case for abolition
Interesting, wonder if any of you are convinced by Daley's arguments for abolishing inheritance tax?
The evil of inheritance tax lies in punishing the thrifty
By Janet Daley
Telegraph Comment
04/09/2006
Which of these households is the most deserving: two spinster sisters who have spent their lives caring for their parents, a married couple without children, a married couple with children, a gay couple in a civil partnership with children, a gay couple in a civil partnership without children?
Depending on your personal scale of values, you might rank these cases variously, but I doubt that many of you would feel comfortable with the peremptory arbitrariness of the Government's order of merit. Under the present rules of inheritance tax, the households without children – both heterosexual and homosexual – are the only ones that escape untouched. When either of the partners in such a ménage dies, the other inherits the entire estate, including the shared home, without having to pay a penny to the Treasury. The savings that the childless couple has accumulated (which are likely to be considerably more than those of the couple with children) will be untouched by the state. The childless are the outright winners in the Treasury's inheritance lottery.
Next comes the married couple (or the gay couple in a civil partnership) with children, who will enjoy the same exemption as the childless when one of them dies. But the children who have presumably been at the centre of their shared lives – for whom they have worked, saved and aspired together – will be hit, on the death of the second, by a 40 per cent tax on whatever is left to them. No matter that this money was taxed when it was earned, and again when it was invested.
Then there are the absolute losers in this game: the two spinster sisters who have devoted their lives selflessly to the care of elderly relatives and each other. The surviving one will get clobbered instantly and brutally on the death of her sibling. Because their relationship, however loving and stable it may be, is not a sexual partnership, they get no recognition at all from the state.
Just such a couple, Joyce and Sybil Burden, both in their eighties, are now challenging what they consider to be unlawful discrimination against them in the European Court of Human Rights. The sisters worked on their father's farm during the war and then went on to care for their parents and two aunts until they died. They remain in the family home, which cost £7,000 to build in the 1960s and which is now estimated to be worth £875,000. Needless to say, having to pay 40 per cent of the difference between this sum and the absurd inheritance tax threshold of £285,000 on the death of either of them would mean the surviving sister having to sell the home in which she has spent her self-sacrificing life. Can this be right? Does it strike you as just or appropriate?
read on...
The evil of inheritance tax lies in punishing the thrifty
By Janet Daley
Telegraph Comment
04/09/2006
Which of these households is the most deserving: two spinster sisters who have spent their lives caring for their parents, a married couple without children, a married couple with children, a gay couple in a civil partnership with children, a gay couple in a civil partnership without children?
Depending on your personal scale of values, you might rank these cases variously, but I doubt that many of you would feel comfortable with the peremptory arbitrariness of the Government's order of merit. Under the present rules of inheritance tax, the households without children – both heterosexual and homosexual – are the only ones that escape untouched. When either of the partners in such a ménage dies, the other inherits the entire estate, including the shared home, without having to pay a penny to the Treasury. The savings that the childless couple has accumulated (which are likely to be considerably more than those of the couple with children) will be untouched by the state. The childless are the outright winners in the Treasury's inheritance lottery.
Next comes the married couple (or the gay couple in a civil partnership) with children, who will enjoy the same exemption as the childless when one of them dies. But the children who have presumably been at the centre of their shared lives – for whom they have worked, saved and aspired together – will be hit, on the death of the second, by a 40 per cent tax on whatever is left to them. No matter that this money was taxed when it was earned, and again when it was invested.
Then there are the absolute losers in this game: the two spinster sisters who have devoted their lives selflessly to the care of elderly relatives and each other. The surviving one will get clobbered instantly and brutally on the death of her sibling. Because their relationship, however loving and stable it may be, is not a sexual partnership, they get no recognition at all from the state.
Just such a couple, Joyce and Sybil Burden, both in their eighties, are now challenging what they consider to be unlawful discrimination against them in the European Court of Human Rights. The sisters worked on their father's farm during the war and then went on to care for their parents and two aunts until they died. They remain in the family home, which cost £7,000 to build in the 1960s and which is now estimated to be worth £875,000. Needless to say, having to pay 40 per cent of the difference between this sum and the absurd inheritance tax threshold of £285,000 on the death of either of them would mean the surviving sister having to sell the home in which she has spent her self-sacrificing life. Can this be right? Does it strike you as just or appropriate?
read on...
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
The Left-Islamist Alliance
Another important topic without an Impdec place of its own is the Left-Islamist alliance, perhaps most obvious to British eyes in the courting by Ken Livingstone of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to the outrage of (amongst others) some of the gay community.
The motivation for beginning this thread was a quite brilliant article in the last Sunday Times by an ex-Greenham Common protestor. She was reflecting on her erstwhile feminist chums marching cheek-by-jowl with Islamic fundamentalists who hate everything they used to stand for. Go read the whole article, you cannot fail to be moved.
Wimmin at War
by Sarah Baxter
Sunday Times
13/8/06
It is 25 years since the Greenham Common protests began. Sarah Baxter was there, but now asks why feminist ideals have become twisted into support for groups like Hezbollah
The peace movement ... has gone on to find new friends in today’s Stop the War movement. Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched last weekend alongside banners proclaiming “We are all Hezbollah now” and Muslim extremists chanting “Oh Jew, the army of Muhammad will return.” For Linda Grant, the novelist, who says that “feminism” is the one “ism” she has not given up on, it was a shocking sight: “What you’re seeing is an alliance of what used to be the far left with various Muslim groups and that poses real problems. Saturday’s march was not a peace march in the way that the Ban the Bomb marches were. Seeing young and old white women holding Hezbollah placards showed that it’s a very different anti-war movement to Greenham. Part of it feels the wrong side is winning.”
As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews. On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of “I am woman, hear me roar”, there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush — “the world’s number one terrorist” as the marchers would have it.
Women are perfectly entitled to oppose the war in Iraq or to feel that Israel is brutally overreacting to Hezbollah’s provocation. But where is the parallel, equally vital debate about how to combat Islamic fundamentalism? And why don’t more peace-loving feminists regard it as a threat? Kira Cochrane, 29, is the new editor of The Guardian women’s page, the bible of the Greenham years, where so many women writers made their names by staking out positions on the peace movement. She has noticed that today’s feminists are inclined to keep quiet about the march of radical Islam. “There’s a great fear of tackling the subject because of cultural relativism. People are scared of being called racist,” Cochrane observes.
...
Looking back I think I was wrong about Reagan and too sympathetic towards the Soviet Union. There were plenty of fellow travellers in the peace movement who were cheering on the Soviet Union under their breath. I can remember making a lot of silly excuses about it myself. But the fear of mutual assured destruction was genuine enough. As long as it worked, Mad was a plausible strategy. Were it to fail, the results would be catastrophic. As President Dwight Eisenhower said after the testing of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s: “Atomic war will destroy civilisation.” If war came, “you might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself”.
The situation today is very different. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, Bernard Lewis, the noted scholar of Islam, pointed out that Iran’s messianic rulers are not constrained by such fears. According to their theology, the day of judgment will be glorious. “At the end of time there will be general destruction anyway,” Lewis writes. “What matters will be the final destination of the dead — hell for the infidels and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, Mad is not a constraint, it is an inducement.” Hassan Nasrallah, the Shi’ite cleric who leads Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, regularly issues bloodcurdling threats against the Jews. “If they (the Jews all gather in Israel,” he has said, “it will save us the trouble of going after them on a worldwide basis.”
For some on the left such words are merely understandable hyperbole, provoked by decades of Israeli ill-treatment of the Palestinians, but I prefer to take Islamic fundamentalists at their word when they spout insults about Jews being the descendants of “pigs and apes” and launch their chillingly apocalyptic tirades. Why? Because they not only talk centuries-old nonsense about the place of women in society, but they also purposely oppress the female sex whenever they are given the chance. As regards their treatment of women, there is no discernible difference between their acts and their words.
In my own life I have been lucky enough not to experience a great deal of sexism. The 1980s and 1990s were decades of progress for western career women and working mothers. But I felt how it was to be invisible when I interviewed Hamas militants and clerics many years ago in Gaza. They were very courteous and helpful and I tried to be respectful by covering my hair with a black scarf. But they never looked me in the eye or addressed me directly. I would ask the questions; they would answer the male photographer who accompanied me.
Phyllis Chesler, 65, the writer and a founder feminist in the 1960s, has experienced some of the more disturbing aspects of Muslim patriarchy at first hand. In the summer of 1961 Chesler married Ali, her western-educated college sweetheart, and went to live with him in Afghanistan. Nothing had prepared her for the restrictions and humiliations which Muslim women endured there, nor the gradual personality change that her husband underwent. The worst of it, she discovered, was “nothing unique happened to me”. It was the way of the world. “The Afghanistan I knew was a prison, a police state, a feudal monarchy, a theocracy rank with fear and paranoia,” Chesler recalls in The Death of Feminism, published last year. “
Afghanistan had never been colonised. My Afghan relatives were very proud of this fact. ‘Not even the British could occupy us’, they told me, not once but many times. “I was ultimately forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism, tyranny and misogyny were entirely of their own making and not attributable to colonialism or imperialism. It is what they themselves would say.” Six months later, travelling on false papers obtained by a sympathetic German-born friend, Chesler secretly fled the country. The ardent feminism that she embraced on her return to America was forged in Afghanistan, she told me last week. She has not recanted her support for women’s rights, she insists, but she has seen the views of others morph in alarming new directions.
“The compassion for people of colour has been translated into feminists standing with terrorists who are terrorising their own women,” she says. In the week when a massive bomb plot against civilians was uncovered in Britain, Chesler’s critique of women’s complacency in her book is prophetic. “The Islamists who are beheading Jews and American civilians, stoning Muslim women to death, jailing Muslim dissidents and bombing civilians on every continent are now moving among us both in the East and in the West,” she writes. “I fear that the ‘peace and love’ crowd in the West refuses to understand how Islamism endangers our values and our lives, beginning with our commitment to women’s rights and human rights.” Women’s studies programmes should have been the first to sound the alarm, she points out: “They did not.”
Chesler has fallen out with many old friends in the women’s movement. They have in effect excommunicated her for writing in right-wing publications in America, but she has found it impossible to get published on the left. There are whispers that she has become paranoid, mad, bonkers, a charge frequently levelled against the handful of women writers who are brave enough to tackle the same theme. In Britain there is the polemicist Julie Burchill, who has written incisively about the desire of terrorists to commit acts “not so that innocents may have the right to live freely on the West Bank, but so that they might have the right to throw acid in the face of innocent, unveiled women”. Well, the outrageous Julie has always been bonkers, hasn’t she.
Then there is “mad” Melanie Phillips, the Cassandra of our age, banging on that “if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around”. Of course she would say that, wouldn’t she. She’s Jewish, and anyway didn’t you know that she is crazy enough to believe in two-parent families? In America the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin died last year virtually unmourned by women on the left in part, as her friend Christopher Hitchens remembered, because “she wasn’t neutral against a jihadist threat that wanted, and wants, to enslave and torture females. “That she could be denounced as a ‘conservative’,” he concluded, “says much about the left to which she used to belong.”
... I am surprised by the persistence of the ideological blind spot that has led women who are so quick to condemn the failings of the West to make transparent excuses for the behaviour of some of the world’s most anti-feminist regimes. Recently Kate Hudson, chairwoman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, wrote a breathtaking apologia for the Iranian nuclear energy programme, which took at face value Ahmadinejad’s claims to be developing it for “strictly peaceful” purposes. (Since when, by the way, has CND regarded Britain’s nuclear power plants so benignly?) Never mind the preposterous dancing with enriched uranium around the doves of peace nor the missiles marked “Tel Aviv” paraded in the streets.
...
It is certainly plausible, as Pettitt [Greenham Common pioneer] claims, that Bush’s actions have “accelerated the radicalisation of the Islamic world tremendously”, although this popular view conveniently downplays the growing Islamic fundamentalist movement before the September 11 attacks and the huge psychological boost that it received from Al-Qaeda’s strike on America. Let us assume that what Pettitt says is true. I can remember when the women’s movement was told that its persistent demands for equality were leading to a “backlash”. Susan Faludi wrote a feminist bestseller of that name, based on the premise that men were fighting back tooth and nail in the gender wars.
I have just got the book down from my shelves. It says on the back cover: “The backlash against women is real. This is the book we need to understand it, to struggle through the battle fatigue and to keep going.” There was no question of slinking away out of fear that men were being emboldened to find new ways of oppressing women. The Middle East is engaged in a titanic struggle between modernity and theocracy. Whatever one’s views about the Iraq war or the conflict in Lebanon, it deserves more than slogans about “We are all Hezbollah now” and fury against Bush and Blair. I don’t agree with Chesler that we are witnessing the death of feminism, but for now it is MIA: missing in action.
The motivation for beginning this thread was a quite brilliant article in the last Sunday Times by an ex-Greenham Common protestor. She was reflecting on her erstwhile feminist chums marching cheek-by-jowl with Islamic fundamentalists who hate everything they used to stand for. Go read the whole article, you cannot fail to be moved.
Wimmin at War
by Sarah Baxter
Sunday Times
13/8/06
It is 25 years since the Greenham Common protests began. Sarah Baxter was there, but now asks why feminist ideals have become twisted into support for groups like Hezbollah
The peace movement ... has gone on to find new friends in today’s Stop the War movement. Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched last weekend alongside banners proclaiming “We are all Hezbollah now” and Muslim extremists chanting “Oh Jew, the army of Muhammad will return.” For Linda Grant, the novelist, who says that “feminism” is the one “ism” she has not given up on, it was a shocking sight: “What you’re seeing is an alliance of what used to be the far left with various Muslim groups and that poses real problems. Saturday’s march was not a peace march in the way that the Ban the Bomb marches were. Seeing young and old white women holding Hezbollah placards showed that it’s a very different anti-war movement to Greenham. Part of it feels the wrong side is winning.”
As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews. On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of “I am woman, hear me roar”, there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush — “the world’s number one terrorist” as the marchers would have it.
Women are perfectly entitled to oppose the war in Iraq or to feel that Israel is brutally overreacting to Hezbollah’s provocation. But where is the parallel, equally vital debate about how to combat Islamic fundamentalism? And why don’t more peace-loving feminists regard it as a threat? Kira Cochrane, 29, is the new editor of The Guardian women’s page, the bible of the Greenham years, where so many women writers made their names by staking out positions on the peace movement. She has noticed that today’s feminists are inclined to keep quiet about the march of radical Islam. “There’s a great fear of tackling the subject because of cultural relativism. People are scared of being called racist,” Cochrane observes.
...
Looking back I think I was wrong about Reagan and too sympathetic towards the Soviet Union. There were plenty of fellow travellers in the peace movement who were cheering on the Soviet Union under their breath. I can remember making a lot of silly excuses about it myself. But the fear of mutual assured destruction was genuine enough. As long as it worked, Mad was a plausible strategy. Were it to fail, the results would be catastrophic. As President Dwight Eisenhower said after the testing of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s: “Atomic war will destroy civilisation.” If war came, “you might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself”.
The situation today is very different. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, Bernard Lewis, the noted scholar of Islam, pointed out that Iran’s messianic rulers are not constrained by such fears. According to their theology, the day of judgment will be glorious. “At the end of time there will be general destruction anyway,” Lewis writes. “What matters will be the final destination of the dead — hell for the infidels and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, Mad is not a constraint, it is an inducement.” Hassan Nasrallah, the Shi’ite cleric who leads Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, regularly issues bloodcurdling threats against the Jews. “If they (the Jews all gather in Israel,” he has said, “it will save us the trouble of going after them on a worldwide basis.”
For some on the left such words are merely understandable hyperbole, provoked by decades of Israeli ill-treatment of the Palestinians, but I prefer to take Islamic fundamentalists at their word when they spout insults about Jews being the descendants of “pigs and apes” and launch their chillingly apocalyptic tirades. Why? Because they not only talk centuries-old nonsense about the place of women in society, but they also purposely oppress the female sex whenever they are given the chance. As regards their treatment of women, there is no discernible difference between their acts and their words.
In my own life I have been lucky enough not to experience a great deal of sexism. The 1980s and 1990s were decades of progress for western career women and working mothers. But I felt how it was to be invisible when I interviewed Hamas militants and clerics many years ago in Gaza. They were very courteous and helpful and I tried to be respectful by covering my hair with a black scarf. But they never looked me in the eye or addressed me directly. I would ask the questions; they would answer the male photographer who accompanied me.
Phyllis Chesler, 65, the writer and a founder feminist in the 1960s, has experienced some of the more disturbing aspects of Muslim patriarchy at first hand. In the summer of 1961 Chesler married Ali, her western-educated college sweetheart, and went to live with him in Afghanistan. Nothing had prepared her for the restrictions and humiliations which Muslim women endured there, nor the gradual personality change that her husband underwent. The worst of it, she discovered, was “nothing unique happened to me”. It was the way of the world. “The Afghanistan I knew was a prison, a police state, a feudal monarchy, a theocracy rank with fear and paranoia,” Chesler recalls in The Death of Feminism, published last year. “
Afghanistan had never been colonised. My Afghan relatives were very proud of this fact. ‘Not even the British could occupy us’, they told me, not once but many times. “I was ultimately forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism, tyranny and misogyny were entirely of their own making and not attributable to colonialism or imperialism. It is what they themselves would say.” Six months later, travelling on false papers obtained by a sympathetic German-born friend, Chesler secretly fled the country. The ardent feminism that she embraced on her return to America was forged in Afghanistan, she told me last week. She has not recanted her support for women’s rights, she insists, but she has seen the views of others morph in alarming new directions.
“The compassion for people of colour has been translated into feminists standing with terrorists who are terrorising their own women,” she says. In the week when a massive bomb plot against civilians was uncovered in Britain, Chesler’s critique of women’s complacency in her book is prophetic. “The Islamists who are beheading Jews and American civilians, stoning Muslim women to death, jailing Muslim dissidents and bombing civilians on every continent are now moving among us both in the East and in the West,” she writes. “I fear that the ‘peace and love’ crowd in the West refuses to understand how Islamism endangers our values and our lives, beginning with our commitment to women’s rights and human rights.” Women’s studies programmes should have been the first to sound the alarm, she points out: “They did not.”
Chesler has fallen out with many old friends in the women’s movement. They have in effect excommunicated her for writing in right-wing publications in America, but she has found it impossible to get published on the left. There are whispers that she has become paranoid, mad, bonkers, a charge frequently levelled against the handful of women writers who are brave enough to tackle the same theme. In Britain there is the polemicist Julie Burchill, who has written incisively about the desire of terrorists to commit acts “not so that innocents may have the right to live freely on the West Bank, but so that they might have the right to throw acid in the face of innocent, unveiled women”. Well, the outrageous Julie has always been bonkers, hasn’t she.
Then there is “mad” Melanie Phillips, the Cassandra of our age, banging on that “if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around”. Of course she would say that, wouldn’t she. She’s Jewish, and anyway didn’t you know that she is crazy enough to believe in two-parent families? In America the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin died last year virtually unmourned by women on the left in part, as her friend Christopher Hitchens remembered, because “she wasn’t neutral against a jihadist threat that wanted, and wants, to enslave and torture females. “That she could be denounced as a ‘conservative’,” he concluded, “says much about the left to which she used to belong.”
... I am surprised by the persistence of the ideological blind spot that has led women who are so quick to condemn the failings of the West to make transparent excuses for the behaviour of some of the world’s most anti-feminist regimes. Recently Kate Hudson, chairwoman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, wrote a breathtaking apologia for the Iranian nuclear energy programme, which took at face value Ahmadinejad’s claims to be developing it for “strictly peaceful” purposes. (Since when, by the way, has CND regarded Britain’s nuclear power plants so benignly?) Never mind the preposterous dancing with enriched uranium around the doves of peace nor the missiles marked “Tel Aviv” paraded in the streets.
...
It is certainly plausible, as Pettitt [Greenham Common pioneer] claims, that Bush’s actions have “accelerated the radicalisation of the Islamic world tremendously”, although this popular view conveniently downplays the growing Islamic fundamentalist movement before the September 11 attacks and the huge psychological boost that it received from Al-Qaeda’s strike on America. Let us assume that what Pettitt says is true. I can remember when the women’s movement was told that its persistent demands for equality were leading to a “backlash”. Susan Faludi wrote a feminist bestseller of that name, based on the premise that men were fighting back tooth and nail in the gender wars.
I have just got the book down from my shelves. It says on the back cover: “The backlash against women is real. This is the book we need to understand it, to struggle through the battle fatigue and to keep going.” There was no question of slinking away out of fear that men were being emboldened to find new ways of oppressing women. The Middle East is engaged in a titanic struggle between modernity and theocracy. Whatever one’s views about the Iraq war or the conflict in Lebanon, it deserves more than slogans about “We are all Hezbollah now” and fury against Bush and Blair. I don’t agree with Chesler that we are witnessing the death of feminism, but for now it is MIA: missing in action.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
War on Terror (aka War on Islamofascism)
Thought we should have a thread to discuss the War on Terror, or as Bush recently called it, At War with Islamic Fascists.
This was the front page lead in today's Telegraph, contained some positive and some contradictory views.
Example of positive:
Seventy three per cent agreed that "the West is in a global war against Islamic terrorists who threaten our way of life". When asked whether Britain should change its foreign policy in response to terrorism only 12 per cent said it should be more conciliatory, compared with 53 per cent who thought it should become more "aggressive" and 24 per who wanted no change.
Example of contradictory:
A majority of British people wants the Government to adopt an even more "aggressive" foreign policy to combat international terrorism, according to an opinion poll conducted after the arrests of 24 terrorism suspects last week. However - by a margin of more than five to one - the public wants Tony Blair to split from President George W Bush and either go it alone in the "war on terror", or work more closely with Europe.
Ditch US in terror war, say 80pc of Britons
Telegraph
17/08/2006
This was the front page lead in today's Telegraph, contained some positive and some contradictory views.
Example of positive:
Seventy three per cent agreed that "the West is in a global war against Islamic terrorists who threaten our way of life". When asked whether Britain should change its foreign policy in response to terrorism only 12 per cent said it should be more conciliatory, compared with 53 per cent who thought it should become more "aggressive" and 24 per who wanted no change.
Example of contradictory:
A majority of British people wants the Government to adopt an even more "aggressive" foreign policy to combat international terrorism, according to an opinion poll conducted after the arrests of 24 terrorism suspects last week. However - by a margin of more than five to one - the public wants Tony Blair to split from President George W Bush and either go it alone in the "war on terror", or work more closely with Europe.
Ditch US in terror war, say 80pc of Britons
Telegraph
17/08/2006
Monday, August 14, 2006
Rwanda
As the discussions surrounding a UN force for Lebanon take place, the notorious failings of another UN mission is worth recalling. Kofi Annan does not come out well, and neither do the US, UK or France.
Film reveals grim Rwanda images that haunt general
Telegraph
11/08/2006
If Gen Romeo Dallaire finds clothing dropped in the street, he fights the urge to check whether the rags conceal a corpse. His searing experience as the commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda, which failed to halt the genocide in 1994 when 800,000 people were slaughtered, has left him tormented.
...
Gen Dallaire, 60, suffered a breakdown at the end of his service in Rwanda, tormented by the "red, fearful, bewildered eyes" of the victims of massacres he witnessed day after day. He has made several suicide attempts, injuring himself with razor blades, and was discharged from the Canadian army six years ago on medical grounds.
...
Gen Dallaire's UN superiors repeatedly ignored warnings of disaster. Three months before Rwanda's Hutu extremist regime started the genocide of the minority Tutsi tribe - and the murder of any Hutus who opposed the killing - an informant told him exactly what was going to happen. He disclosed the locations of four arms caches in Kigali, each stacked with weapons for use in the genocide. Gen Dallaire proposed to seize the caches but Kofi Annan, who was then the head of UN peacekeeping, vetoed the operation.
When the massacres began, Gen Dallaire was ordered not to use force to protect civilians. His soldiers were to "fire only if fired upon".
Only 2,500 troops were under his command. Of these, 1,100 were undisciplined Bangladeshis who often shirked patrols by sabotaging their own vehicles. Another 450 were Belgians but they withdrew when 10 of their number were murdered on the first day of the killing. Gen Dallaire told his superiors that a well-trained force of 4,000 could halt the genocide. Instead, the Security Council reduced his contingent still further, leaving him with only 450 soldiers at the height of the massacres.
America offered 50 armoured cars but demanded £6 million payment in advance. Britain offered 50 obsolete lorries and also wanted to be paid first. France supplied a plane-load of weapons to the genocidal regime shortly before the killing began.
Film reveals grim Rwanda images that haunt general
Telegraph
11/08/2006
If Gen Romeo Dallaire finds clothing dropped in the street, he fights the urge to check whether the rags conceal a corpse. His searing experience as the commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda, which failed to halt the genocide in 1994 when 800,000 people were slaughtered, has left him tormented.
...
Gen Dallaire, 60, suffered a breakdown at the end of his service in Rwanda, tormented by the "red, fearful, bewildered eyes" of the victims of massacres he witnessed day after day. He has made several suicide attempts, injuring himself with razor blades, and was discharged from the Canadian army six years ago on medical grounds.
...
Gen Dallaire's UN superiors repeatedly ignored warnings of disaster. Three months before Rwanda's Hutu extremist regime started the genocide of the minority Tutsi tribe - and the murder of any Hutus who opposed the killing - an informant told him exactly what was going to happen. He disclosed the locations of four arms caches in Kigali, each stacked with weapons for use in the genocide. Gen Dallaire proposed to seize the caches but Kofi Annan, who was then the head of UN peacekeeping, vetoed the operation.
When the massacres began, Gen Dallaire was ordered not to use force to protect civilians. His soldiers were to "fire only if fired upon".
Only 2,500 troops were under his command. Of these, 1,100 were undisciplined Bangladeshis who often shirked patrols by sabotaging their own vehicles. Another 450 were Belgians but they withdrew when 10 of their number were murdered on the first day of the killing. Gen Dallaire told his superiors that a well-trained force of 4,000 could halt the genocide. Instead, the Security Council reduced his contingent still further, leaving him with only 450 soldiers at the height of the massacres.
America offered 50 armoured cars but demanded £6 million payment in advance. Britain offered 50 obsolete lorries and also wanted to be paid first. France supplied a plane-load of weapons to the genocidal regime shortly before the killing began.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Bad Debts
This is an interesting entry on the Adam Smith Institute Blog regarding the rise in bad debts.
HSBC personal Finance services division reported a 36% increase in bad debts which has taken the shine off record profits. 36%?! Wow. If bad debts continue to rise like that the terms on which money is borrowed will change drastically. As the blog concludes 'I try to avoid paying for boy racers when I take out auto insurance, and I think I'd rather like to avoid paying for bad debtors when I do my banking.'
HSBC personal Finance services division reported a 36% increase in bad debts which has taken the shine off record profits. 36%?! Wow. If bad debts continue to rise like that the terms on which money is borrowed will change drastically. As the blog concludes 'I try to avoid paying for boy racers when I take out auto insurance, and I think I'd rather like to avoid paying for bad debtors when I do my banking.'
Monday, July 17, 2006
Tax Cuts = Higher Tax Revenues
This is very counter intuitive - US tax cuts have delivered higher tax revenues, with the rich paying a higher share of the total tax share. This year the US Treasury saw an 11 percent gain in tax revenues. As a consequence the US deficit is set to halve by 2009. Not only that, some of the American states have recorded growth rates just behind China and ahead of India.
The real news, and where the policy credit belongs, is with the 2003 tax cuts. They've succeeded even beyond Art Laffer's dreams, if that's possible. In the nine quarters preceding that cut on dividend and capital gains rates and in marginal income-tax rates, economic growth averaged an annual 1.1%. In the 12 quarters--three full years--since the tax cut passed, growth has averaged a remarkable 4%.
[...]
This growth in turn has produced a record flood of tax revenues, just as the most ebullient supply-siders predicted. In the first nine months of fiscal 2006, tax revenues have climbed by $206 billion, or nearly 13%. As the Congressional Budget Office recently noted, "That increase represents the second-highest rate of growth for that nine-month period in the past 25 years"--exceeded only by the year before. For all of fiscal 2005, revenues rose by $274 billion, or 15%. We should add that CBO itself failed to anticipate this revenue boom, as the nearby table shows. Maybe its economists should rethink their models.
[...]
Remember the folks who said the tax cuts would "blow a hole in the deficit?" Well, revenues as a share of the economy are now expected to rise this year to 18.3%, slightly above the modern historical average of 18.2%. The remaining budget deficit of a little under $300 billion will be about 2.3% of GDP, which is smaller than in 17 of the previous 25 years. Throw in the surpluses rolling into the states, and the overall U.S. "fiscal deficit" is now economically trivial.
It's worth remembering that the U.S. tax cuts of 2003 where much-derided and Bush was mocked for his economic stupidity. Who's laughing now?
The real news, and where the policy credit belongs, is with the 2003 tax cuts. They've succeeded even beyond Art Laffer's dreams, if that's possible. In the nine quarters preceding that cut on dividend and capital gains rates and in marginal income-tax rates, economic growth averaged an annual 1.1%. In the 12 quarters--three full years--since the tax cut passed, growth has averaged a remarkable 4%.
[...]
This growth in turn has produced a record flood of tax revenues, just as the most ebullient supply-siders predicted. In the first nine months of fiscal 2006, tax revenues have climbed by $206 billion, or nearly 13%. As the Congressional Budget Office recently noted, "That increase represents the second-highest rate of growth for that nine-month period in the past 25 years"--exceeded only by the year before. For all of fiscal 2005, revenues rose by $274 billion, or 15%. We should add that CBO itself failed to anticipate this revenue boom, as the nearby table shows. Maybe its economists should rethink their models.
[...]
Remember the folks who said the tax cuts would "blow a hole in the deficit?" Well, revenues as a share of the economy are now expected to rise this year to 18.3%, slightly above the modern historical average of 18.2%. The remaining budget deficit of a little under $300 billion will be about 2.3% of GDP, which is smaller than in 17 of the previous 25 years. Throw in the surpluses rolling into the states, and the overall U.S. "fiscal deficit" is now economically trivial.
It's worth remembering that the U.S. tax cuts of 2003 where much-derided and Bush was mocked for his economic stupidity. Who's laughing now?
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Freedland and Baddiel interviewed on Hardtalk
Great interview with Freedland and Baddiel on the BBC's Hardtalk, discussing Jewishness and Britishness with their usual intelligence and humour.
BBC Hard Talk
In a Hardtalk Extra interview broadcast on Friday 7th October, Gavin Esler talks to Jonathan Freedland and David Baddiel. One is a leading journalist, the other a well-known comedian, recently turned writer. Both are Jewish and have recently published books which seek to assess the issues - past and present - of being both Jewish and British.
BBC Hard Talk
In a Hardtalk Extra interview broadcast on Friday 7th October, Gavin Esler talks to Jonathan Freedland and David Baddiel. One is a leading journalist, the other a well-known comedian, recently turned writer. Both are Jewish and have recently published books which seek to assess the issues - past and present - of being both Jewish and British.
Israel at war in Gaza and Lebanon - Pipes was right
Very interesting interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today Program where Isaac Herzog, a member of Ehud Olmert's government, suggests that their (defining) policy of unilateral disengagement may be a mistake.
This would represent one huge "I told you so" for Daniel Pipes who has repeatedly critised the policy of unilateral withdrawal from both Lebanon and Gaza, and the links between the two.
I have blogged about this elsewhere, but one of my previous comments is worth re-posting, as the empirical evidence says unequivocally that Pipes was right:
-----------
And a contrary view. Credit to Pipes, he makes a concrete, falsifiable prediction as to the consequences of Sharon's Gaza pullout, which we can keep an eye on to see if he is proved right or wrong.
"Today Gaza, Tomorrow Jerusalem"
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
August 9, 2005
Are Israel's critics correct? Does the "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza cause the Palestinian Arabs' anti-Semitism, their suicide factories, and their terrorism? And is it true these horrors will end only when Israeli civilians and troops leave the territories?
The answer is coming soon. Starting August 15, the Israeli government will evict about 8,000 Israelis from Gaza and turn their land over to the Palestinian Authority. In addition to being a unique event in modern history (no other democracy has forcibly uprooted thousands of its own citizens of one religion from their lawful homes), it also offers a rare, live, social-science experiment.
We stand at an interpretive divide. If Israel's critics are right, the Gaza withdrawal will improve Palestinian attitudes toward Israel, leading to an end of incitement and a steep drop in attempted violence, followed by a renewal of negotiations and a full settlement. Logic requires, after all, that if "occupation" is the problem, ending it, even partially, will lead to a solution.
But I forecast a very different outcome. Given that about 80% of Palestinian Arabs continue to reject Israel's very existence, signs of Israeli weakness, such as the forthcoming Gaza withdrawal, will instead inspire heightened Palestinian irredentism. Absorbing their new gift without gratitude, Palestinian Arabs will focus on those territories Israelis have not evacuated. (This is what happened after Israeli forces fled Lebanon.) The retreat will inspire not comity but a new rejectionist exhilaration, a greater frenzy of anti-Zionist anger, and a surge in anti-Israel violence.
Palestinian Arabs themselves are openly saying as much. A top Hamas figure in Gaza, Ahmed al-Bahar says "Israel has never been in such a state of retreat and weakness as it is today following more than four years of the intifada. Hamas's heroic attacks exposed the weakness and volatility of the impotent Zionist security establishment. The withdrawal marks the end of the Zionist dream and is a sign of the moral and psychological decline of the Jewish state. We believe that the resistance is the only way to pressure the Jews."
This would represent one huge "I told you so" for Daniel Pipes who has repeatedly critised the policy of unilateral withdrawal from both Lebanon and Gaza, and the links between the two.
I have blogged about this elsewhere, but one of my previous comments is worth re-posting, as the empirical evidence says unequivocally that Pipes was right:
-----------
And a contrary view. Credit to Pipes, he makes a concrete, falsifiable prediction as to the consequences of Sharon's Gaza pullout, which we can keep an eye on to see if he is proved right or wrong.
"Today Gaza, Tomorrow Jerusalem"
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
August 9, 2005
Are Israel's critics correct? Does the "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza cause the Palestinian Arabs' anti-Semitism, their suicide factories, and their terrorism? And is it true these horrors will end only when Israeli civilians and troops leave the territories?
The answer is coming soon. Starting August 15, the Israeli government will evict about 8,000 Israelis from Gaza and turn their land over to the Palestinian Authority. In addition to being a unique event in modern history (no other democracy has forcibly uprooted thousands of its own citizens of one religion from their lawful homes), it also offers a rare, live, social-science experiment.
We stand at an interpretive divide. If Israel's critics are right, the Gaza withdrawal will improve Palestinian attitudes toward Israel, leading to an end of incitement and a steep drop in attempted violence, followed by a renewal of negotiations and a full settlement. Logic requires, after all, that if "occupation" is the problem, ending it, even partially, will lead to a solution.
But I forecast a very different outcome. Given that about 80% of Palestinian Arabs continue to reject Israel's very existence, signs of Israeli weakness, such as the forthcoming Gaza withdrawal, will instead inspire heightened Palestinian irredentism. Absorbing their new gift without gratitude, Palestinian Arabs will focus on those territories Israelis have not evacuated. (This is what happened after Israeli forces fled Lebanon.) The retreat will inspire not comity but a new rejectionist exhilaration, a greater frenzy of anti-Zionist anger, and a surge in anti-Israel violence.
Palestinian Arabs themselves are openly saying as much. A top Hamas figure in Gaza, Ahmed al-Bahar says "Israel has never been in such a state of retreat and weakness as it is today following more than four years of the intifada. Hamas's heroic attacks exposed the weakness and volatility of the impotent Zionist security establishment. The withdrawal marks the end of the Zionist dream and is a sign of the moral and psychological decline of the Jewish state. We believe that the resistance is the only way to pressure the Jews."
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Happy Birthday George
On the occasion of G.W.'s 60th birthday (and a couple of days after July 4th) here is a rather nice piece in praise of America:
What's So Great About America?
By Dinesh D'Souza
The newcomer who sees America for the first time typically experiences emotions that alternate between wonder and delight. Here is a country where everything works: The roads are paper-smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up the telephone you get a dial tone. You can even buy things from the store and then take them back if you change your mind. For the Third World visitor, the American supermarket is a marvel to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, 50 different types of cereal, multiple flavors of ice cream, countless unappreciated inventions like quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, roll-on deodorant, disposable diapers.
The immigrant cannot help noticing that America is a country where the poor live comparatively well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s, when CBS television broadcast an anti-Reagan documentary, “People Like Us,” which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with the intention of embarrassing the Reagan administration. But it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans had television sets and cars. They arrived at the same conclusion that I witnessed in a friend of mine from Bombay who has been trying unsuccessfully to move to the United States for nearly a decade. I asked him, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”
Read on...
Found it via: instapundit
What's So Great About America?
By Dinesh D'Souza
The newcomer who sees America for the first time typically experiences emotions that alternate between wonder and delight. Here is a country where everything works: The roads are paper-smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up the telephone you get a dial tone. You can even buy things from the store and then take them back if you change your mind. For the Third World visitor, the American supermarket is a marvel to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, 50 different types of cereal, multiple flavors of ice cream, countless unappreciated inventions like quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, roll-on deodorant, disposable diapers.
The immigrant cannot help noticing that America is a country where the poor live comparatively well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s, when CBS television broadcast an anti-Reagan documentary, “People Like Us,” which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with the intention of embarrassing the Reagan administration. But it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans had television sets and cars. They arrived at the same conclusion that I witnessed in a friend of mine from Bombay who has been trying unsuccessfully to move to the United States for nearly a decade. I asked him, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”
Read on...
Found it via: instapundit
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Survey of World's Muslims Yields Dismaying Results - Pipes
Survey of World's Muslims Yields Dismaying Results
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
June 27, 2006
How do Muslims worldwide think?
To find out, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press carried out a large-scale attitudinal survey this spring. Titled The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other, it interviewed Muslims in two batches of countries: six of them with long-standing, majority-Muslim populations (Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey) and four of them in Western Europe with new, minority Muslim populations (France, Germany, Britain, and Spain).
The survey, which also looks at Western views of Muslims, yielded some dismaying but not altogether surprising results. Its themes can be grouped under three rubrics.
A proclivity to conspiracy theories: In not one Muslim population polled does a majority believe that Arabs carried out the attacks of September 11, 2001, on America. The proportions range from a mere 15% in Pakistan holding Arabs responsible, to 48% among French Muslims. Confirming recent negative trends in Turkey, the number of Turks who point the finger at Arabs has declined to 16% today from 46% in 2002. In other words, in every one of these 10 Muslim communities, a majority views September 11 as a hoax perpetrated by the American government, Israel, or some other agency.
Likewise, Muslims are widely prejudiced against Jews, ranging from 28% unfavorable ratings among French Muslims to 98% in Jordan (which, despite the monarchy's moderation, has a majority Palestinian Arab population). Further, Muslims in certain countries (especially Egypt and Jordan) see Jews conspiratorially, as being responsible for bad relations between Muslims and Westerners.
Conspiracy theories also pertain to larger topics. Asked, "What is most responsible for Muslim nations' lack of prosperity?" between 14% (in Pakistan) and 43% (in Jordan) blame the policies of America and other Western states, as opposed to indigenous problems, such as a lack of democracy or education, or the presence of corruption or radical Islam.
This conspiracism points to a widespread unwillingness in the umma to deal with realities, preferring the safer bromides of plots, schemes, and intrigues. It also exposes major problems adjusting to modernity.
Support for terrorism: All the Muslim populations polled display a solid majority of support for Osama bin Laden. Asked whether they have confidence in him, Muslims replied positively, ranging between 8% (in Turkey) and 72% (in Nigeria). Likewise, suicide bombing is popular. Muslims who call it justified range from 13% (in Germany) to 69% (in Nigeria). These appalling numbers suggest that terrorism by Muslims has deep roots and will remain a danger for years to come.
British and Nigerian Muslims are most alienated: Britain stands out as a paradoxical country. Non-Muslims there have strikingly more favorable views of Islam and Muslims than elsewhere in the West; for example, only 32% of the British sample view Muslims as violent, significantly less than their counterparts in France (41%), Germany (52%), or Spain (60%). In the Muhammad cartoon dispute, Britons showed more sympathy for the Muslim outlook than did other Europeans. More broadly, Britons blame Muslims less for the poor state of Western-Muslim relations.
But British Muslims return the favor with the most malign anti-Western attitudes found in Europe. Many more of them regard Westerners as violent, greedy, immoral, and arrogant than do their counterparts in France, Germany, and Spain. In addition, whether asked about their attitudes toward Jews, responsibility for September 11, or the place of women in Western societies, their views are notably more extreme.
The situation in Britain reflects the "Londonistan" phenomenon, whereby Britons preemptively cringe and Muslims respond to this weakness with aggression.
Nigerian Muslims generally have the most belligerent views on such issues as the state of Western-Muslim relations, the supposed immorality and arrogance of Westerners, and support for Mr. bin Laden and suicide terrorism. This extremism results, no doubt, from the violent state of Christian-Muslim relations in Nigeria.
Ironically, most Muslim alienation is found in those countries where Muslims are either the most or the least accommodated, suggesting that a middle path is best - where Muslims do not win special privileges, as in Britain, nor are they in an advanced state of hostility, as in Nigeria.
Overall, the Pew survey sends an undeniable message of crisis from one end to the other of the Muslim world
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
June 27, 2006
How do Muslims worldwide think?
To find out, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press carried out a large-scale attitudinal survey this spring. Titled The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other, it interviewed Muslims in two batches of countries: six of them with long-standing, majority-Muslim populations (Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey) and four of them in Western Europe with new, minority Muslim populations (France, Germany, Britain, and Spain).
The survey, which also looks at Western views of Muslims, yielded some dismaying but not altogether surprising results. Its themes can be grouped under three rubrics.
A proclivity to conspiracy theories: In not one Muslim population polled does a majority believe that Arabs carried out the attacks of September 11, 2001, on America. The proportions range from a mere 15% in Pakistan holding Arabs responsible, to 48% among French Muslims. Confirming recent negative trends in Turkey, the number of Turks who point the finger at Arabs has declined to 16% today from 46% in 2002. In other words, in every one of these 10 Muslim communities, a majority views September 11 as a hoax perpetrated by the American government, Israel, or some other agency.
Likewise, Muslims are widely prejudiced against Jews, ranging from 28% unfavorable ratings among French Muslims to 98% in Jordan (which, despite the monarchy's moderation, has a majority Palestinian Arab population). Further, Muslims in certain countries (especially Egypt and Jordan) see Jews conspiratorially, as being responsible for bad relations between Muslims and Westerners.
Conspiracy theories also pertain to larger topics. Asked, "What is most responsible for Muslim nations' lack of prosperity?" between 14% (in Pakistan) and 43% (in Jordan) blame the policies of America and other Western states, as opposed to indigenous problems, such as a lack of democracy or education, or the presence of corruption or radical Islam.
This conspiracism points to a widespread unwillingness in the umma to deal with realities, preferring the safer bromides of plots, schemes, and intrigues. It also exposes major problems adjusting to modernity.
Support for terrorism: All the Muslim populations polled display a solid majority of support for Osama bin Laden. Asked whether they have confidence in him, Muslims replied positively, ranging between 8% (in Turkey) and 72% (in Nigeria). Likewise, suicide bombing is popular. Muslims who call it justified range from 13% (in Germany) to 69% (in Nigeria). These appalling numbers suggest that terrorism by Muslims has deep roots and will remain a danger for years to come.
British and Nigerian Muslims are most alienated: Britain stands out as a paradoxical country. Non-Muslims there have strikingly more favorable views of Islam and Muslims than elsewhere in the West; for example, only 32% of the British sample view Muslims as violent, significantly less than their counterparts in France (41%), Germany (52%), or Spain (60%). In the Muhammad cartoon dispute, Britons showed more sympathy for the Muslim outlook than did other Europeans. More broadly, Britons blame Muslims less for the poor state of Western-Muslim relations.
But British Muslims return the favor with the most malign anti-Western attitudes found in Europe. Many more of them regard Westerners as violent, greedy, immoral, and arrogant than do their counterparts in France, Germany, and Spain. In addition, whether asked about their attitudes toward Jews, responsibility for September 11, or the place of women in Western societies, their views are notably more extreme.
The situation in Britain reflects the "Londonistan" phenomenon, whereby Britons preemptively cringe and Muslims respond to this weakness with aggression.
Nigerian Muslims generally have the most belligerent views on such issues as the state of Western-Muslim relations, the supposed immorality and arrogance of Westerners, and support for Mr. bin Laden and suicide terrorism. This extremism results, no doubt, from the violent state of Christian-Muslim relations in Nigeria.
Ironically, most Muslim alienation is found in those countries where Muslims are either the most or the least accommodated, suggesting that a middle path is best - where Muslims do not win special privileges, as in Britain, nor are they in an advanced state of hostility, as in Nigeria.
Overall, the Pew survey sends an undeniable message of crisis from one end to the other of the Muslim world
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Empire Discussion with Niall Ferguson
Great discussion here on the rights and wrongs of Empire (in general, and the British in particular). Ferguson is my hero, this Colley woman is ok, then a whinging old Marxist and a couple of trendy lefties to get your right-thinking hackles up! About 30 mins and well worth it!
Radio 4's Start the Week - Empire Discussion
This week Andrew Marr presents a special edition of Start the Week. To mark the end of Radio 4's This Sceptred Isle: Empire series, some of this country's best-known historians will be examining how Britain and other countries around the world have been changed by their experience of empire. They'll be discussing whether Britain should apologise and make reparation for its imperial past or glory in it, and asking whether the twenty-first century will see the birth of new empires. Eric Hobsbawm, Niall Ferguson, Robert Beckford, Linda Colley and Priya Gopal join Andrew Marr.
Radio 4's Start the Week - Empire Discussion
This week Andrew Marr presents a special edition of Start the Week. To mark the end of Radio 4's This Sceptred Isle: Empire series, some of this country's best-known historians will be examining how Britain and other countries around the world have been changed by their experience of empire. They'll be discussing whether Britain should apologise and make reparation for its imperial past or glory in it, and asking whether the twenty-first century will see the birth of new empires. Eric Hobsbawm, Niall Ferguson, Robert Beckford, Linda Colley and Priya Gopal join Andrew Marr.
- The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred by Niall Ferguson is published by Allen Lane.
- Jesus Dub: Theology, Music and Social Change by Robert Beckford is published by Routledge.
- Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence by Priyamvada Gopal is published by Routledge. Her essay on a Moral Empire can be found in the collection she is editing with Neil Lazarus, which will be published in the autumn as a special issue of the journal New Formations, to be called, After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies.
- The Age of Extremes by Eric Hobsbawm is published by Abacus, as is Nations and Nationalism since 1780.
- The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley will be published by HarperCollins in the autumn. Captives is published by Pimlico.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Polish anti-semitism on the rise
Ghetto survivor warns of Polish 'fascism'
Telegraph
24/06/2006
As a 24-year-old banished to the Warsaw ghetto with thousands of fellow Polish Jews, Marek Edelman decided that the only way to fight the Nazis was to take up arms.More than six decades later, the last surviving leader of the ghetto's courageous but doomed uprising of 1943 said he thought similar action justified in today's Poland."If we want to save Poland, my advice would be to take up the knife and hit them where it hurts," Mr Edelman, 87, said in his flat in the central city of Lodz.
His anger is directed at the conservative government, which was elected eight months ago, and two nationalist and radical Right-wing parties that were recently invited to prop it up: the League of Polish Families (LPR) and Self-Defence, whose leader has praised Hitler's economic policies.
Poland's entry to the European Union two years ago has generally been hailed as a success. But it has brought with it heavy doses of illiberalism that are embarrassing the champions of EU expansion. The nation of 40 million is in danger of becoming a hothouse of extremism and Catholic nationalism. Ten days ago the European Parliament condemned "a rise in racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic and homophobic intolerance" and urged the government to tone down its rhetoric or risk sanctions. Drawing parallels with the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Mr Edelman said: "If this coalition continues to shape the country, I truly believe that our freedom is threatened. Persecution starts with small things: first language, then beatings, then murder."
This week a report alleged that the deputy chief of state television had published a neo-Nazi magazine calling for the expulsion of Jews from Poland. Piotr Farfal, 28, claimed that he had only "lent his name" to the magazine. Asked to confirm his identity on a photograph of him giving a Nazi salute, he said: "You can also use this gesture to greet someone."
Gay rights groups around the world protested after Wojciech Wierzejski, the deputy chief of LPR, speaking before the country's annual gay rights march, referred to gays as "deviants" who should be beaten with sticks if they marched without a permit.
But the main focus of detractors' wrath is Radio Maryja, a popular Catholic radio station that is openly anti-semitic and racist. The station was crucial to the electoral success of the Law and Justice Party, which squeezed into power on the back of public dissatisfaction with the previous Left-wing government's corruption and poor economic management. As a result, the station has acquired a huge influence on government business.
Its listeners are, like the supporters of LPR and Self-Defence, typically rural, elderly, staunch Catholics who feel betrayed by the country's free market transformation. Numbering up to four million, they pay for the station through donations and in return lap up not only the morning doses of prayers, recipes and household tips but also the evening political broadcasts and phone-ins in which government figures regularly take part.
In March Mr Edelman wrote an angry letter to the prime minister after a broadcast in which a regular Radio Maryja commentator said that Poland was "being outflanked by Judeans" who, with their "greasy palms", were "trying to extort money from our government". "I wanted to point out that the government is lending support to the most reactionary currents of xenophobia and anti-semitism," said Mr Edelman, a retired heart surgeon. "Radio Maryja should be closed down."
The government rejects the charges, talking of a Left-wing smear campaign. All Polish Youth, the youth wing of LPR, says it is only by making Poland a Catholic state that its future will be secured. "We do not want to become like Holland with its free drugs and gay marriage," said Konrad Bonislawski, 23, a senior member. "Since joining the European Union we have seen attempts to destroy our Catholic values."
One of the government's most controversial moves has been to announce the reintroduction to schools of lessons in patriotism, in which pupils will celebrate their heritage through history lessons and singing the national anthem. The initiative prompted schoolchildren to form the Pupils' Initiative and to storm the education ministry this month, demanding the sacking of Roman Giertych, the education minister and the leader of LPR.
"You can't teach patriotism," said Karolina Szczepaniak, 18, who attends a convent school in Warsaw. "The government is trying to force on us its religious ideas, its homophobia, its racism, as it tries to turn Poland into a Catholic state. "Look at all the cases where fundamentalists impose their ideas on states and you see how dangerous it can be."
-----------------
JP Note: according to the stats here, the Jewish population of Poland is 25,000, ie 0.065% of the population
Telegraph
24/06/2006
As a 24-year-old banished to the Warsaw ghetto with thousands of fellow Polish Jews, Marek Edelman decided that the only way to fight the Nazis was to take up arms.More than six decades later, the last surviving leader of the ghetto's courageous but doomed uprising of 1943 said he thought similar action justified in today's Poland."If we want to save Poland, my advice would be to take up the knife and hit them where it hurts," Mr Edelman, 87, said in his flat in the central city of Lodz.
His anger is directed at the conservative government, which was elected eight months ago, and two nationalist and radical Right-wing parties that were recently invited to prop it up: the League of Polish Families (LPR) and Self-Defence, whose leader has praised Hitler's economic policies.
Poland's entry to the European Union two years ago has generally been hailed as a success. But it has brought with it heavy doses of illiberalism that are embarrassing the champions of EU expansion. The nation of 40 million is in danger of becoming a hothouse of extremism and Catholic nationalism. Ten days ago the European Parliament condemned "a rise in racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic and homophobic intolerance" and urged the government to tone down its rhetoric or risk sanctions. Drawing parallels with the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Mr Edelman said: "If this coalition continues to shape the country, I truly believe that our freedom is threatened. Persecution starts with small things: first language, then beatings, then murder."
This week a report alleged that the deputy chief of state television had published a neo-Nazi magazine calling for the expulsion of Jews from Poland. Piotr Farfal, 28, claimed that he had only "lent his name" to the magazine. Asked to confirm his identity on a photograph of him giving a Nazi salute, he said: "You can also use this gesture to greet someone."
Gay rights groups around the world protested after Wojciech Wierzejski, the deputy chief of LPR, speaking before the country's annual gay rights march, referred to gays as "deviants" who should be beaten with sticks if they marched without a permit.
But the main focus of detractors' wrath is Radio Maryja, a popular Catholic radio station that is openly anti-semitic and racist. The station was crucial to the electoral success of the Law and Justice Party, which squeezed into power on the back of public dissatisfaction with the previous Left-wing government's corruption and poor economic management. As a result, the station has acquired a huge influence on government business.
Its listeners are, like the supporters of LPR and Self-Defence, typically rural, elderly, staunch Catholics who feel betrayed by the country's free market transformation. Numbering up to four million, they pay for the station through donations and in return lap up not only the morning doses of prayers, recipes and household tips but also the evening political broadcasts and phone-ins in which government figures regularly take part.
In March Mr Edelman wrote an angry letter to the prime minister after a broadcast in which a regular Radio Maryja commentator said that Poland was "being outflanked by Judeans" who, with their "greasy palms", were "trying to extort money from our government". "I wanted to point out that the government is lending support to the most reactionary currents of xenophobia and anti-semitism," said Mr Edelman, a retired heart surgeon. "Radio Maryja should be closed down."
The government rejects the charges, talking of a Left-wing smear campaign. All Polish Youth, the youth wing of LPR, says it is only by making Poland a Catholic state that its future will be secured. "We do not want to become like Holland with its free drugs and gay marriage," said Konrad Bonislawski, 23, a senior member. "Since joining the European Union we have seen attempts to destroy our Catholic values."
One of the government's most controversial moves has been to announce the reintroduction to schools of lessons in patriotism, in which pupils will celebrate their heritage through history lessons and singing the national anthem. The initiative prompted schoolchildren to form the Pupils' Initiative and to storm the education ministry this month, demanding the sacking of Roman Giertych, the education minister and the leader of LPR.
"You can't teach patriotism," said Karolina Szczepaniak, 18, who attends a convent school in Warsaw. "The government is trying to force on us its religious ideas, its homophobia, its racism, as it tries to turn Poland into a Catholic state. "Look at all the cases where fundamentalists impose their ideas on states and you see how dangerous it can be."
-----------------
JP Note: according to the stats here, the Jewish population of Poland is 25,000, ie 0.065% of the population
Friday, June 23, 2006
The public feels patronised, bullied and betrayed
Here's a good piece on Labour in the Guardian.
The public feels patronised, bullied and betrayed
Jenni Russell
The saddest and most puzzling aspect of this rift is that the party adopted the top-down creed of technocratic managerialism just as business was realising the limitations of that approach. These days, successful workplaces are all about delegation and trust. Already the Conservatives have seen what potentially rich territory this is. They are talking of the need to trust people again.
There are signs of hope. Some young Labour ministers think and talk like human beings and would like a new approach. If Labour is to win the next election, it's vital that this more open, less defensive generation of politicians are allowed to start thinking about how they can construct a better relationship between them and us.
The public feels patronised, bullied and betrayed
Jenni Russell
The saddest and most puzzling aspect of this rift is that the party adopted the top-down creed of technocratic managerialism just as business was realising the limitations of that approach. These days, successful workplaces are all about delegation and trust. Already the Conservatives have seen what potentially rich territory this is. They are talking of the need to trust people again.
There are signs of hope. Some young Labour ministers think and talk like human beings and would like a new approach. If Labour is to win the next election, it's vital that this more open, less defensive generation of politicians are allowed to start thinking about how they can construct a better relationship between them and us.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
An Englishman's home isn't his Castle
A new property law enables the council to confiscate your home if it has been empty for over six months.
It's an old saying, a trope or a truism if you prefer, that "An Englishman's home is his castle". Whatever happens outside in the streets, whatever idiocies the current political pygmies have decided to inflict upon the populace, the possession and enjoyment of one's own property was safe, guarded by both law and custom. Certainly there were eminent domain purchases, broadly in line with American practice but as of the first of this month the government no longer even has to pay.
Yes, you did read that correctly, your paid off, unmortgaged, fully owned property can be taken away from you without your even being paid for it.
The law is here: The Housing (Empty Dwelling Management Orders) (Prescribed Exceptions and Requirements) (England) Order 2006. Something of a mouthful, I know, but what this and the preceding pieces of legislation actually state is that if you leave a property uninhabited for 6 months then the local council can take it from you and rent it to whomever it likes. There are a few exceptions, such as vacation homes and so on, but at a stroke the entire basis of property law has changed. Instead of it being yours to do with as you wish it is yours as long, and only as long, as you do as the government wishes.
The set up is that if you have left the property empty then the local council must make reasonable efforts to contact you to let out the house or apartment. If you still decide that you don't want to, then they will do it for you. Worse, far worse, is if their "reasonable efforts" don't actually find you, then they'll do it without actually telling you. These orders allowing them to do this will last 7 years, and can be extended. Yes, this will even be possible in the case of a death: the inheritors have 6 months (not from probate, but from the granting of representation: and there are many only even mildly complicated estates that can take more than 6 months to run the executor's course) to dispose of the property or conceivably have it compulsorarily rented out from underneath them.
That local council can charge you a management fee for this service that you obviously don't want and should then pass on to you whatever is left of the rent they have been charging your new unwanted tenant. Your new tenants will not, of course, be quite from the top drawer of society, for like anywhere else in the world, that's not the social stratum from whom the inhabitants of "social" housing are drawn. Yet you will be responsible for the costs of ensuring that said housing is maintained to the highest standards, whether or not they actually pay any rent; indeed, you won't actually be able to evict them if they should trash the place for, of course, you are not the manager or agent for the property; that is the local council.
Here's the full article.
It's an old saying, a trope or a truism if you prefer, that "An Englishman's home is his castle". Whatever happens outside in the streets, whatever idiocies the current political pygmies have decided to inflict upon the populace, the possession and enjoyment of one's own property was safe, guarded by both law and custom. Certainly there were eminent domain purchases, broadly in line with American practice but as of the first of this month the government no longer even has to pay.
Yes, you did read that correctly, your paid off, unmortgaged, fully owned property can be taken away from you without your even being paid for it.
The law is here: The Housing (Empty Dwelling Management Orders) (Prescribed Exceptions and Requirements) (England) Order 2006. Something of a mouthful, I know, but what this and the preceding pieces of legislation actually state is that if you leave a property uninhabited for 6 months then the local council can take it from you and rent it to whomever it likes. There are a few exceptions, such as vacation homes and so on, but at a stroke the entire basis of property law has changed. Instead of it being yours to do with as you wish it is yours as long, and only as long, as you do as the government wishes.
The set up is that if you have left the property empty then the local council must make reasonable efforts to contact you to let out the house or apartment. If you still decide that you don't want to, then they will do it for you. Worse, far worse, is if their "reasonable efforts" don't actually find you, then they'll do it without actually telling you. These orders allowing them to do this will last 7 years, and can be extended. Yes, this will even be possible in the case of a death: the inheritors have 6 months (not from probate, but from the granting of representation: and there are many only even mildly complicated estates that can take more than 6 months to run the executor's course) to dispose of the property or conceivably have it compulsorarily rented out from underneath them.
That local council can charge you a management fee for this service that you obviously don't want and should then pass on to you whatever is left of the rent they have been charging your new unwanted tenant. Your new tenants will not, of course, be quite from the top drawer of society, for like anywhere else in the world, that's not the social stratum from whom the inhabitants of "social" housing are drawn. Yet you will be responsible for the costs of ensuring that said housing is maintained to the highest standards, whether or not they actually pay any rent; indeed, you won't actually be able to evict them if they should trash the place for, of course, you are not the manager or agent for the property; that is the local council.
Here's the full article.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
A Natural History of Jewish Intelligence
The Lessons of Jewish Genes
by Steven Pinker
The New Republic
17/6/06
My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe who owned a small necktie factory on the outskirts of Montreal. While visiting them one weekend, I found my grandfather on the factory floor, cutting shapes out of irregular stacks of cloth with a fabric saw. He explained that by carving up the remnants that were left over when the neckties had been cut out and stitching them together in places that didn't show, he could get a few extra ties out of each sheet of cloth. I asked him why he was doing this himself rather than leaving it to his employees. He shrugged, tapped his forehead, and said, "Goyishe kop," a term of condescension that literally means "gentile head."
He wasn't exactly serious, but he wasn't exactly not serious either. Jews have long had an ambivalent attitude toward their own intelligence, and toward their reputation for intelligence. There is an ethnic pride at the prevalence of Jews in occupations that reward brainpower. A droll e-mail called "New Words to Add to Your Jewish Vocabulary" includes "jewbiliation, N: pride in finding out that one's favorite celebrity is Jewish" and "meinstein, N: My son, the genius." Many Jews subscribe to a folk theory that attributes Jewish intelligence to what would have to be the weirdest example of sexual selection in the living world: that for generations in the shtetl, the brightest yeshiva boy was betrothed to the daughter of the richest man, thereby favoring the genes, if such genes there are, for Talmudic pilpul.
But pride has always been haunted by fear that public acknowledge of Jewish achievement could fuel the perception of "Jewish domination" of institutions. And any characterization of Jews in biological terms smacks of Nazi pseudoscience about "the Jewish race." A team of scientists from the University of Utah recently strode into this minefield with their article "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence," which was published online in the Journal of Biosocial Science a year ago, and was soon publicized in The New York Times, The Economist, and on the cover of New York magazine.
The Utah researchers Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending (henceforth CH&H) proposed that Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic advantage in intelligence, and that the advantage arose from natural selection for success in middleman occupations (moneylending, selling, and estate management) during the first millennium of their existence in northern Europe, from about 800 C.E. to 1600 C.E. Since rapid selection of a single trait often brings along deleterious by-products, this evolutionary history also bequeathed the genetic diseases known to be common among Ashkenazim, such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher's.
The CH&H study quickly became a target of harsh denunciation and morbid fascination. It raises two questions. How good is the evidence for this audacious hypothesis? And what, if any, are the political and moral implications?
by Steven Pinker
The New Republic
17/6/06
My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe who owned a small necktie factory on the outskirts of Montreal. While visiting them one weekend, I found my grandfather on the factory floor, cutting shapes out of irregular stacks of cloth with a fabric saw. He explained that by carving up the remnants that were left over when the neckties had been cut out and stitching them together in places that didn't show, he could get a few extra ties out of each sheet of cloth. I asked him why he was doing this himself rather than leaving it to his employees. He shrugged, tapped his forehead, and said, "Goyishe kop," a term of condescension that literally means "gentile head."
He wasn't exactly serious, but he wasn't exactly not serious either. Jews have long had an ambivalent attitude toward their own intelligence, and toward their reputation for intelligence. There is an ethnic pride at the prevalence of Jews in occupations that reward brainpower. A droll e-mail called "New Words to Add to Your Jewish Vocabulary" includes "jewbiliation, N: pride in finding out that one's favorite celebrity is Jewish" and "meinstein, N: My son, the genius." Many Jews subscribe to a folk theory that attributes Jewish intelligence to what would have to be the weirdest example of sexual selection in the living world: that for generations in the shtetl, the brightest yeshiva boy was betrothed to the daughter of the richest man, thereby favoring the genes, if such genes there are, for Talmudic pilpul.
But pride has always been haunted by fear that public acknowledge of Jewish achievement could fuel the perception of "Jewish domination" of institutions. And any characterization of Jews in biological terms smacks of Nazi pseudoscience about "the Jewish race." A team of scientists from the University of Utah recently strode into this minefield with their article "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence," which was published online in the Journal of Biosocial Science a year ago, and was soon publicized in The New York Times, The Economist, and on the cover of New York magazine.
The Utah researchers Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending (henceforth CH&H) proposed that Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic advantage in intelligence, and that the advantage arose from natural selection for success in middleman occupations (moneylending, selling, and estate management) during the first millennium of their existence in northern Europe, from about 800 C.E. to 1600 C.E. Since rapid selection of a single trait often brings along deleterious by-products, this evolutionary history also bequeathed the genetic diseases known to be common among Ashkenazim, such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher's.
The CH&H study quickly became a target of harsh denunciation and morbid fascination. It raises two questions. How good is the evidence for this audacious hypothesis? And what, if any, are the political and moral implications?
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
The Positive Case For Globalisation
An excellent article in the Times on the positive benefits of Globalisation and why it is important to defend it against a rising tide of criticsm. And the Author? Mr Gordon Brown. If he keeps this up I might even vote for him!
The whole article is worth reading but I wanted to pull out these quotes:
'“Economic patriotism” across Europe, with country after country blocking cross-border acquisitions, is antithetical to both the spirit and the rules of an open single market. Protectionist calls from parts of the United States, which would seek to halt necessary change, also send out the wrong message, implying that globalisation is a threat, not the opportunity it should be.
The rising tide of populism in Latin America and continuing protectionism in Asia are direct assaults on the very idea of globalisation itself. Everywhere, instead of barriers coming down, they appear to be going up.'
'Ironically, even globalisation’s beneficiaries — the millions who are seeing cuts in consumer goods prices, lower inflation and lower interest rates, and higher economic growth and employment — are acting as if they are victims. With even winners thinking like losers — and the popular focus on lost manufacturing, lost service jobs off-shored, lost jobs to newcomers moving into their communities — the argument is being run by the hardest hit producers, forgetting the benefits to consumers.
But it is not the side-effects or the inevitable strains of globalisation that they have put under attack. Under assault are the very foundations of globalisation — the free movement of capital, goods and services, and labour — that would be destroyed by this three-pronged attack from protectionism, economic patriotism and anti-immigrant sentiment.
The world is being given a wake-up call about the dangers of retreating back into the kind of beggar-thy-neighbour, heads-in-the-sand protectionism that set nation against nation in the 1930s.
So our first task, indeed our responsibility as economic leaders, is to demonstrate to an insecure and uncertain public that either defending a status quo that cannot endure, or retreating into protectionism is a false prospectus.'
The whole article is worth reading but I wanted to pull out these quotes:
'“Economic patriotism” across Europe, with country after country blocking cross-border acquisitions, is antithetical to both the spirit and the rules of an open single market. Protectionist calls from parts of the United States, which would seek to halt necessary change, also send out the wrong message, implying that globalisation is a threat, not the opportunity it should be.
The rising tide of populism in Latin America and continuing protectionism in Asia are direct assaults on the very idea of globalisation itself. Everywhere, instead of barriers coming down, they appear to be going up.'
'Ironically, even globalisation’s beneficiaries — the millions who are seeing cuts in consumer goods prices, lower inflation and lower interest rates, and higher economic growth and employment — are acting as if they are victims. With even winners thinking like losers — and the popular focus on lost manufacturing, lost service jobs off-shored, lost jobs to newcomers moving into their communities — the argument is being run by the hardest hit producers, forgetting the benefits to consumers.
But it is not the side-effects or the inevitable strains of globalisation that they have put under attack. Under assault are the very foundations of globalisation — the free movement of capital, goods and services, and labour — that would be destroyed by this three-pronged attack from protectionism, economic patriotism and anti-immigrant sentiment.
The world is being given a wake-up call about the dangers of retreating back into the kind of beggar-thy-neighbour, heads-in-the-sand protectionism that set nation against nation in the 1930s.
So our first task, indeed our responsibility as economic leaders, is to demonstrate to an insecure and uncertain public that either defending a status quo that cannot endure, or retreating into protectionism is a false prospectus.'
Monday, June 12, 2006
Civilian deaths in Gaza
It's hard to write about this without sounding like a complete apologist for any action carried about Israel. Just for the record, I'm not defending the shelling of picnicing families. However, just read this (via biased-bbc), which made think that the story was at the very least worth keeping an eye on. (Worth reading for the surprising - to me, anyway - revelation that the Palestinian boy shown cowering behind his father, was not, after all, killed by Israeli bullets.) Good post on moral equivalence from HP too.
In God We Trust (a bit less)
Tipped off to this by the fun-loving National Secular Society:
Although the US is far more devout than Europe (a point frequently made by M. Steyn) a new study suggests that Americans too are beginning to stand in the corner losing their religion. According to the authors of the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), the number of respondants claiming no religious affiliation has risen from 8% to 14%.
I realise it probably looks like I'm making some kind of 'aha! they're as godless as us!' point - but I'm not. It's one survey and the numbers aren't exactly massive. Just thought it was mildly interesting. Anyway, you can read more about it here, if you're so inclined.
Although the US is far more devout than Europe (a point frequently made by M. Steyn) a new study suggests that Americans too are beginning to stand in the corner losing their religion. According to the authors of the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), the number of respondants claiming no religious affiliation has risen from 8% to 14%.
I realise it probably looks like I'm making some kind of 'aha! they're as godless as us!' point - but I'm not. It's one survey and the numbers aren't exactly massive. Just thought it was mildly interesting. Anyway, you can read more about it here, if you're so inclined.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Friday, June 02, 2006
Hamas leader's three sisters live secretly in Israel as full citizens
Hamas leader's three sisters live secretly in Israel as full citizens
Telegraph
02/06/2006
Israel regards Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian Hamas prime minister, as an enemy of state. But three of his sisters enjoy full Israeli citizenship, having moved 30 years ago to the desert town of Tel Sheva. Some of their offspring have even served in the Israeli army, the force responsible for decades of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, an occupation that the Islamist movement, Hamas, was founded to fight.
Telegraph
02/06/2006
Israel regards Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian Hamas prime minister, as an enemy of state. But three of his sisters enjoy full Israeli citizenship, having moved 30 years ago to the desert town of Tel Sheva. Some of their offspring have even served in the Israeli army, the force responsible for decades of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, an occupation that the Islamist movement, Hamas, was founded to fight.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Recycled politics
How many of the Conservative policies that Labour abolished are they now bringing back?
1. The Governments Education Bill is effectively the Conservatives 1987 Grant Maintained Schools scheme.
2. The Government banned the Conservative internal market reforms in the NHS, massively increased spending on something else and then decided they were wrong to ban the Tory policies in the first place. Now they are pushing forward with internal market reforms to the NHS.
3. And finally we have a new scheme that is similiar in principle to the Conservatives assisted places scheme.
Here's the Adam Smith Institue Blog report on the new scheme:
'Telegraph education correspondent Julie Henry reports that up to 2,000 children in local-authority care in Britain could be offered places in private boarding schools.
Despite the £2.5bn a year that is spent looking after some 60,000 children in care, only 6% of them end up gaining five or more good GCSEs – the standard target in secondary schools. More than a third of them get no GCSE exams at all. They are also three times more likely to get involved in crime than other children. So access to private education could be a great boon for them.
Trials of the idea could start next year. There is, of course, a bit of self-interest for the local councils too. To keep a child in a children’s home costs four times the fees in posh schools like Eton or Winchester.
But what struck me as remarkable is that here we are – eight years later – bringing back a version of the ‘assisted places’ scheme that Tony Blair’s government abolished as soon as it came into office. The scheme offended Old Labour backbenchers, who wanted to make life as difficult as possible for the private schools. So despite the fact that it had given thousands of poor but bright kids access to the very best schooling in the country, it had to go.
So let us hope that this new idea takes root and grows. But why stop at 2,000? Why not give all children state-paid access to the school of their choice? The state does not have to provide an entire service – education, health, food, footwear, clothes – to make sure that everyone has access to it. All it has to do is pay – specifically, for those who could not otherwise afford these things. That gives equal access of the kind Old Labour wants: but without the nationalized industry provision that we all know is a disaster.'
Who knows maybe this is an example of Labour Ideology being best served by Conservative policies. If that's the case it would appear the Government has wasted a lot of money and effort over the last nine years. (Incidently, no book quite defines the right as Marx's Communist manifesto does the left but I reckon Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' and its theory of the Market's 'invisible hand'comes closest).
1. The Governments Education Bill is effectively the Conservatives 1987 Grant Maintained Schools scheme.
2. The Government banned the Conservative internal market reforms in the NHS, massively increased spending on something else and then decided they were wrong to ban the Tory policies in the first place. Now they are pushing forward with internal market reforms to the NHS.
3. And finally we have a new scheme that is similiar in principle to the Conservatives assisted places scheme.
Here's the Adam Smith Institue Blog report on the new scheme:
'Telegraph education correspondent Julie Henry reports that up to 2,000 children in local-authority care in Britain could be offered places in private boarding schools.
Despite the £2.5bn a year that is spent looking after some 60,000 children in care, only 6% of them end up gaining five or more good GCSEs – the standard target in secondary schools. More than a third of them get no GCSE exams at all. They are also three times more likely to get involved in crime than other children. So access to private education could be a great boon for them.
Trials of the idea could start next year. There is, of course, a bit of self-interest for the local councils too. To keep a child in a children’s home costs four times the fees in posh schools like Eton or Winchester.
But what struck me as remarkable is that here we are – eight years later – bringing back a version of the ‘assisted places’ scheme that Tony Blair’s government abolished as soon as it came into office. The scheme offended Old Labour backbenchers, who wanted to make life as difficult as possible for the private schools. So despite the fact that it had given thousands of poor but bright kids access to the very best schooling in the country, it had to go.
So let us hope that this new idea takes root and grows. But why stop at 2,000? Why not give all children state-paid access to the school of their choice? The state does not have to provide an entire service – education, health, food, footwear, clothes – to make sure that everyone has access to it. All it has to do is pay – specifically, for those who could not otherwise afford these things. That gives equal access of the kind Old Labour wants: but without the nationalized industry provision that we all know is a disaster.'
Who knows maybe this is an example of Labour Ideology being best served by Conservative policies. If that's the case it would appear the Government has wasted a lot of money and effort over the last nine years. (Incidently, no book quite defines the right as Marx's Communist manifesto does the left but I reckon Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' and its theory of the Market's 'invisible hand'comes closest).
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Christian children sold as slaves by Islamist leader
Reunited: boys saved from slavers
The Sunday Times
May 21, 2006
A SENIOR member of an Islamic organisation linked to Al-Qaeda is funding his activities through the kidnapping of Christian children who are sold into slavery in Pakistan. The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12. They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade.
Khan was exposed in a sting organised by American and Pakistani missionaries who decided to save 20 such boys and return them to their homes. ... The undercover missionaries have demanded the prosecution of Khan and an investigation into his work for the JUD, which claims to have created a “pure Islamic environment” at Muridke.
Hafez Muhamed Sayeed, [JUD's] leader, was accused of inciting riots in Pakistan this year with speeches denouncing western “depravity” after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.
----------------------------
The rescue in detail:
Rescued – the Pakistan children seized by Islamist slave traders
The Sunday Times
May 21, 2006
The Sunday Times
May 21, 2006
A SENIOR member of an Islamic organisation linked to Al-Qaeda is funding his activities through the kidnapping of Christian children who are sold into slavery in Pakistan. The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12. They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade.
Khan was exposed in a sting organised by American and Pakistani missionaries who decided to save 20 such boys and return them to their homes. ... The undercover missionaries have demanded the prosecution of Khan and an investigation into his work for the JUD, which claims to have created a “pure Islamic environment” at Muridke.
Hafez Muhamed Sayeed, [JUD's] leader, was accused of inciting riots in Pakistan this year with speeches denouncing western “depravity” after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.
----------------------------
The rescue in detail:
Rescued – the Pakistan children seized by Islamist slave traders
The Sunday Times
May 21, 2006
Friday, May 19, 2006
Chavez and the foolishness of the Left - Buruma
Thank you, my foolish friends in the West
The Sunday Times
May 14, 2006
Ian Buruma
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is only the latest dictator-in-waiting to bask in adulation from western 'progressives', says Ian Buruma
When the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape to the US in 1980, after years of persecution by the Cuban government for being openly homosexual and a dissident, he said: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”
One of the most vexing things for artists and intellectuals who live under the compulsion to applaud dictators is the spectacle of colleagues from more open societies applauding of their own free will. It adds a peculiarly nasty insult to injury. Stalin was applauded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Mao was visited by a constant stream of worshippers from the West, some of whose names can still produce winces of disgust in China. Castro has basked for years in the adulation of such literary stars as Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Even Pol Pot found favour among several well-known journalists and academics.
Last year a number of journalists, writers and showbiz figures, including Harold Pinter, Nadine Gordimer, Harry Belafonte and Tariq Ali, signed a letter claiming that in Cuba “there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959 . . .”
Arenas was arrested in 1973 for “ideological deviation”. He was tortured and locked up in prison cells filled with floodwater and excrement, and threatened with death if he didn’t renounce his own writing. Imagine what it must be like to be treated like this and then read about your fellow writers in the West standing up for your oppressors.
...
Worse causes have been served by western enthusiasts than the Bolivarist revolution, and worse leaders have been applauded than Chavez. One only needs recall the abject audiences at the court of Saddam Hussein by George Galloway, among others, who flattered the murderous dictator while claiming to represent “the voice of the voiceless”. Even now, such publications as the New Left Review advocate support for a global anti-imperialist movement that would include North Korea, surely the most oppressive regime on earth.
The common element of radical Third Worldism is an obsession with American power, as though the US were so intrinsically evil that any enemy of the US must be our friend, from Mao to Kim Jong-il, from Fidel Castro to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And if our “friends” shower us with flattery, asking us to attend conferences and sit on advisory boards, so much the better.
Criticism of American policies and economic practices are necessary and often just, but why do leftists continue to discredit their critical stance by applauding strongmen who oppress and murder their own critics? Is it simply a reverse application of that famous American cold war dictum: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”? Or is it the fatal attraction to power often felt by writers and artists who feel marginal and impotent in capitalist democracies? The danger of Chavism is not a revival of communism, even though Castro is among its main boosters. Nor should anti-Americanism be our main concern. The US can take care of itself. What needs to be resisted, not just in Latin America, is the new form of populist authoritarianism.
That Chavez is applauded by many people, especially the poor, is not necessarily a sign of democracy; many revolutionary leaders are popular, at least in the beginning of their rule, before their promises have ended in misery and bloodshed.
The left has a proud tradition of defending political freedoms, at home and abroad. But this tradition is in danger of being lost when western intellectuals indulge in power worship. Applause for autocrats undermines the morale of people who insist on fighting for their freedoms Leftists were largely sympathetic, and rightly so, to critics of Berlusconi and Thaksin, even though neither was a dictator. Both did, of course, support American foreign policy. But when democracy is endangered, the left should be equally hard on rulers who oppose the US. Failure to do so encourages authoritarianism everywhere, including in the West itself, where the frivolous behaviour of a dogmatic left has already allowed neoconservatives to steal all the best lines.
The Sunday Times
May 14, 2006
Ian Buruma
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is only the latest dictator-in-waiting to bask in adulation from western 'progressives', says Ian Buruma
When the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape to the US in 1980, after years of persecution by the Cuban government for being openly homosexual and a dissident, he said: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”
One of the most vexing things for artists and intellectuals who live under the compulsion to applaud dictators is the spectacle of colleagues from more open societies applauding of their own free will. It adds a peculiarly nasty insult to injury. Stalin was applauded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Mao was visited by a constant stream of worshippers from the West, some of whose names can still produce winces of disgust in China. Castro has basked for years in the adulation of such literary stars as Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Even Pol Pot found favour among several well-known journalists and academics.
Last year a number of journalists, writers and showbiz figures, including Harold Pinter, Nadine Gordimer, Harry Belafonte and Tariq Ali, signed a letter claiming that in Cuba “there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959 . . .”
Arenas was arrested in 1973 for “ideological deviation”. He was tortured and locked up in prison cells filled with floodwater and excrement, and threatened with death if he didn’t renounce his own writing. Imagine what it must be like to be treated like this and then read about your fellow writers in the West standing up for your oppressors.
...
Worse causes have been served by western enthusiasts than the Bolivarist revolution, and worse leaders have been applauded than Chavez. One only needs recall the abject audiences at the court of Saddam Hussein by George Galloway, among others, who flattered the murderous dictator while claiming to represent “the voice of the voiceless”. Even now, such publications as the New Left Review advocate support for a global anti-imperialist movement that would include North Korea, surely the most oppressive regime on earth.
The common element of radical Third Worldism is an obsession with American power, as though the US were so intrinsically evil that any enemy of the US must be our friend, from Mao to Kim Jong-il, from Fidel Castro to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And if our “friends” shower us with flattery, asking us to attend conferences and sit on advisory boards, so much the better.
Criticism of American policies and economic practices are necessary and often just, but why do leftists continue to discredit their critical stance by applauding strongmen who oppress and murder their own critics? Is it simply a reverse application of that famous American cold war dictum: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”? Or is it the fatal attraction to power often felt by writers and artists who feel marginal and impotent in capitalist democracies? The danger of Chavism is not a revival of communism, even though Castro is among its main boosters. Nor should anti-Americanism be our main concern. The US can take care of itself. What needs to be resisted, not just in Latin America, is the new form of populist authoritarianism.
That Chavez is applauded by many people, especially the poor, is not necessarily a sign of democracy; many revolutionary leaders are popular, at least in the beginning of their rule, before their promises have ended in misery and bloodshed.
The left has a proud tradition of defending political freedoms, at home and abroad. But this tradition is in danger of being lost when western intellectuals indulge in power worship. Applause for autocrats undermines the morale of people who insist on fighting for their freedoms Leftists were largely sympathetic, and rightly so, to critics of Berlusconi and Thaksin, even though neither was a dictator. Both did, of course, support American foreign policy. But when democracy is endangered, the left should be equally hard on rulers who oppose the US. Failure to do so encourages authoritarianism everywhere, including in the West itself, where the frivolous behaviour of a dogmatic left has already allowed neoconservatives to steal all the best lines.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Ayaan Hirsi Ali leaves Europe to live in the USA
Europe loses a powerful & important voice in the debate on Islam:
Hirsi Ali to leave Netherlands for job with US think tank
Holland's shameful treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Hirsi Ali to leave Netherlands for job with US think tank
Holland's shameful treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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