Here is an interesting review of What's Left by Nick Cohen. The piece is by a writer called Anthony Daniels, who I believe also writes under the pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, a fact that will I imagine be greeted with anticipation by some bloggers and dread by others.
Here's the review in full (another New Criterion article I'm afraid so no link available):
Finding his way
By Anthony Daniels | Volume 25, March 2007
Nick Cohen What’s Left?:
How Liberals Lost Their Way
Fourth Estate, 400 pages, £12.99
The author of this book, a respected columnist on Britain’s venerable Sunday newspaper of liberal outlook, The Observer, was born into a family in which it was assumed, as a settled matter beyond reasonable doubt, that all intelligent, cultivated, and decent people were on, and of, the Left, and that there was no serious intellectual or moral case to be made for any type of conservatism. Conservatives were not merely wrong but bad, at best motivated by a fear of change and at worst by their own narrowly material interests (the Left at that time had no material interests, at least in its own estimation). Conservatives might sometimes win elections, of course, but that was no reason to take anything they said seriously.
There comes a time, however, in many a leftist’s life when he looks around him and realizes that, all his tireless support for reform notwithstanding, many aspects of the modern world, some of them brought about by the very reform that he has so assiduously supported, do not entirely please him—and what is more, that some of his erstwhile companions in the struggle now disgust him. The world then becomes for him more ambiguous in its meaning. Mr. Cohen is on the cusp of such a change of worldview.
Changes in outlook generally have provoking causes, though there may be an underlying quasi-biological tendency in the ageing process towards conservatism. In Mr. Cohen’s case, his change of outlook was provoked by Iraq and the response of the Left to Saddam Hussein. In its opposition to the war, the Left has contrived to minimize the horrors of Saddam in order to maximize the evils of Bush and Blair: if the war was bad, then it followed that Saddam was not as bad as all that. According to Mr. Cohen, the Left had fallen for the old illusion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, irrespective of what he is actually like. And this reasoning led Mr. Cohen to doubt whether the Left’s commitment to such desiderata as basic human rights was as strong or principled as he had hitherto supposed to it be. It was more like posturing than like real commitment.
It is, of course, perfectly possible to doubt the wisdom of the enterprise in Iraq without resort to the expedient of whitewashing Iraqi Baathism and its murderous leaders, or to the repulsively grovelling apologetics of George Galloway. One has only to read the words of Elie Kedourie, which are the fruit of deep knowledge, long and discouraging experience, and brilliant intelligence, to realize the difficulties in the way of reform in the Middle East:
It is enough for practical men to fend off present evils and secure existing interests. They must not cumber themselves with historical dogmas, or chase illusions in that maze of double talk which western political vocabulary has extended over the whole world. The very attempt to modernise middle eastern society, to make it western or “democratic” must bring about evils, which may be greater than the benefits.
Professor Kedourie, born an Iraqi Jew, knew whereof he spoke.
Mr. Cohen’s main complaint against his erstwhile companions on the Left is that they have failed to take seriously the universality of Enlightenment values such as freedom of expression and freedom from oppression by arbitrary power. Instead, whenever they saw a foreign enemy of their own country whom they could usefully co-opt as an ally in their disputes with their own domestic enemies, they resorted to nihilistic relativism and multiculturalism, thus explaining away the vileness of their new ally’s atrocities as being the expression of his sacrosanct cultural tradition.
However, it does not follow from a belief in the universality of Enlightenment values that they can, and therefore should, be imposed by force. No doubt it is desirable that people should be kind, but you cannot force or even cajole them into being kind. While philosophical enlightenment can no doubt be encouraged, it cannot be imposed: it is sought and achieved. And not everybody seeks it, let alone achieves it. There is no logical necessity for opponents of the Iraq war to be apologists for Saddam.
The question of Iraq looms so large in Mr. Cohen’s reflections because the Left, to which he once belonged and to which he retains a sentimental attachment, clearly feeling that there must be something worth saving from the ruins, has comprehensively lost the economic argument that was once its very raison d’être, and is now reduced to the work of cultural destruction and the balkanization of society into little communities of ideological monomaniacs—the feminists, homosexual and animal liberationists, and so forth. The Left lost its soul when it lost the economic argument.
As it happens, I write this in my study where I have before me books of erotica smuggled in the late 1950s to my late mother from Paris by her cousin who lived there, and which I have inherited. Published by the Olympia and Obelisk Presses, and an organization called Les Hautes Etudes, they include Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer, the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, and Count Palmiro Vicaron’s Book of Limericks, none of which was obtainable in the England of that time. Personally, I don’t think England was much the loser by that.
More interesting by far than the contents of these books are the newspapers in which my cousin covered them, a method of concealment so ludicrous that it surely would have alerted any customs officer who was not actually of subnormal intelligence to the nature of their contents. A page from the Guardian for 30 November 1959, covering a compendium of 1,700 salacious limericks (complete with scholarly apparatus), reports from the Labour Party Conference of that year. Mrs. Barbara Castle, later to be an important government minister, said, “We [the state as one day to be ruled by the Labour Party] don’t want to take over industries merely in order to make them more efficient, but to make them responsible to us all.” (“We” here having changed its meaning to the whole population of the country). And Aneurin Bevan said “I insist that we will never be able to get the economic resources of this nation fully expanded unless we have a planned economy, in which the nation itself can determine its own priorities.”
These were the core beliefs and commonplaces of the Left until the advent of Mrs. Thatcher and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. So complete has been the defeat of socialism, however, that anyone who now avowed a belief in the superior efficiency of state-run industry would be more a candidate for the lunatic asylum (supposing that any remained open) than for high political office. All that the Left can nowadays propose on the domestic front is social policy so destructive that it allegedly necessitates a vast state apparatus to repair the damage it does. For this reason, the accusation of promoting only its material interests can now be more properly leveled at the Left than at conservatives, or at least at those conservatives who believe that conservatism is more than a matter of the lowest possible taxes.
Hell hath no fury like the former colleagues of a journalist who has changed his mind, and Mr. Cohen has not been altogether praised by them for what seems to them not so much a volte face as outright treachery. His book is not particularly well-written, nor does he present a structured argument: if he had, it would have been quite a lot shorter and more incisive. But it shows real thought, that of a man grappling with doctrines and presuppositions that until recently he took for granted.
He has very little to say about the domestic policy prescriptions of the modern Left, of which multiculturalism is among the most destructive. It was once the honorable goal of the Left, at least in Britain, to spread higher culture to the working class, and also to immigrants, so that every person capable by inclination and natural endowment of enjoying, participating in, or contributing to that higher culture would do so. More recently, however, the Left has devoted its energies to denying that there is any higher or lower, better or worse in cultural matters. Not coincidentally, this betrayal allows leftist intellectuals to preen themselves on the broadness of their minds while they maintain their membership of a social elite. They rarely educate their own children as if their theoretical pronouncements were true. Clearly, there is an analogy here with their betrayal of Enlightenment values in foreign affairs.
This betrayal is not new, though Mr. Cohen appears to believe that it is. It was one thing to oppose the Vietnam War because you thought it was futile and ethically worse than not fighting it (not necessarily true, but at least an honest opinion); quite another because you thought that Uncle Ho was a good man who was leading his people to freedom and prosperity, something that you could believe only by employing all the human mind’s capacity for special pleading and self-deception.
I will be interested to follow Mr. Cohen’s subsequent career. Will he reject his childhood altogether and become truly conservative? He is still young enough to do so.'
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Iran Sanctions boost civil nuclear disaster risk
The FT thinks the chances of a nuclear distaster in Iran will increase with sanctions.
'International sanctions to starve Iran's nuclear programme have heightened the risk of a radiological disaster that could spread across the Gulf, according to a new British report.
John Large of Large and Associates, UK nuclear consultants, writes that once the Bushehr civilian reactor in southern Iran goes into operation this year, a safety failure - a radioactive leak - could threaten Gulf shipping lanes and Arab Gulf states.
"The United Nations Security Council sanctions are aimed at halting, or at least impeding, the transfer of knowledge, information and equipment relating to Iran's uranium enrichment and heavy water related undertakings," the report, commissioned by the United Arab Emirates' Centre for Strategic Studies and Research, states.
"The irony here is that perhaps the culture essential to maintaining nuclear safety for Iran's separate civil nuclear power programme will be left wanting."
Full article here
'International sanctions to starve Iran's nuclear programme have heightened the risk of a radiological disaster that could spread across the Gulf, according to a new British report.
John Large of Large and Associates, UK nuclear consultants, writes that once the Bushehr civilian reactor in southern Iran goes into operation this year, a safety failure - a radioactive leak - could threaten Gulf shipping lanes and Arab Gulf states.
"The United Nations Security Council sanctions are aimed at halting, or at least impeding, the transfer of knowledge, information and equipment relating to Iran's uranium enrichment and heavy water related undertakings," the report, commissioned by the United Arab Emirates' Centre for Strategic Studies and Research, states.
"The irony here is that perhaps the culture essential to maintaining nuclear safety for Iran's separate civil nuclear power programme will be left wanting."
Full article here
Monday, April 02, 2007
Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger interviewed by Piers Morgan
Former Mirror editor Piers Morgan (PM) interviews Alan Rusbridger (AR) Editor of the Guardian. Piers accuses Alan Rusbridger of being a bit of a hypocrite and gives him a pretty hard time. It's probably quite unfair but it makes for a very funny interview.
Here are the highlights:
PM: How is your new Berliner-sized paper actually doing?
AR: It is doing, more or less, what we expected.
PM: That's what I used to say when things went badly.
AR: Do you want to see charts?
PM: No. I always used to bamboozle my critics with charts. How did you sell last week, then [December 2006]?
AR: About 386,000.
PM: And what were you selling before the Berliner redesign?
AR: We were down in the 360s, 370s. The one mistake we made was to take out 10,000 bulks, which made the figures look worse than they were.
PM: But you did that to make the relaunch look better than it was.
AR: No, we did that at the time of the relaunch.
PM: I thought you did it a couple of months before the relaunch.
AR: Er, well, we took them out a few months before and didn't put them back for the relaunch.
PM: So I was right. You did it deliberately. It's an old trick.
AR: We did. But we didn't shove them back in; that's the point.
PM: It's not my point.
AR: We were too honest.
PM: Hmmm...I read an interview in which you said that what mattered most between a paper and its staff and the readers was trust. Do you think you have to be as trustworthy privately as you are professionally?
AR: I think you have to be trustworthy in your professional life.
PM: Not personal life?
AR: [Silence for 10 seconds] I like to make a distinction between professional and private in everything we write about.
PM: Would you answer that question? Are you a public figure?
AR: Not really, no. I am accountable to the Scott Trust [owner of the Guardian Media Group], and I make The Guardian's journalism more publicly accountable than any other editor in this country.
PM: I only ask, because I remember The Guardian treating me as a public figure when I encountered various scrapes as an editor. Do you think that your own life would stand up to much ethical scrutiny?
AR: In terms of the journalism?
PM: No, I mean privately. Do you consider that infidelity is always a private matter for public figures, for instance?
AR: I think what people do legally and consensually is private.
PM: If I asked you if you had ever taken illegal drugs, would you feel compelled to answer?
AR: No, I'd say to you to mind your own business.
PM: What's your current salary?
AR: It's, er, about £350,000.
PM: What bonus did you receive last year?
AR: About £170,000, which was a way of addressing my pension.
PM: That means that you earned £520,000 last year alone. That's more than the editor of The Sun by a long way.
AR: I'll talk to you off the record about this, but not on the record.
PM: Why? In The Guardian, you never stop banging on about fat cats. Do you think that your readers would be pleased to hear that you earned £520,000 last year? Are you worth it?
AR: That's for others to say.
PM: Wouldn't it be more Guardian-like, more socialist, to take a bit less and spread the pot around a bit? We have this quaint idea that you guys are into that "all men are equal" nonsense, but you're not really, are you? You seem a lot more "equal" than others on your paper.
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Do you ever get awkward moments when your bonus gets published? Do you wince and think, "Oh dear, Polly Toynbee's not going to like this one."
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Or is Polly raking in so much herself that she wouldn't mind?
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Are you embarrassed by it?
AR: No. I didn't ask for the money. And I do declare it, too.
PM: But if you earned £520,000 last year, then that must make you a multimillionaire.
AR: You say I'm a millionaire?
PM: You must be - unless you're giving it all away to charity...
AR: Er...
PM: What's your house worth?
AR: I don't want to talk about these aspects of my life.
PM: You think it's all private?
AR: I do really, yes.
PM: Did you think that about Peter Mandelson's house? I mean, you broke that story.
AR: I, er... it was a story about an elected politician.
PM: And you're not as accountable. You just reserve the right to expose his private life.
AR: We all make distinctions about this kind of thing. The line between private and public is a fine one, and you've taken up most of the interview with it.
PM: Well, only because you seem so embarrassed and confused about it.
AR: I'm not embarrassed about it. But nor do I feel I have to talk about it.
PM: What about your cars? Are you still driving that ridiculous G-Wiz thing around?
AR: Yes, and I love it.
PM: But I also read that you use taxis to ferry your stuff to and from work, which sort of negates the green effort, doesn't it?
AR: That story was a bit confused. I used to cycle to work sometimes, and if I was too tired at the end of the day then I would fold up the bike and get a cab home, yes. But about a year ago I was nearly killed in a nasty accident on my bike so I gave up cycling and bought the G-Wiz.
PM: Any other cars?
AR: A company Volvo estate.
PM: A big gas-guzzler.
AR: Yes.
PM: Bit of a culture clash with your G-Wiz, then?
AR: Let me think about that. The problem is that I also have a big dog, and it doesn't fit into the G-Wiz.
PM: I'm sure the environment will understand. Any others?
AR: My wife has a Corsa.
PM: Quite an expansive...
AR: Fleet...
PM: Yes, fleet.
AR: But I've got children as well.
PM: They're privately educated?
AR: Er... [pause].
PM: Is that a valid question?
AR: I don't... think so... no.
PM: And you went to Cranleigh, a top public school.
AR: I did, yes.
PM: Do you feel uncomfortable answering that question?
AR: It falls into the category of something I don't feel embarrassed about, but you get on to a slippery slope about what else you talk about, don't you?
PM: It's not really about your private life though, is it? It's just a fact. And I assume by your reluctance to answer the question that they are privately educated.
AR: [Pause] Again, I am trying to make a distinction between...
PM: You often run stories about Labour politicians sending their kids to private schools, and you are quite censorious about it. Are you worried that it makes you look a hypocrite again?
AR: No. I think there are boundaries. It goes back to this question of whether editors are public figures or not.
PM: And you don't think they are?
AR: Well, again, I've tried to draw a distinction between making my journalism accountable, but I have never tried to go around talking about my private life and therefore making myself into a public figure.
PM: You were originally a gossip columnist on The Guardian. Did you never write about anyone's private life?
AR: I can't remember writing about someone's private life.
Here are the highlights:
PM: How is your new Berliner-sized paper actually doing?
AR: It is doing, more or less, what we expected.
PM: That's what I used to say when things went badly.
AR: Do you want to see charts?
PM: No. I always used to bamboozle my critics with charts. How did you sell last week, then [December 2006]?
AR: About 386,000.
PM: And what were you selling before the Berliner redesign?
AR: We were down in the 360s, 370s. The one mistake we made was to take out 10,000 bulks, which made the figures look worse than they were.
PM: But you did that to make the relaunch look better than it was.
AR: No, we did that at the time of the relaunch.
PM: I thought you did it a couple of months before the relaunch.
AR: Er, well, we took them out a few months before and didn't put them back for the relaunch.
PM: So I was right. You did it deliberately. It's an old trick.
AR: We did. But we didn't shove them back in; that's the point.
PM: It's not my point.
AR: We were too honest.
PM: Hmmm...I read an interview in which you said that what mattered most between a paper and its staff and the readers was trust. Do you think you have to be as trustworthy privately as you are professionally?
AR: I think you have to be trustworthy in your professional life.
PM: Not personal life?
AR: [Silence for 10 seconds] I like to make a distinction between professional and private in everything we write about.
PM: Would you answer that question? Are you a public figure?
AR: Not really, no. I am accountable to the Scott Trust [owner of the Guardian Media Group], and I make The Guardian's journalism more publicly accountable than any other editor in this country.
PM: I only ask, because I remember The Guardian treating me as a public figure when I encountered various scrapes as an editor. Do you think that your own life would stand up to much ethical scrutiny?
AR: In terms of the journalism?
PM: No, I mean privately. Do you consider that infidelity is always a private matter for public figures, for instance?
AR: I think what people do legally and consensually is private.
PM: If I asked you if you had ever taken illegal drugs, would you feel compelled to answer?
AR: No, I'd say to you to mind your own business.
PM: What's your current salary?
AR: It's, er, about £350,000.
PM: What bonus did you receive last year?
AR: About £170,000, which was a way of addressing my pension.
PM: That means that you earned £520,000 last year alone. That's more than the editor of The Sun by a long way.
AR: I'll talk to you off the record about this, but not on the record.
PM: Why? In The Guardian, you never stop banging on about fat cats. Do you think that your readers would be pleased to hear that you earned £520,000 last year? Are you worth it?
AR: That's for others to say.
PM: Wouldn't it be more Guardian-like, more socialist, to take a bit less and spread the pot around a bit? We have this quaint idea that you guys are into that "all men are equal" nonsense, but you're not really, are you? You seem a lot more "equal" than others on your paper.
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Do you ever get awkward moments when your bonus gets published? Do you wince and think, "Oh dear, Polly Toynbee's not going to like this one."
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Or is Polly raking in so much herself that she wouldn't mind?
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Are you embarrassed by it?
AR: No. I didn't ask for the money. And I do declare it, too.
PM: But if you earned £520,000 last year, then that must make you a multimillionaire.
AR: You say I'm a millionaire?
PM: You must be - unless you're giving it all away to charity...
AR: Er...
PM: What's your house worth?
AR: I don't want to talk about these aspects of my life.
PM: You think it's all private?
AR: I do really, yes.
PM: Did you think that about Peter Mandelson's house? I mean, you broke that story.
AR: I, er... it was a story about an elected politician.
PM: And you're not as accountable. You just reserve the right to expose his private life.
AR: We all make distinctions about this kind of thing. The line between private and public is a fine one, and you've taken up most of the interview with it.
PM: Well, only because you seem so embarrassed and confused about it.
AR: I'm not embarrassed about it. But nor do I feel I have to talk about it.
PM: What about your cars? Are you still driving that ridiculous G-Wiz thing around?
AR: Yes, and I love it.
PM: But I also read that you use taxis to ferry your stuff to and from work, which sort of negates the green effort, doesn't it?
AR: That story was a bit confused. I used to cycle to work sometimes, and if I was too tired at the end of the day then I would fold up the bike and get a cab home, yes. But about a year ago I was nearly killed in a nasty accident on my bike so I gave up cycling and bought the G-Wiz.
PM: Any other cars?
AR: A company Volvo estate.
PM: A big gas-guzzler.
AR: Yes.
PM: Bit of a culture clash with your G-Wiz, then?
AR: Let me think about that. The problem is that I also have a big dog, and it doesn't fit into the G-Wiz.
PM: I'm sure the environment will understand. Any others?
AR: My wife has a Corsa.
PM: Quite an expansive...
AR: Fleet...
PM: Yes, fleet.
AR: But I've got children as well.
PM: They're privately educated?
AR: Er... [pause].
PM: Is that a valid question?
AR: I don't... think so... no.
PM: And you went to Cranleigh, a top public school.
AR: I did, yes.
PM: Do you feel uncomfortable answering that question?
AR: It falls into the category of something I don't feel embarrassed about, but you get on to a slippery slope about what else you talk about, don't you?
PM: It's not really about your private life though, is it? It's just a fact. And I assume by your reluctance to answer the question that they are privately educated.
AR: [Pause] Again, I am trying to make a distinction between...
PM: You often run stories about Labour politicians sending their kids to private schools, and you are quite censorious about it. Are you worried that it makes you look a hypocrite again?
AR: No. I think there are boundaries. It goes back to this question of whether editors are public figures or not.
PM: And you don't think they are?
AR: Well, again, I've tried to draw a distinction between making my journalism accountable, but I have never tried to go around talking about my private life and therefore making myself into a public figure.
PM: You were originally a gossip columnist on The Guardian. Did you never write about anyone's private life?
AR: I can't remember writing about someone's private life.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
U.N. Watch exposes the U.N. Human Rights Council
Thanks to Andy for putting me onto this. UN Watch is an NGO whose name betrays their interests, and here one of their guys telling the UN a few home truths. The most interesting thing is the hostile reaction to his speech, while outrageous lies from the likes of Syria and Zimbabwe receive thanks.
The New York Sun reported on this below.
'I Will Not Express Thanks'
New York Sun
March 30, 2007
Every once in a while there comes a diplomatic moment to remember, and New Yorkers who want to share one can go up on youtube.com and watch the representative in Geneva of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, in a March 23 speech before the 4th session of the Human Rights Council. In the adjacent columns, we print the full text of his remarks, lamenting the loss of the dream of Eleanor Roosevelt and other architects of the human rights movement within the United Nations system. Mr. Neuer offers the substance. But it's worth watching the full clip (it's only a few minutes long) to catch the scandalous behavior of the president of the council, as he — for what may be the only time in its history — refuses to thank a speaker for his intervention and declares he will ban Mr. Neuer, or any other critic of the commission, if he says anything similar again.
To provide the full context, UN Watch has put together a compendium of clippings (Watch Video) called "Admissible and Inadmissable at the U.N. Human Rights Council." It shows actual film clips of the president of the Human Rights Council, Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, thanking various diplomats for their testimony. He thanks a speaker for Zimbabwe talking about the ignorance of a delegate who has criticized human rights under President Mugabe. He thanks the delegate from Cuba for insulting a human rights expert who exposed abuses of the communist regime. When the permanent observer of Palestine asserts that the one that has a "monopoly on human rights violations" is Israel, which, he adds, is the darling of not only the ambassadors of America and Canada but also of the human rights commissioner, Louise Arbour, the observer is thanked by Mr. de Alba. On the clip one can see Mr. de Alba thanking the delegation of Sudan for a statement saying that reports of violence against women in Darfur has been "exaggerated."
Then one can watch and hear an envoy from Nigeria assert that "stoning under Sharia law for unnatural sexual acts … should not be equated with extrajudicial killings …" Or watch an envoy of Iran defend the Holocaust denial conference. Or watch a defense of the Hezbollah terrorist organization. Or speaker after speaker liken Israel to the Nazis, only to get thanked by Mr. de Alba or whoever is presiding. Then one can watch Mr. de Alba lean back demonstrably in his chair and fold his arms across his face and adopt a disapproving visage as Mr. Neuer of UN Watch begins his recent testimony. He notes that 60 years ago, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rene Cassin, and others gathered on the banks of Lake Geneva to reaffirm the principle of human dignity and created the Commission on Human Rights. He asks what has become of "this noble dream" and offers a devastating answer with a reprise of all the human rights abuses on which the council has been silent.
"Why has this council chosen silence?" Mr. Neuer asks. "Because Israel could not be blamed." He ticks off the actions against Israel, the only one the council takes. When Mr. Neuer is done, Mr. de Alba says, "for the first time in this session, I will not express thanks for that statement. ... I will not tolerate any similar statements in the council." And he threatens to strike any similar statements from UN Watch from the record of the proceedings. We had to tip our hat to Mr. Neuer, who has, on occasion, written for these pages. Newspapermen have to have strong stomachs, but it's nothing compared to what he needs to sit through these sessions. He presents with memorable force and dignity. The compendium of clips runs only seven minutes or so and is winging its way around the World Wide Web. It's worth watching, a reminder of the wisdom of the decision of America's former ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, and his colleagues in the Bush administration to stand down from participating in this charade.
The New York Sun reported on this below.
'I Will Not Express Thanks'
New York Sun
March 30, 2007
Every once in a while there comes a diplomatic moment to remember, and New Yorkers who want to share one can go up on youtube.com and watch the representative in Geneva of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, in a March 23 speech before the 4th session of the Human Rights Council. In the adjacent columns, we print the full text of his remarks, lamenting the loss of the dream of Eleanor Roosevelt and other architects of the human rights movement within the United Nations system. Mr. Neuer offers the substance. But it's worth watching the full clip (it's only a few minutes long) to catch the scandalous behavior of the president of the council, as he — for what may be the only time in its history — refuses to thank a speaker for his intervention and declares he will ban Mr. Neuer, or any other critic of the commission, if he says anything similar again.
To provide the full context, UN Watch has put together a compendium of clippings (Watch Video) called "Admissible and Inadmissable at the U.N. Human Rights Council." It shows actual film clips of the president of the Human Rights Council, Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, thanking various diplomats for their testimony. He thanks a speaker for Zimbabwe talking about the ignorance of a delegate who has criticized human rights under President Mugabe. He thanks the delegate from Cuba for insulting a human rights expert who exposed abuses of the communist regime. When the permanent observer of Palestine asserts that the one that has a "monopoly on human rights violations" is Israel, which, he adds, is the darling of not only the ambassadors of America and Canada but also of the human rights commissioner, Louise Arbour, the observer is thanked by Mr. de Alba. On the clip one can see Mr. de Alba thanking the delegation of Sudan for a statement saying that reports of violence against women in Darfur has been "exaggerated."
Then one can watch and hear an envoy from Nigeria assert that "stoning under Sharia law for unnatural sexual acts … should not be equated with extrajudicial killings …" Or watch an envoy of Iran defend the Holocaust denial conference. Or watch a defense of the Hezbollah terrorist organization. Or speaker after speaker liken Israel to the Nazis, only to get thanked by Mr. de Alba or whoever is presiding. Then one can watch Mr. de Alba lean back demonstrably in his chair and fold his arms across his face and adopt a disapproving visage as Mr. Neuer of UN Watch begins his recent testimony. He notes that 60 years ago, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rene Cassin, and others gathered on the banks of Lake Geneva to reaffirm the principle of human dignity and created the Commission on Human Rights. He asks what has become of "this noble dream" and offers a devastating answer with a reprise of all the human rights abuses on which the council has been silent.
"Why has this council chosen silence?" Mr. Neuer asks. "Because Israel could not be blamed." He ticks off the actions against Israel, the only one the council takes. When Mr. Neuer is done, Mr. de Alba says, "for the first time in this session, I will not express thanks for that statement. ... I will not tolerate any similar statements in the council." And he threatens to strike any similar statements from UN Watch from the record of the proceedings. We had to tip our hat to Mr. Neuer, who has, on occasion, written for these pages. Newspapermen have to have strong stomachs, but it's nothing compared to what he needs to sit through these sessions. He presents with memorable force and dignity. The compendium of clips runs only seven minutes or so and is winging its way around the World Wide Web. It's worth watching, a reminder of the wisdom of the decision of America's former ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, and his colleagues in the Bush administration to stand down from participating in this charade.
Iran captures 15 British Royal Marines
I haven't been following this story that closely, but the bit that has always bothered me the most (even more than where *did* this thing actually take place?) is how come a 5000 ton warship did nothing to prevent the capture in the first place?'.
Here's an article that discusses exactly that, and let me warn you, friends, it does not make good reading for supporters of the once-great Royal Navy, nor for our politicians.
-----------------------
Focus: In the eye of the storm
Fifteen sailors snatched and publicly humiliated without a single shot fired. Tony Allen-Mills, Michael Smith and Marie Colvin on a shambles Britain could have avoided
Sunday Times
April 1, 2007
They should have known the Iranians might spring a trap. Several months before the current hostage crisis a small group of American and Iraqi soldiers had been patrolling near the Iranian border 75 miles east of Baghdad.
They spotted a single Iranian soldier lurking in Iraqi territory near the town of Balad Ruz and moved forward to question him. The Americans were, according to a US army report obtained by The Sunday Times, promptly ambushed by a much larger platoon of Iranian soldiers who had been hiding across the nearby border.
An Iranian captain warned the Americans that “if they tried to leave their location, the Iranians would fire upon them”. For a few moments the US paratroopers must have felt as helpless as the British sailors in inflatable speedboats who were surprised 10 days ago by more heavily armed Iranian vessels.
The US incident last September ended very differently. Firing broke out. Both sides scattered and a potential hostage crisis was averted as the Americans escaped unhurt.
By contrast, the 14 British service-men and one woman proved humiliatingly vulnerable to a low-tech Iranian naval manoeuvre that has provoked mocking headlines around the world. Yesterday they were still at the mercy of their unpredictable Iranian captors, reduced to making forced false apologies for breaching Iranian territory.
Nathan Thomas Summers, one of the captured crewmen, was paraded on television. “We trespassed without permission,” he said. “I deeply apologise for entering your waters.”
Yesterday Hussein Shari’atma-dari, a senior adviser to the regime, described the incident as a “plot from London to put more pressures on Iran”. He said: “The path taken by Britain and the West shows that they do not want to take any step for the release of the British soldiers, therefore Iran must put them on trial.”
How could the British forces have been caught so unawares? They should have been alerted months ago by the Balad Ruz clash to the heightened threat of an Iranian assault. They might even have read subsequent warnings – reported in The Sunday Times as recently as two weeks ago – that Tehran was threatening to kidnap “a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers”.
As Iranian radicals rejoiced at their propaganda triumph last week, even some of Britain’s friends were scathing in their condemnation of military impotence and political incompetence.
“Wimping out on Iran” was one of the more polite commentaries in the New York Daily News. John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, dubbed the British government’s performance as “pathetic”.
The crisis has reduced Tony Blair and several of his officials to the status of irrelevant foghorns, issuing empty warnings about “stepping up the pressure” and “moving to the next phase”.
Such is the shambles that senior Royal Navy officers at the fleet’s operational headquarters have been directed to review the rules of engagement for naval boarding parties. If necessary they will recommend changes to ensure Britain’s forces are never again seized so easily without a shot being fired.
THE streets of Tehran were largely empty last week as Iranians celebrated Norouz, their new year festival. There was a chill in the air and snow on the distant mountains as Mullah Ahmad Khatami mounted his podium in the courtyard of Tehran University to lead Friday prayers.
Khatami, viewed as a rising hard-liner, quickly turned to the hostage crisis. “Britain must know that this is not the 19th century and it should not be taking an imperial posture,” the burly mullah said.
“Everyone knows that Britain is a defeated nation that acts as a political broker [for the Americans],” he went on. “You cannot frighten Iran by sending gunboats and doing whatever pleases you. Iran today is a strong Iran and is the only country that stands up to the Americans.”
Iran has been resisting a campaign led by the United States and Britain at the UN to force the mullahs to end Iran’s programme of enriching uranium. Iran claims it will be used to produce civilian nuclear power but the West fears Iran wants to produce a nuclear bomb.
Khatami said his religious colleagues sent their “warmest congratulations” to the “mighty border guards” who had seized the British sailors. He condemned London for “bullish declarations and devious actions” and warned: “Britain should understand that if they want to continue that path of bullying, they would pay a huge price.”
This was scarcely the response that Blair can have been hoping for when he warned last Tuesday that Britain’s campaign to free the captives would “move into a different phase” if Iran did not respond.
Blair added: “I hope we manage to get them to realise that they have to release them.”
While there was no doubting the outrage shared by British ministers, it was equally clear by Thursday’s cabinet meeting that Britain’s big mistake was to have allowed the sailors to be captured in the first place.
“It’s not as simple as just being tough with the Iranians,” Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, argued to her colleagues.
“They have tentacles in all sorts of areas such as the Afghan warlords, the Iraqi insurgents and Hamas.”
In other words, Beckett was suggesting, any military action against Tehran was likely to be met by a barrage of terrorist reprisals by Iranian allies around the globe. “We have to be more sophisticated,” she insisted.
At 10 Downing Street, senior officials took a similar line. “There is no real point in sabre-rattling for its own sake,” said one official. “We have been looking for the opportunity to engage through our multilateral contacts.”
Variations on that peacemongering theme were expressed widely in Whitehall last week. John Williams, a former Foreign Office director of communications who was intimately involved in protracted negotiations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, said he believed Beckett’s hands were tied. “The Foreign Office objective is to get our people out safely. There is just too much at stake for any other approach,” he said.
Such diplomatic hand-wringing was last week driving American hawks to distraction. “The Brits have laboured mightily for many years to prevent the United States from pursuing vigorous action against Iran,” sneered Michael Ledeen, a prominent neocon and Middle East scholar who has long argued for regime change in Tehran. “Now they will have to answer to the families of the hostages.” Ledeen argued that coalition forces should “undertake the legitimate self-defence to which we are entitled”, and attack terrorist training camps and bomb factories inside Iran.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican congressman who is considering a presidential bid, urged Britain to use military force to destroy Iran’s petrol production company. If a lack of petrol for their cars forced Iranians to “go back to walking and using oxen to pull carts”, the people might rise against the ayatollahs, Gingrich said.
None of which will come as much comfort to the frightened family of Leading Seaman Faye Turney, 26, who has become the human face of the crisis. Psychologists have had a field day analysing the pitiful videos of Turney attempting to cooperate under obvious duress.
The three letters she has purportedly written to her parents. to a “representative of the House of Commons” and to “British People” were obviously dictated in large part by her Iranian captors. Yet however crude Iran’s propaganda may seem in Britain, it is mainly aimed elsewhere. Iran is patently showing off to its radical acolytes around the globe, revelling in the chance to kick sand in the face of the West.
The so-called confessions of Turney and Summers were first aired not in Farsi, which is spoken by most Iranians, but on an Arab-language television station watched widely in Iraq and Arab Gulf countries. The message was clear – the Arab world must look to Tehran if it wishes to vanquish the American invaders and see off their yapping British lapdogs.
How they must have laughed in Iran last week when Britain failed to persuade the UN even to “deplore” the seizure of its sailors. The UN security council expressed “grave concern” instead. “That’ll really show the Iranians we mean business,” commented one disillusioned British diplomat. WITH diplomatic efforts apparently stalling, attention is likely to return this week to how the Royal Navy, pride of Britain for at least 350 years, allowed this disaster to happen in the first place. Have we really sunk so low that we cannot fight off a few Iranian thugs in what amounted to little more than militarised speedboats?
Vice-Admiral Charles Style, a deputy chief of defence staff, made a good fist of defending the navy’s position at a Ministry of Defence press conference on Wednesday. He had all the right satellite coordinates and charts to show the Iranians were at fault, but everyone listening knew that it no longer really mattered exactly where our chaps had been arrested – they should not have been arrested at all.
That point was rammed home by an officer on board the US frigate that is the other main ship in Task Force 158, the British-commanded fleet patrolling off Iraq. Lieutenant-Commander Erik Horner of the USS Underwood said US sailors’ rules of engagement meant they not only had the right to defend themselves against that kind of aggression, but also were obliged to do so. “Our reaction was: why didn’t your guys defend themselves?” Horner said.
John Pike, one of America’s leading military analysts, was similarly baffled that the sailors’ home ship, HMS Cornwall, was up to 11 miles away, too far to offer immediate cover as the British inflatables searched an Indian freighter in a routine antismuggling check. Despite all the evidence that Iran was looking to capture “blue-eyed officers”, Pike said, “there seems to have been a loss of situational awareness on the part of the folks on Cornwall that their boarding party could be snuck up on like that”.
Admiral Sir Alan West, the former first sea lord, defended the lack of aggression on the British side, pointing out that UK rules of engagement “are very much deescalatory, because we don’t want wars starting”. He added: “The reason we are there is to be a force for good, to make the whole area safe. So we try to downplay things. Rather than roaring into action and sinking everything in sight we try to step back and that, of course, is why our chaps were . . . captured.”
The British lapse was all the more surprising because the same thing happened in June 2004, when eight sailors and marines were seized in the same area and released three days later. The defence ministry compiled a “lessons learnt” paper to ensure that those mistakes were not repeated.
The Sunday Times has learnt that the paper highlighted the need for “top cover” for boarding parties, which should always have been covered from the air by the presence of a helicopter. The Cornwall’s Lynx – armed with a .50 machinegun that could have caused serious damage to the Iranian fast boats – had apparently been overhead when the sailors boarded the Indian freighter.
Why did it turn back, leaving the sailors exposed? The ministry initially said last week that it needed to refuel before retreating behind an insistence that there was no standard procedure for keeping a helicopter in place.
It also remained a mystery how the Cornwall’s advanced radar and sonar systems failed to alert its crew to a problem. As a type22 frigate, the Cornwall has the capability to track ships up to 200 miles away. One recently retired naval officer said even basic navigation radar should have picked up motorboats at shorter range, assuming someone was looking out for them.
An official board of inquiry will ultimately be charged with examining the incident and establishing, among many other things, why no immediate effort was made to intercept the Iranians as they departed with their captives.
Less easy to predict is how the standoff will be resolved. “A military confrontation would just be losing all round. Both sides realise that,” said Robert Lowe of the Chatham House think tank. He said the solution had to be one where “neither side loses face”.
One experienced source who has dealt with Iran in the past expects the hostages to be released after a week to 10 days, but he said that was likely only if Britain relaxed its pressure. “They will not want to be seen to be reacting to anything we are saying or doing,” he said.
A rescue attempt, if successful, would be hugely popular in Britain and might restore Blair’s tattered image in America. “There are plans being made [for a possible rescue],” one senior British source acknowledged. But it is not even clear where the sailors are being held.
Nor is history on the prime minister’s side. A US attempt to rescue embassy hostages in Iran in 1980 ended in a fiasco of colliding aircraft in the desert. Those hostages were held for 444 days.
Here's an article that discusses exactly that, and let me warn you, friends, it does not make good reading for supporters of the once-great Royal Navy, nor for our politicians.
-----------------------
Focus: In the eye of the storm
Fifteen sailors snatched and publicly humiliated without a single shot fired. Tony Allen-Mills, Michael Smith and Marie Colvin on a shambles Britain could have avoided
Sunday Times
April 1, 2007
They should have known the Iranians might spring a trap. Several months before the current hostage crisis a small group of American and Iraqi soldiers had been patrolling near the Iranian border 75 miles east of Baghdad.
They spotted a single Iranian soldier lurking in Iraqi territory near the town of Balad Ruz and moved forward to question him. The Americans were, according to a US army report obtained by The Sunday Times, promptly ambushed by a much larger platoon of Iranian soldiers who had been hiding across the nearby border.
An Iranian captain warned the Americans that “if they tried to leave their location, the Iranians would fire upon them”. For a few moments the US paratroopers must have felt as helpless as the British sailors in inflatable speedboats who were surprised 10 days ago by more heavily armed Iranian vessels.
The US incident last September ended very differently. Firing broke out. Both sides scattered and a potential hostage crisis was averted as the Americans escaped unhurt.
By contrast, the 14 British service-men and one woman proved humiliatingly vulnerable to a low-tech Iranian naval manoeuvre that has provoked mocking headlines around the world. Yesterday they were still at the mercy of their unpredictable Iranian captors, reduced to making forced false apologies for breaching Iranian territory.
Nathan Thomas Summers, one of the captured crewmen, was paraded on television. “We trespassed without permission,” he said. “I deeply apologise for entering your waters.”
Yesterday Hussein Shari’atma-dari, a senior adviser to the regime, described the incident as a “plot from London to put more pressures on Iran”. He said: “The path taken by Britain and the West shows that they do not want to take any step for the release of the British soldiers, therefore Iran must put them on trial.”
How could the British forces have been caught so unawares? They should have been alerted months ago by the Balad Ruz clash to the heightened threat of an Iranian assault. They might even have read subsequent warnings – reported in The Sunday Times as recently as two weeks ago – that Tehran was threatening to kidnap “a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers”.
As Iranian radicals rejoiced at their propaganda triumph last week, even some of Britain’s friends were scathing in their condemnation of military impotence and political incompetence.
“Wimping out on Iran” was one of the more polite commentaries in the New York Daily News. John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, dubbed the British government’s performance as “pathetic”.
The crisis has reduced Tony Blair and several of his officials to the status of irrelevant foghorns, issuing empty warnings about “stepping up the pressure” and “moving to the next phase”.
Such is the shambles that senior Royal Navy officers at the fleet’s operational headquarters have been directed to review the rules of engagement for naval boarding parties. If necessary they will recommend changes to ensure Britain’s forces are never again seized so easily without a shot being fired.
THE streets of Tehran were largely empty last week as Iranians celebrated Norouz, their new year festival. There was a chill in the air and snow on the distant mountains as Mullah Ahmad Khatami mounted his podium in the courtyard of Tehran University to lead Friday prayers.
Khatami, viewed as a rising hard-liner, quickly turned to the hostage crisis. “Britain must know that this is not the 19th century and it should not be taking an imperial posture,” the burly mullah said.
“Everyone knows that Britain is a defeated nation that acts as a political broker [for the Americans],” he went on. “You cannot frighten Iran by sending gunboats and doing whatever pleases you. Iran today is a strong Iran and is the only country that stands up to the Americans.”
Iran has been resisting a campaign led by the United States and Britain at the UN to force the mullahs to end Iran’s programme of enriching uranium. Iran claims it will be used to produce civilian nuclear power but the West fears Iran wants to produce a nuclear bomb.
Khatami said his religious colleagues sent their “warmest congratulations” to the “mighty border guards” who had seized the British sailors. He condemned London for “bullish declarations and devious actions” and warned: “Britain should understand that if they want to continue that path of bullying, they would pay a huge price.”
This was scarcely the response that Blair can have been hoping for when he warned last Tuesday that Britain’s campaign to free the captives would “move into a different phase” if Iran did not respond.
Blair added: “I hope we manage to get them to realise that they have to release them.”
While there was no doubting the outrage shared by British ministers, it was equally clear by Thursday’s cabinet meeting that Britain’s big mistake was to have allowed the sailors to be captured in the first place.
“It’s not as simple as just being tough with the Iranians,” Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, argued to her colleagues.
“They have tentacles in all sorts of areas such as the Afghan warlords, the Iraqi insurgents and Hamas.”
In other words, Beckett was suggesting, any military action against Tehran was likely to be met by a barrage of terrorist reprisals by Iranian allies around the globe. “We have to be more sophisticated,” she insisted.
At 10 Downing Street, senior officials took a similar line. “There is no real point in sabre-rattling for its own sake,” said one official. “We have been looking for the opportunity to engage through our multilateral contacts.”
Variations on that peacemongering theme were expressed widely in Whitehall last week. John Williams, a former Foreign Office director of communications who was intimately involved in protracted negotiations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, said he believed Beckett’s hands were tied. “The Foreign Office objective is to get our people out safely. There is just too much at stake for any other approach,” he said.
Such diplomatic hand-wringing was last week driving American hawks to distraction. “The Brits have laboured mightily for many years to prevent the United States from pursuing vigorous action against Iran,” sneered Michael Ledeen, a prominent neocon and Middle East scholar who has long argued for regime change in Tehran. “Now they will have to answer to the families of the hostages.” Ledeen argued that coalition forces should “undertake the legitimate self-defence to which we are entitled”, and attack terrorist training camps and bomb factories inside Iran.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican congressman who is considering a presidential bid, urged Britain to use military force to destroy Iran’s petrol production company. If a lack of petrol for their cars forced Iranians to “go back to walking and using oxen to pull carts”, the people might rise against the ayatollahs, Gingrich said.
None of which will come as much comfort to the frightened family of Leading Seaman Faye Turney, 26, who has become the human face of the crisis. Psychologists have had a field day analysing the pitiful videos of Turney attempting to cooperate under obvious duress.
The three letters she has purportedly written to her parents. to a “representative of the House of Commons” and to “British People” were obviously dictated in large part by her Iranian captors. Yet however crude Iran’s propaganda may seem in Britain, it is mainly aimed elsewhere. Iran is patently showing off to its radical acolytes around the globe, revelling in the chance to kick sand in the face of the West.
The so-called confessions of Turney and Summers were first aired not in Farsi, which is spoken by most Iranians, but on an Arab-language television station watched widely in Iraq and Arab Gulf countries. The message was clear – the Arab world must look to Tehran if it wishes to vanquish the American invaders and see off their yapping British lapdogs.
How they must have laughed in Iran last week when Britain failed to persuade the UN even to “deplore” the seizure of its sailors. The UN security council expressed “grave concern” instead. “That’ll really show the Iranians we mean business,” commented one disillusioned British diplomat. WITH diplomatic efforts apparently stalling, attention is likely to return this week to how the Royal Navy, pride of Britain for at least 350 years, allowed this disaster to happen in the first place. Have we really sunk so low that we cannot fight off a few Iranian thugs in what amounted to little more than militarised speedboats?
Vice-Admiral Charles Style, a deputy chief of defence staff, made a good fist of defending the navy’s position at a Ministry of Defence press conference on Wednesday. He had all the right satellite coordinates and charts to show the Iranians were at fault, but everyone listening knew that it no longer really mattered exactly where our chaps had been arrested – they should not have been arrested at all.
That point was rammed home by an officer on board the US frigate that is the other main ship in Task Force 158, the British-commanded fleet patrolling off Iraq. Lieutenant-Commander Erik Horner of the USS Underwood said US sailors’ rules of engagement meant they not only had the right to defend themselves against that kind of aggression, but also were obliged to do so. “Our reaction was: why didn’t your guys defend themselves?” Horner said.
John Pike, one of America’s leading military analysts, was similarly baffled that the sailors’ home ship, HMS Cornwall, was up to 11 miles away, too far to offer immediate cover as the British inflatables searched an Indian freighter in a routine antismuggling check. Despite all the evidence that Iran was looking to capture “blue-eyed officers”, Pike said, “there seems to have been a loss of situational awareness on the part of the folks on Cornwall that their boarding party could be snuck up on like that”.
Admiral Sir Alan West, the former first sea lord, defended the lack of aggression on the British side, pointing out that UK rules of engagement “are very much deescalatory, because we don’t want wars starting”. He added: “The reason we are there is to be a force for good, to make the whole area safe. So we try to downplay things. Rather than roaring into action and sinking everything in sight we try to step back and that, of course, is why our chaps were . . . captured.”
The British lapse was all the more surprising because the same thing happened in June 2004, when eight sailors and marines were seized in the same area and released three days later. The defence ministry compiled a “lessons learnt” paper to ensure that those mistakes were not repeated.
The Sunday Times has learnt that the paper highlighted the need for “top cover” for boarding parties, which should always have been covered from the air by the presence of a helicopter. The Cornwall’s Lynx – armed with a .50 machinegun that could have caused serious damage to the Iranian fast boats – had apparently been overhead when the sailors boarded the Indian freighter.
Why did it turn back, leaving the sailors exposed? The ministry initially said last week that it needed to refuel before retreating behind an insistence that there was no standard procedure for keeping a helicopter in place.
It also remained a mystery how the Cornwall’s advanced radar and sonar systems failed to alert its crew to a problem. As a type22 frigate, the Cornwall has the capability to track ships up to 200 miles away. One recently retired naval officer said even basic navigation radar should have picked up motorboats at shorter range, assuming someone was looking out for them.
An official board of inquiry will ultimately be charged with examining the incident and establishing, among many other things, why no immediate effort was made to intercept the Iranians as they departed with their captives.
Less easy to predict is how the standoff will be resolved. “A military confrontation would just be losing all round. Both sides realise that,” said Robert Lowe of the Chatham House think tank. He said the solution had to be one where “neither side loses face”.
One experienced source who has dealt with Iran in the past expects the hostages to be released after a week to 10 days, but he said that was likely only if Britain relaxed its pressure. “They will not want to be seen to be reacting to anything we are saying or doing,” he said.
A rescue attempt, if successful, would be hugely popular in Britain and might restore Blair’s tattered image in America. “There are plans being made [for a possible rescue],” one senior British source acknowledged. But it is not even clear where the sailors are being held.
Nor is history on the prime minister’s side. A US attempt to rescue embassy hostages in Iran in 1980 ended in a fiasco of colliding aircraft in the desert. Those hostages were held for 444 days.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Saudis propose Middle East peace plan
Will be interesting to keep an eye on this one. It certainly makes an interesting contrast with the three no's of the Khartoum Resolution. And as the article hints, Saudi fear of Iran is at least as much behind this as any desire for a lasting resolution with Israel. If they don't lead the Arab world, the Persians might.
------------
Accept peace plan or face war, Israel told
Telegraph
28/03/2007
The "lords of war" will decide Israel's future if it rejects a blueprint for peace crafted by the entire Arab world, Saudi Arabia's veteran foreign minister warned yesterday.
As leaders began gathering in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, for today's summit of the Arab League, Prince Saud al-Faisal told The Daily Telegraph that the Middle East risks perpetual conflict if the peace plan fails.
Under this Saudi-drafted proposal, every Arab country would formally recognise Israel in return for a withdrawal from all the land captured in the war of 1967.
This would entail a Palestinian state embracing the entire West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. Every Arab country will almost certainly endorse this blueprint when the Riyadh summit concludes tomorrow. Prince Saud said Israel should accept or reject this final offer.
"What we have the power to do in the Arab world, we think we have done," he said. "So now it is up to the other side because if you want peace, it is not enough for one side only to want it. Both sides must want it equally."
Speaking inside his whitewashed palace, surrounded by luxuriant lawns and manicured flower beds resembling a green oasis in the drabness of Riyadh, Prince Saud delivered an unequivocal warning to Israel.
"If Israel refuses, that means it doesn't want peace and it places everything back into the hands of fate. They will be putting their future not in the hands of the peacemakers but in the hands of the lords of war," he said.
Prince Saud dismissed any further diplomatic overtures towards Israel. "It has never been proven that reaching out to Israel achieves anything," he said.
"Other Arab countries have recognised Israel and what has that achieved?
"The largest Arab country, Egypt, recognised Israel and what was the result? Not one iota of change happened in the attitude of Israel towards peace."
Israel has numerous reservations about the Arab peace plan - which was previously proposed at a summit in 2002. Israel fears any hint that Palestinian refugees would have the right to return to their homes in the event of a peace settlement.
...
The menacing spectre of Iran, the rising Shia power with nuclear-tipped ambitions for regional dominance, looms large across the waters of the Gulf. Saudi Arabia is quietly moving to contain its bellicose neighbour. Prince Saud offered conciliatory words to Iran, laced with coded criticism.
more...
------------
Accept peace plan or face war, Israel told
Telegraph
28/03/2007
The "lords of war" will decide Israel's future if it rejects a blueprint for peace crafted by the entire Arab world, Saudi Arabia's veteran foreign minister warned yesterday.
As leaders began gathering in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, for today's summit of the Arab League, Prince Saud al-Faisal told The Daily Telegraph that the Middle East risks perpetual conflict if the peace plan fails.
Under this Saudi-drafted proposal, every Arab country would formally recognise Israel in return for a withdrawal from all the land captured in the war of 1967.
This would entail a Palestinian state embracing the entire West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. Every Arab country will almost certainly endorse this blueprint when the Riyadh summit concludes tomorrow. Prince Saud said Israel should accept or reject this final offer.
"What we have the power to do in the Arab world, we think we have done," he said. "So now it is up to the other side because if you want peace, it is not enough for one side only to want it. Both sides must want it equally."
Speaking inside his whitewashed palace, surrounded by luxuriant lawns and manicured flower beds resembling a green oasis in the drabness of Riyadh, Prince Saud delivered an unequivocal warning to Israel.
"If Israel refuses, that means it doesn't want peace and it places everything back into the hands of fate. They will be putting their future not in the hands of the peacemakers but in the hands of the lords of war," he said.
Prince Saud dismissed any further diplomatic overtures towards Israel. "It has never been proven that reaching out to Israel achieves anything," he said.
"Other Arab countries have recognised Israel and what has that achieved?
"The largest Arab country, Egypt, recognised Israel and what was the result? Not one iota of change happened in the attitude of Israel towards peace."
Israel has numerous reservations about the Arab peace plan - which was previously proposed at a summit in 2002. Israel fears any hint that Palestinian refugees would have the right to return to their homes in the event of a peace settlement.
...
The menacing spectre of Iran, the rising Shia power with nuclear-tipped ambitions for regional dominance, looms large across the waters of the Gulf. Saudi Arabia is quietly moving to contain its bellicose neighbour. Prince Saud offered conciliatory words to Iran, laced with coded criticism.
more...
Saturday, March 17, 2007
The Guardian's Simon Jenkins on The Guardian
This article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian is extraordinary.
I don't know sure what I'm more shocked by:
(1) That the Guardian ran a supplement that appeared to be it's own editorial but was in fact paid for by the Government.
or
(2) That the Guardian published an article by Jenkins on the same story where he effectively accuses his own newspaper of being an accesory to Government sleaze.
Here are the money quotes:
'Inducing newspapers to dress public relations as journalism in a ministerial spat with the Treasury is close to sleaze'
and
'None of the writers (nor The Guardian's readers) was told of this, or that their fees were being paid, in effect, by the Blair government. Some were given to understand that they were writing for The Observer.'
I don't know sure what I'm more shocked by:
(1) That the Guardian ran a supplement that appeared to be it's own editorial but was in fact paid for by the Government.
or
(2) That the Guardian published an article by Jenkins on the same story where he effectively accuses his own newspaper of being an accesory to Government sleaze.
Here are the money quotes:
'Inducing newspapers to dress public relations as journalism in a ministerial spat with the Treasury is close to sleaze'
and
'None of the writers (nor The Guardian's readers) was told of this, or that their fees were being paid, in effect, by the Blair government. Some were given to understand that they were writing for The Observer.'
Friday, March 09, 2007
How Diana died
Well said, Boris!
I'll come clean: I know exactly how Diana died
Boris Johnson
Telegraph Comment
08/03/2007
I'll come clean: I know exactly how Diana died
Boris Johnson
Telegraph Comment
08/03/2007
Thursday, March 08, 2007
In search of an Arab Schindler
Did anyone else know of the "104 labour and punishment camps built by the Nazis and their allies in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco"? I didn't till I read this book review:
In search of an Arab Schindler
The Sunday Times
February 25, 2007
Howard Jacobson
Review of:
Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands
by Robert Satloff
This book has a twofold ambition: first, to remind us that the Nazis and their collaborators exported their persecution of Jews to Arab north Africa; second, to find an Arab Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg who stood out against that persecution, and to have him honoured as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s monument to the Holocaust, where no Arab has yet been recognised. Thus it is not simply as a historian that Robert Satloff sets about raking through the ashes, but as a man on a mission of peace — to discover evidence of as much or as little humanity as it will take for all parties to Arab/Jewish hostilities over the past 60 years to feel better about one another.
Considering which, Among the Righteous is a surprisingly muted book — an act of gentlemanly civility amid the shouting that seems to concede its ineffectiveness almost before it starts. Indeed, so careful is Satloff not to raise our hopes that he dashes them before the opening sentence is cold on the page. “Did any Arabs,” he asks, in a diminuendo of expectation, “save any Jews during the Holocaust?” Do I hear a hundred, do I hear fifty, do I hear one?
It all but gives the game away. Whatever humanity he is going to find among those ashes, it won’t put the world to rights. Such realism is not a general reflection on the character of Arabs. Satloff has an axe to grind, but it is not that one. As the search progresses — from anecdote to official record to actual sites of recorded human kindness — we are not surprised to learn that Arabs behaved the way everyone behaves in time of war. Some were benevolent, some were brutes, some just looked the other way.
What makes it difficult for Satloff to return from his travels and researches with evidence more compelling than this is the silent world in which he is obliged to operate. A silence of general ignorance — for who now knows or recalls that the Holocaust extended its reach to Arab countries, or could name a single one of the 104 labour and punishment camps built by the Nazis and their allies in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, or has heard of the tombeaux , or torture tombs of Morocco, where Jews, under the supervision of Arab guards, were ordered to lie in their own waste for weeks on end? A silence of fading memory and disappearing witness. But above all a silence of refusal typified by the “forbidden room” of the library at the University of Jordan where Satloff did his doctoral research, and that contained books frowned upon by the ruling royal family. In the instance of Satloff’s search for evidence of Arab kindness to Jew, the “forbidden room” is Arab resolve to wipe every trace of the Holocaust from its consciousness. And if that means wiping out every trace of its own humanity to Jews caught up in the tragedy, so be it.
“Soon after 9/11,” Satloff writes — and it’s here that his nerves begin to fray — “I surveyed Holocaust and tolerance-related institutions and found that not a single module, text, or programme for Holocaust education existed in an Arab country, even within the context of studying 20th-century history, modern genocides, or tolerance education.” This is not Holocaust denial but Holocaust negation. Because, in Arab eyes, the Holocaust was deployed to legitimise Zionism and Zionism was the cause of the Arabs’ own “Catastrophe”, it had to be expunged. So much Satloff knew before he started on his trek to find his Arab Schindler. But what he had not prepared himself for was how deep this negation ran even away from official discourse, and how hard it was therefore going to be to find friends or relatives of a Righteous Arab prepared to acknowledge the good he’d done, let alone accept thanks for it.
Thus the desolating emptiness at the heart of Satloff’s quest. He hears stories of heroic generosity but the corroborations he seeks are walled up in that “forbidden room”. When he finally tracks down the grandson of Si Ali Sakkat, a Tunisian Arab of noble descent, who threw open his farm to a group of Jews fleeing a nearby labour camp, lodging, feeding and protecting them, he is warned not to discuss these actions in front of the present farm labourers, who “just would not understand”. Even when an acknowledgment of past helpfulness is made, it is accompanied by irritation, embarrassment, blankness. Our times have seen many examples of history airbrushing what it finds inconvenient. But things are terrible indeed when goodness itself becomes a guilty secret to be banished from our sight.
That no Arab might want to be honoured as Righteous in an Israeli memorial to the Holocaust Satloff knows and understands, but cannot quite bear to admit. In this, there is something of the Don Quixote about him, foisting a troublesome idealism on an unwilling world. And it would be ungenerous not to allow that he does, at the last, put together a modest collection of little, unnamed, unremembered acts of kindness and of love, even identifying, just about, a solitary Schindler — Khaled Abdelwahhab, a wealthy, hedonistic Tunisian, who spirited away a Jewish family and hid them, at great risk to himself, until the Germans left.
No less importantly, Satloff’s researches have played a part in getting the German government to agree compensation to survivors of almost 100 labour camps in Arab north Africa. Which is itself a contribution to our education into the “Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands”. But how long it will be before the Arab world accepts that it, too, was touched by the Holocaust — and by that I do not only mean catastrophically — and how long it will be before both sides accept that there is no hope of peace until each agrees to swim in the other’s past, is anybody’s guess. Among the Righteous taps politely on the door. But there is no answer from the “forbidden room”.
In search of an Arab Schindler
The Sunday Times
February 25, 2007
Howard Jacobson
Review of:
Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands
by Robert Satloff
This book has a twofold ambition: first, to remind us that the Nazis and their collaborators exported their persecution of Jews to Arab north Africa; second, to find an Arab Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg who stood out against that persecution, and to have him honoured as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s monument to the Holocaust, where no Arab has yet been recognised. Thus it is not simply as a historian that Robert Satloff sets about raking through the ashes, but as a man on a mission of peace — to discover evidence of as much or as little humanity as it will take for all parties to Arab/Jewish hostilities over the past 60 years to feel better about one another.
Considering which, Among the Righteous is a surprisingly muted book — an act of gentlemanly civility amid the shouting that seems to concede its ineffectiveness almost before it starts. Indeed, so careful is Satloff not to raise our hopes that he dashes them before the opening sentence is cold on the page. “Did any Arabs,” he asks, in a diminuendo of expectation, “save any Jews during the Holocaust?” Do I hear a hundred, do I hear fifty, do I hear one?
It all but gives the game away. Whatever humanity he is going to find among those ashes, it won’t put the world to rights. Such realism is not a general reflection on the character of Arabs. Satloff has an axe to grind, but it is not that one. As the search progresses — from anecdote to official record to actual sites of recorded human kindness — we are not surprised to learn that Arabs behaved the way everyone behaves in time of war. Some were benevolent, some were brutes, some just looked the other way.
What makes it difficult for Satloff to return from his travels and researches with evidence more compelling than this is the silent world in which he is obliged to operate. A silence of general ignorance — for who now knows or recalls that the Holocaust extended its reach to Arab countries, or could name a single one of the 104 labour and punishment camps built by the Nazis and their allies in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, or has heard of the tombeaux , or torture tombs of Morocco, where Jews, under the supervision of Arab guards, were ordered to lie in their own waste for weeks on end? A silence of fading memory and disappearing witness. But above all a silence of refusal typified by the “forbidden room” of the library at the University of Jordan where Satloff did his doctoral research, and that contained books frowned upon by the ruling royal family. In the instance of Satloff’s search for evidence of Arab kindness to Jew, the “forbidden room” is Arab resolve to wipe every trace of the Holocaust from its consciousness. And if that means wiping out every trace of its own humanity to Jews caught up in the tragedy, so be it.
“Soon after 9/11,” Satloff writes — and it’s here that his nerves begin to fray — “I surveyed Holocaust and tolerance-related institutions and found that not a single module, text, or programme for Holocaust education existed in an Arab country, even within the context of studying 20th-century history, modern genocides, or tolerance education.” This is not Holocaust denial but Holocaust negation. Because, in Arab eyes, the Holocaust was deployed to legitimise Zionism and Zionism was the cause of the Arabs’ own “Catastrophe”, it had to be expunged. So much Satloff knew before he started on his trek to find his Arab Schindler. But what he had not prepared himself for was how deep this negation ran even away from official discourse, and how hard it was therefore going to be to find friends or relatives of a Righteous Arab prepared to acknowledge the good he’d done, let alone accept thanks for it.
Thus the desolating emptiness at the heart of Satloff’s quest. He hears stories of heroic generosity but the corroborations he seeks are walled up in that “forbidden room”. When he finally tracks down the grandson of Si Ali Sakkat, a Tunisian Arab of noble descent, who threw open his farm to a group of Jews fleeing a nearby labour camp, lodging, feeding and protecting them, he is warned not to discuss these actions in front of the present farm labourers, who “just would not understand”. Even when an acknowledgment of past helpfulness is made, it is accompanied by irritation, embarrassment, blankness. Our times have seen many examples of history airbrushing what it finds inconvenient. But things are terrible indeed when goodness itself becomes a guilty secret to be banished from our sight.
That no Arab might want to be honoured as Righteous in an Israeli memorial to the Holocaust Satloff knows and understands, but cannot quite bear to admit. In this, there is something of the Don Quixote about him, foisting a troublesome idealism on an unwilling world. And it would be ungenerous not to allow that he does, at the last, put together a modest collection of little, unnamed, unremembered acts of kindness and of love, even identifying, just about, a solitary Schindler — Khaled Abdelwahhab, a wealthy, hedonistic Tunisian, who spirited away a Jewish family and hid them, at great risk to himself, until the Germans left.
No less importantly, Satloff’s researches have played a part in getting the German government to agree compensation to survivors of almost 100 labour camps in Arab north Africa. Which is itself a contribution to our education into the “Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands”. But how long it will be before the Arab world accepts that it, too, was touched by the Holocaust — and by that I do not only mean catastrophically — and how long it will be before both sides accept that there is no hope of peace until each agrees to swim in the other’s past, is anybody’s guess. Among the Righteous taps politely on the door. But there is no answer from the “forbidden room”.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Is The Guardian institutionally racist? Theodore Dalrymple
Brilliantly and humourously argued.
Is The Guardian institutionally racist?
Theodore Dalrymple
Social Affairs Unit
23/09/05
Is The Guardian - the best newspaper in Britain - institutionally racist? Alas, I think the answer must be a resounding Yes.
I had long had the impression that blacks were over-represented in photographs published in the newspaper by comparison with people from the Indian subcontinent or with the Chinese, and I tested the accuracy of my impression by counting the photographs in the edition of 19th September 2005.
There was only one photograph of an Indian, and that was in a commercial advertisement, over the content of which The Guardian, presumably, had little or no control. By contrast, there were 26 photographs of blacks. Surely this was a discrepancy that could not have arisen by chance, and is proof positive of a systematic bias amounting to racism. After all, there are more people of South Asian descent in Britain than of African and West Indian descent, and yet Indians were the subjects of fewer than 4 per cent of all the photographs of ethnic minorities to appear in the newspaper.
How are we to explain this? Does it mean that The Guardian, if it systematically ignores Indians, harbours specially friendly feelings towards blacks? By no means: I think the most likely explanation is quite otherwise. I admit that my hypothesis cannot be proved and is somewhat speculative, but I think it is more plausible than the alternatives.
The people who run and write The Guardian have deep, suppressed and subliminal doubts about the equality of human races. To prove to themselves that they do not have such doubts, they overcompensate by publishing as many photographs of blacks as possible in their pages.
They don't have any such doubts with regard to the Indians and the Chinese. Moreover, these two groups have a horrible and fatal vice, as far as the mindset of The Guardian and its readers is concerned: grosso modo, these two groups can shift for themselves, and require no help from the coalition of intellectuals, moral entrepreneurs and bureaucrats in order to thrive. On the contrary, they are well on the way to outstripping the white population in achievement, thus demonstrating the redundancy of that coalition.
By contrast, blacks are regarded in the pages of The Guardian much as conservationists regard endangered species, in need of special protection. They therefore represent a goldmine for the coalition.
No doubt my hypothesis will be regarded as far-fetched by some, and founded on the spurious assumption that the numbers of photographs in a newspaper can tell you something important about the views and feelings of those who write and publish it. But in essence I am only applying to them the methods and arguments they so easily, frequently and earnestly apply to others.
more...
Is The Guardian institutionally racist?
Theodore Dalrymple
Social Affairs Unit
23/09/05
Is The Guardian - the best newspaper in Britain - institutionally racist? Alas, I think the answer must be a resounding Yes.
I had long had the impression that blacks were over-represented in photographs published in the newspaper by comparison with people from the Indian subcontinent or with the Chinese, and I tested the accuracy of my impression by counting the photographs in the edition of 19th September 2005.
There was only one photograph of an Indian, and that was in a commercial advertisement, over the content of which The Guardian, presumably, had little or no control. By contrast, there were 26 photographs of blacks. Surely this was a discrepancy that could not have arisen by chance, and is proof positive of a systematic bias amounting to racism. After all, there are more people of South Asian descent in Britain than of African and West Indian descent, and yet Indians were the subjects of fewer than 4 per cent of all the photographs of ethnic minorities to appear in the newspaper.
How are we to explain this? Does it mean that The Guardian, if it systematically ignores Indians, harbours specially friendly feelings towards blacks? By no means: I think the most likely explanation is quite otherwise. I admit that my hypothesis cannot be proved and is somewhat speculative, but I think it is more plausible than the alternatives.
The people who run and write The Guardian have deep, suppressed and subliminal doubts about the equality of human races. To prove to themselves that they do not have such doubts, they overcompensate by publishing as many photographs of blacks as possible in their pages.
They don't have any such doubts with regard to the Indians and the Chinese. Moreover, these two groups have a horrible and fatal vice, as far as the mindset of The Guardian and its readers is concerned: grosso modo, these two groups can shift for themselves, and require no help from the coalition of intellectuals, moral entrepreneurs and bureaucrats in order to thrive. On the contrary, they are well on the way to outstripping the white population in achievement, thus demonstrating the redundancy of that coalition.
By contrast, blacks are regarded in the pages of The Guardian much as conservationists regard endangered species, in need of special protection. They therefore represent a goldmine for the coalition.
No doubt my hypothesis will be regarded as far-fetched by some, and founded on the spurious assumption that the numbers of photographs in a newspaper can tell you something important about the views and feelings of those who write and publish it. But in essence I am only applying to them the methods and arguments they so easily, frequently and earnestly apply to others.
more...
Friday, March 02, 2007
Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel
This is simply one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Got through it in a weekend, absolutely unputdownable. Get it, read it, buy copies and distribute them:
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Here she and her book are the subject of an Observer feature, and some interesting stuff comes out about a debate she had with Tariq Ramadan (some more links at the end).
---------------------------------
Taking the fight to Islam
Sunday February 4, 2007
The Observer
...
Strictly speaking Hirsi Ali is not an infidel but an apostate, a designation that in the Koran warrants the punishment of death. The distinction is not without significance. In a poll published last week, one in three British Muslims in the 16-24 age group agreed that 'Muslim conversion is forbidden and punishable by death'.
This figure comes as no surprise to Hirsi Ali. She argues that Europe's determination to maintain cultural difference will lead increasing numbers of alienated Muslims to seek the unambiguity of fundamentalism. Liberals, she says, have shirked the responsibility of making the case for their own beliefs. They need to start speaking out in favour of the values of secular humanism. And they need to make clear that they are not compatible with religious bigotry and superstition. 'You have to say that if you want the Prophet Muhammad to be your moral guide in the 21st century and you are aware of the choices the Prophet Muhammad made towards unbelievers, women, homosexuals, do you really think you're going to succeed? You will get into some sort of cognitive dissonance if you at the same time want to adapt to a life here.'
Without an open and robust critique of the nature of the prophet's teachings, she goes on, 'these clerics proselytising radical Islam make much, much more sense. Because the radical Muslims say that democracy is bad, and the young Muslim mind says "Why is it bad?". Because the Koran says it's bad. That makes more sense than democracy is good, the rights of individuals must be observed but you can also hang on to what the Koran says. I say stop that and appeal to and challenge young minds.'
When it comes to words, Hirsi Ali is not one to look for the mincer. She speaks in a language that makes no concessions to the softening euphemisms of political correctness. Those immersed in circumspection and ever vigilant to the contemporary sin of offence are bound to ask themselves if she's allowed to say what she says. In this respect her predicament is reminiscent of the moment in Basic Instinct when Sharon Stone lights a cigarette under interrogation in a police station. She's told that's it's non-smoking environment and she replies: 'So arrest me.' Hirsi Ali's life is already in jeopardy. She's long past the point of polite restraint.
Some observers find her forthright approach refreshing and, indeed, intoxicating, but many recoil from her unadorned conviction. Writing in the New York Review of Books, the historian Timothy Garton Ash described Hirsi Ali as a 'slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist'. Last year when Garton Ash chaired a discussion with Hirsi Ali at the ICA, he seemed both to admire the incisiveness of her quietly spoken logic and to wince at its unshakeable conclusions.
'For him,' Hirsi Ali laughs, 'the Enlightenment is complex. For me, it isn't. There's nothing complex about it.' A student of 17th- and 18th-century political ideas, she doesn't mean that she thinks the Enlightenment was some kind of uniform philosophical movement. The simplicity, for her, is the legacy of the Enlightenment, the things we take for granted about Western sociopolitical culture: the rule of law, the rights of the individual, freedom of expression. To Hirsi Ali these are bedrock precepts that should not be compromised in the name of cultural diversity.
Most of the political classes would agree with her in principle but like to take a more nuanced, and often evasive, stance in practice. She was one of the few intellectuals, for example, who rushed to support the Danes in the cartoon crisis last year. If you believe in the right of freedom of expression, she says, you have to defend that right. In a debate a few years back, Hirsi Ali challenged the Swiss Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan, something of a poster boy for the multicultural left, to be more consistent and clear-cut in what he said. Was the Koran the word of God or a man-made text that was out of date? Ramadan responded by questioning Hirsi Ali's adversarial style. 'The question,' he said, 'is whether you want to change the mentality or please the audience.'
Does her bald delivery not further alienate Muslims, forcing them to cling to traditional values? Hirsi Ali is too smooth of skin and composure to bristle, but it is obviously an accusation she finds irritating.
'Tariq Ramadan is filled with contempt for Muslims because he believes they have no faculties of reason,' she replies in a beguilingly friendly tone, as though she had remarked that he had an excellent taste in shirts. 'If I say that terrorism is created in the name of Islam suddenly they take up terrorism? He gives me so much more power than I have. Why don't my remarks make him turn to terrorism? Because he's above that. Like many believers in multiculturalism, he puts himself on a higher plane. The other thing is that it's not about your style, it's about your content. Are my propositions right or wrong? Is it social, cultural and religious beliefs that cause economic backwardness or is it the other way round? My take on this is the cultural and religious elements are far more important to look at. That is what we should be looking at and not how I say it.'
All the same, it's fair to say that her audience is made up largely of white liberal males, rather than the Muslim women she wishes to liberate. In Holland, a female Muslim politician named Fatima Elatik told me: 'She's appealing to Dutch society, to middle-class Dutch-origin people. She talks about the emancipation of women but you can't push it down their that you didn't bring John Stuart Mill and left us only with the Koran. It doesn't help to say my forefathers oppressed your forefathers, and remain guilty forever.'throats. If I could talk to her, I would tell her that she needs to get a couple of Muslim women around her.'
Hirsi Ali dismisses this as 'a very silly remark. I started off in a position where none of these women were visible anyway except as proxies to be put forward to get subsidies from the government. Just keep singing we're discriminated against. No Muslim women are allowed into this debate by their own groups. So it's way too early. By the time these women are assertive enough, I won't be around. It will be one generation on.'
She also argues that it's important to address white liberals because they need to overcome the self-censoring effects of post-colonial guilt. 'If you want to feel guilty,' snaps Hirsi Ali, 'feel guilty
There is no zealot like the convert, goes the old saying, and many commentators have concluded that Hirsi Ali is a prime secular example. 'In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals,' wrote Garton Ash, 'she has gone from one extreme to the other'. The word on Hirsi Ali is that she is 'traumatised' by her upbringing and her subsequent adoption of a Western lifestyle. It's the word that Ian Buruma uses to describe her condition in his book Murder In Amsterdam.
Needless to say, she finds this appraisal of her ideas patronising. It was, she says, partly in an effort to combat this impression that she wrote Infidel. 'People can see that there is not much trauma in my story.'
That depends on what you think constitutes trauma. The account of being held down by the legs, aged five, and having her clitoris and inner labia cut off with a pair of scissors will certainly alarm many readers. 'I heard it,' she writes, 'like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat.' The fierce beatings she receives at the hands of her embittered mother, and the fractured skull inflicted on her by a brutal religious teacher, these too would leave psychological scars on most of us.
But as Hirsi Ali writes, they were normal events in her childhood and in the lives of people she knew. Death and illness were commonplace in Africa, and by African standards she lived well. There is nothing melodramatic in Hirsi Ali's prose. It's matter-of-fact and also, as she is quick to point out, entirely subjective. It's possible, she says, that her family will remember things differently. 'But it's my story and if you undertake such an endeavour you have to be honest. Usually people make excuses for their culture and family etcetera. I could tell the story that we in the Third World have things that the West could learn from, which is obviously true, but that isn't what I wanted to show. My argument is that western liberal culture is superior to Islamic tribal group culture.'
...
Hirsi Ali, say her opponents, is an arch exponent of Islamophobia. One such critic has written a stinging attack on Hirsi Ali in this month's Times Literary Supplement. Maria Golia, an Egyptian-based academic, writes: 'Hirsi Ali seems far more interested in indicting Islam than helping damaged women, whose horror stories she conveniently trots out whenever she needs to bludgeon home a point.'
She takes Hirsi Ali to task on female genital mutilation which, she points out, is not an Islamic practice. Hirsi Ali wanted the Dutch government to institute medical checks on young girls in vulnerable circumstances. Golia calls the idea 'institutionalised violence' and prefers an approach that 'requires understanding of context and coalition-building, not to mention compassion and subtlety'.
It should be said that in Infidel Hirsi Ali specifically states that FGM predates Islam, is not limited to Islam and that it is not practised in many Islamic countries. However, she adds, it is very often 'justified in the name of Islam'. Indeed one need only look at the advice of the leading Egyptian cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is considered one of the most influential scholars in Islam. Qaradawi has been promoted by London mayor Ken Livingstone as a moderate voice, but on his Islam-online website he writes of female circumcision: 'Anyhow, it is not obligatory, whoever finds it serving the interest of his daughters should do it, and I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world.'
She characterises the manner in which liberals sidestep such details as a confusion of facts and strategy. 'Some people will accept that Islam is backward but they're not going to say that because Muslims will be offended. "We want them to become liberals, so we're just going to trick them into a secular humanistic way of thinking."' At this she lets out a giggle, as if tickled by the absurdity of the idea. 'But people are aware of what's going on. That's why many Muslims are suspicious of liberals. Because they know they are not being taken seriously.'
Perhaps a more telling symbol of the growing cultural gap between mainstream Western society and doctrinaire Islam is the veil. Again Hirsi Ali does not look around for a fence to sit on. 'The veil,' she says, 'is to show that women are responsible for the sexual self-control of men.' It's a surgical observation, cutting right through to the bone of the issue. She goes on to note that in all communities where the veil is actively observed boys are not taught to restrain themselves. 'They look upon all those who are not veiled as women who are looking for sexual contact and they just go about molesting and being a nuisance.'
But what about those women who say that the veil has nothing to do with sex, that is a demonstration of their love of Allah. 'That is a very small group of women?' But are you to deny them their right to dress as they please? 'No,' she insists, 'I don't want to deny them that and I don't want anyone to deny them that.'
Her solution is secular civic space - for example in schools and government offices - in which all religion is removed. The French model then? That's hardly been a great success. 'It's never been tried,' she counters. 'The French have voiced it but never implemented it. They've created these zones outside Paris where people from Third World countries are put together and excluded from the secular neutral model. They've preached secular Republicanism and practised multiculturalism, that's the whole French hypocrisy.'
...
But of course in voicing her opinion in the style she does, she risks lumping together over a billion people from different nations, cultures and traditions as a single 'problem'. For Hirsi Ali, the problem is one of self-definition. If Muslims want to assert a religious text as the basis of their public identity, then they have to accept public debate of that text and its ideas with all the discomfort and offence that may involve.
---------------------------------
More on Ali v Tariq Ramadan
Lessons from the Cold War about reforming Islam
pulpmovies.com
Sunday 25 Jun 2006
Muslim pundits clash over future of Islam in Europe
FT
June 17 2006
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Here she and her book are the subject of an Observer feature, and some interesting stuff comes out about a debate she had with Tariq Ramadan (some more links at the end).
---------------------------------
Taking the fight to Islam
Sunday February 4, 2007
The Observer
...
Strictly speaking Hirsi Ali is not an infidel but an apostate, a designation that in the Koran warrants the punishment of death. The distinction is not without significance. In a poll published last week, one in three British Muslims in the 16-24 age group agreed that 'Muslim conversion is forbidden and punishable by death'.
This figure comes as no surprise to Hirsi Ali. She argues that Europe's determination to maintain cultural difference will lead increasing numbers of alienated Muslims to seek the unambiguity of fundamentalism. Liberals, she says, have shirked the responsibility of making the case for their own beliefs. They need to start speaking out in favour of the values of secular humanism. And they need to make clear that they are not compatible with religious bigotry and superstition. 'You have to say that if you want the Prophet Muhammad to be your moral guide in the 21st century and you are aware of the choices the Prophet Muhammad made towards unbelievers, women, homosexuals, do you really think you're going to succeed? You will get into some sort of cognitive dissonance if you at the same time want to adapt to a life here.'
Without an open and robust critique of the nature of the prophet's teachings, she goes on, 'these clerics proselytising radical Islam make much, much more sense. Because the radical Muslims say that democracy is bad, and the young Muslim mind says "Why is it bad?". Because the Koran says it's bad. That makes more sense than democracy is good, the rights of individuals must be observed but you can also hang on to what the Koran says. I say stop that and appeal to and challenge young minds.'
When it comes to words, Hirsi Ali is not one to look for the mincer. She speaks in a language that makes no concessions to the softening euphemisms of political correctness. Those immersed in circumspection and ever vigilant to the contemporary sin of offence are bound to ask themselves if she's allowed to say what she says. In this respect her predicament is reminiscent of the moment in Basic Instinct when Sharon Stone lights a cigarette under interrogation in a police station. She's told that's it's non-smoking environment and she replies: 'So arrest me.' Hirsi Ali's life is already in jeopardy. She's long past the point of polite restraint.
Some observers find her forthright approach refreshing and, indeed, intoxicating, but many recoil from her unadorned conviction. Writing in the New York Review of Books, the historian Timothy Garton Ash described Hirsi Ali as a 'slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist'. Last year when Garton Ash chaired a discussion with Hirsi Ali at the ICA, he seemed both to admire the incisiveness of her quietly spoken logic and to wince at its unshakeable conclusions.
'For him,' Hirsi Ali laughs, 'the Enlightenment is complex. For me, it isn't. There's nothing complex about it.' A student of 17th- and 18th-century political ideas, she doesn't mean that she thinks the Enlightenment was some kind of uniform philosophical movement. The simplicity, for her, is the legacy of the Enlightenment, the things we take for granted about Western sociopolitical culture: the rule of law, the rights of the individual, freedom of expression. To Hirsi Ali these are bedrock precepts that should not be compromised in the name of cultural diversity.
Most of the political classes would agree with her in principle but like to take a more nuanced, and often evasive, stance in practice. She was one of the few intellectuals, for example, who rushed to support the Danes in the cartoon crisis last year. If you believe in the right of freedom of expression, she says, you have to defend that right. In a debate a few years back, Hirsi Ali challenged the Swiss Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan, something of a poster boy for the multicultural left, to be more consistent and clear-cut in what he said. Was the Koran the word of God or a man-made text that was out of date? Ramadan responded by questioning Hirsi Ali's adversarial style. 'The question,' he said, 'is whether you want to change the mentality or please the audience.'
Does her bald delivery not further alienate Muslims, forcing them to cling to traditional values? Hirsi Ali is too smooth of skin and composure to bristle, but it is obviously an accusation she finds irritating.
'Tariq Ramadan is filled with contempt for Muslims because he believes they have no faculties of reason,' she replies in a beguilingly friendly tone, as though she had remarked that he had an excellent taste in shirts. 'If I say that terrorism is created in the name of Islam suddenly they take up terrorism? He gives me so much more power than I have. Why don't my remarks make him turn to terrorism? Because he's above that. Like many believers in multiculturalism, he puts himself on a higher plane. The other thing is that it's not about your style, it's about your content. Are my propositions right or wrong? Is it social, cultural and religious beliefs that cause economic backwardness or is it the other way round? My take on this is the cultural and religious elements are far more important to look at. That is what we should be looking at and not how I say it.'
All the same, it's fair to say that her audience is made up largely of white liberal males, rather than the Muslim women she wishes to liberate. In Holland, a female Muslim politician named Fatima Elatik told me: 'She's appealing to Dutch society, to middle-class Dutch-origin people. She talks about the emancipation of women but you can't push it down their that you didn't bring John Stuart Mill and left us only with the Koran. It doesn't help to say my forefathers oppressed your forefathers, and remain guilty forever.'throats. If I could talk to her, I would tell her that she needs to get a couple of Muslim women around her.'
Hirsi Ali dismisses this as 'a very silly remark. I started off in a position where none of these women were visible anyway except as proxies to be put forward to get subsidies from the government. Just keep singing we're discriminated against. No Muslim women are allowed into this debate by their own groups. So it's way too early. By the time these women are assertive enough, I won't be around. It will be one generation on.'
She also argues that it's important to address white liberals because they need to overcome the self-censoring effects of post-colonial guilt. 'If you want to feel guilty,' snaps Hirsi Ali, 'feel guilty
There is no zealot like the convert, goes the old saying, and many commentators have concluded that Hirsi Ali is a prime secular example. 'In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals,' wrote Garton Ash, 'she has gone from one extreme to the other'. The word on Hirsi Ali is that she is 'traumatised' by her upbringing and her subsequent adoption of a Western lifestyle. It's the word that Ian Buruma uses to describe her condition in his book Murder In Amsterdam.
Needless to say, she finds this appraisal of her ideas patronising. It was, she says, partly in an effort to combat this impression that she wrote Infidel. 'People can see that there is not much trauma in my story.'
That depends on what you think constitutes trauma. The account of being held down by the legs, aged five, and having her clitoris and inner labia cut off with a pair of scissors will certainly alarm many readers. 'I heard it,' she writes, 'like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat.' The fierce beatings she receives at the hands of her embittered mother, and the fractured skull inflicted on her by a brutal religious teacher, these too would leave psychological scars on most of us.
But as Hirsi Ali writes, they were normal events in her childhood and in the lives of people she knew. Death and illness were commonplace in Africa, and by African standards she lived well. There is nothing melodramatic in Hirsi Ali's prose. It's matter-of-fact and also, as she is quick to point out, entirely subjective. It's possible, she says, that her family will remember things differently. 'But it's my story and if you undertake such an endeavour you have to be honest. Usually people make excuses for their culture and family etcetera. I could tell the story that we in the Third World have things that the West could learn from, which is obviously true, but that isn't what I wanted to show. My argument is that western liberal culture is superior to Islamic tribal group culture.'
...
Hirsi Ali, say her opponents, is an arch exponent of Islamophobia. One such critic has written a stinging attack on Hirsi Ali in this month's Times Literary Supplement. Maria Golia, an Egyptian-based academic, writes: 'Hirsi Ali seems far more interested in indicting Islam than helping damaged women, whose horror stories she conveniently trots out whenever she needs to bludgeon home a point.'
She takes Hirsi Ali to task on female genital mutilation which, she points out, is not an Islamic practice. Hirsi Ali wanted the Dutch government to institute medical checks on young girls in vulnerable circumstances. Golia calls the idea 'institutionalised violence' and prefers an approach that 'requires understanding of context and coalition-building, not to mention compassion and subtlety'.
It should be said that in Infidel Hirsi Ali specifically states that FGM predates Islam, is not limited to Islam and that it is not practised in many Islamic countries. However, she adds, it is very often 'justified in the name of Islam'. Indeed one need only look at the advice of the leading Egyptian cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is considered one of the most influential scholars in Islam. Qaradawi has been promoted by London mayor Ken Livingstone as a moderate voice, but on his Islam-online website he writes of female circumcision: 'Anyhow, it is not obligatory, whoever finds it serving the interest of his daughters should do it, and I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world.'
She characterises the manner in which liberals sidestep such details as a confusion of facts and strategy. 'Some people will accept that Islam is backward but they're not going to say that because Muslims will be offended. "We want them to become liberals, so we're just going to trick them into a secular humanistic way of thinking."' At this she lets out a giggle, as if tickled by the absurdity of the idea. 'But people are aware of what's going on. That's why many Muslims are suspicious of liberals. Because they know they are not being taken seriously.'
Perhaps a more telling symbol of the growing cultural gap between mainstream Western society and doctrinaire Islam is the veil. Again Hirsi Ali does not look around for a fence to sit on. 'The veil,' she says, 'is to show that women are responsible for the sexual self-control of men.' It's a surgical observation, cutting right through to the bone of the issue. She goes on to note that in all communities where the veil is actively observed boys are not taught to restrain themselves. 'They look upon all those who are not veiled as women who are looking for sexual contact and they just go about molesting and being a nuisance.'
But what about those women who say that the veil has nothing to do with sex, that is a demonstration of their love of Allah. 'That is a very small group of women?' But are you to deny them their right to dress as they please? 'No,' she insists, 'I don't want to deny them that and I don't want anyone to deny them that.'
Her solution is secular civic space - for example in schools and government offices - in which all religion is removed. The French model then? That's hardly been a great success. 'It's never been tried,' she counters. 'The French have voiced it but never implemented it. They've created these zones outside Paris where people from Third World countries are put together and excluded from the secular neutral model. They've preached secular Republicanism and practised multiculturalism, that's the whole French hypocrisy.'
...
But of course in voicing her opinion in the style she does, she risks lumping together over a billion people from different nations, cultures and traditions as a single 'problem'. For Hirsi Ali, the problem is one of self-definition. If Muslims want to assert a religious text as the basis of their public identity, then they have to accept public debate of that text and its ideas with all the discomfort and offence that may involve.
---------------------------------
More on Ali v Tariq Ramadan
Lessons from the Cold War about reforming Islam
pulpmovies.com
Sunday 25 Jun 2006
Muslim pundits clash over future of Islam in Europe
FT
June 17 2006
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Slavery – what a lot of fuss about nothing
Slavery – what a lot of fuss about nothing
Moral relativism should not guide our foreign policy
Times Comment
David Aaronovitch
February 27 2007
Moral relativism should not guide our foreign policy
Times Comment
David Aaronovitch
February 27 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Philosophy of Religion
If anyone fancies a bit of intellectual exercise, see if you can do a Dawkins and show what is wrong with the pro-God arguments presented here:
BBC Radio 4
Today Program
27/02/07
0844 The University and Colleges Christian Fellowship is putting on a series of lectures and debates about God.
Listen | Permalink
BBC Radio 4
Today Program
27/02/07
0844 The University and Colleges Christian Fellowship is putting on a series of lectures and debates about God.
Listen | Permalink
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Jewish blood libel back in the news
It's not often I'm rendered speechless. But the idea that a Jew could raise the medieval blood libel at a time of rising anti-semitism, using confessions extracted in medieval prisons as evidence...
Professor outrages Jews with book claim
Telegraph
08/02/2007
A Jewish academic has shocked Italy by stating that Jews murdered Christians during the Middle Ages so that their blood could be used in ritualistic ceremonies. The details were revealed in yesterday's Corriere Della Sera newspaper which published extracts of the book by Professor Ariel Toaff, Easter of Blood. European Jews and ritual homicides. Last night his claims were denied by leading Jewish figures including his father Elio, once chief rabbi of Rome.
In the book, Prof Toaff describes the multilation and crucification of a two-year-old boy to recreate Christ's execution at Pesach, the Jewish Easter. The festival marks the fleeing of the Jews from Egypt and Prof Toaff says Christian blood was used for "magic and therapeutic practices."In some cases the blood was mixed with dough to make the azzimo, unleavened bread, eaten at Pesach. He says the acts took place in northern Italy, around the city of Trento in German-speaking areas that border modern-day Austria.
Prof Toaff bases his book on confessions he says came from Jews captured and put on trial for the practice, which took place from 1100 and 1500. He writes that several confessed to the crucifixion of Christian children and that they were executed.
However, the claims were condemned by Jewish leaders in Rome. Their declaration read: "There has never existed in the Jewish tradition any ritual involving human blood. It is improper to use the declarations extracted under torture hundreds of years ago to construct theories as original as they are aberrant."The only blood split in these stories was that of many innocent Jews killed for unjust accusations."
However, Prof Toaff, who teaches at the Bar Illan University near Tel Aviv, responded: "This declaration is a disgrace, before judging they should have read my book and then saved themselves the bother."
Professor outrages Jews with book claim
Telegraph
08/02/2007
A Jewish academic has shocked Italy by stating that Jews murdered Christians during the Middle Ages so that their blood could be used in ritualistic ceremonies. The details were revealed in yesterday's Corriere Della Sera newspaper which published extracts of the book by Professor Ariel Toaff, Easter of Blood. European Jews and ritual homicides. Last night his claims were denied by leading Jewish figures including his father Elio, once chief rabbi of Rome.
In the book, Prof Toaff describes the multilation and crucification of a two-year-old boy to recreate Christ's execution at Pesach, the Jewish Easter. The festival marks the fleeing of the Jews from Egypt and Prof Toaff says Christian blood was used for "magic and therapeutic practices."In some cases the blood was mixed with dough to make the azzimo, unleavened bread, eaten at Pesach. He says the acts took place in northern Italy, around the city of Trento in German-speaking areas that border modern-day Austria.
Prof Toaff bases his book on confessions he says came from Jews captured and put on trial for the practice, which took place from 1100 and 1500. He writes that several confessed to the crucifixion of Christian children and that they were executed.
However, the claims were condemned by Jewish leaders in Rome. Their declaration read: "There has never existed in the Jewish tradition any ritual involving human blood. It is improper to use the declarations extracted under torture hundreds of years ago to construct theories as original as they are aberrant."The only blood split in these stories was that of many innocent Jews killed for unjust accusations."
However, Prof Toaff, who teaches at the Bar Illan University near Tel Aviv, responded: "This declaration is a disgrace, before judging they should have read my book and then saved themselves the bother."
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Dispatches - Undercover Mosque
There was a brilliant bit of investigative reporting on Channel 4 a couple of weeks ago, Dispatches - Undercover Mosque.
The truly astonishing thing is the lack of reaction there has been since the broadcast. It is sensational material - I cannot recommend a viewing highly enough - and yet, nothing in the papers, nothing in the news, no comments from MP's. Nowt.
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You Tube - Undercover Mosque
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Documentary Exposes Radical Muslim Rhetoric
Interview with Daniel Pipes
Fox News: Hannity & Colmes
February 1, 2007
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Dispatches - Undercover Mosque
Channel 4
Broadcast: Monday 15 January
A Dispatches reporter attends mosques run by organisations whose public faces are presented as moderate and finds preachers condemning integration into British society, condemning democracy and praising the Taliban for killing British soldiers.
Prime Minister Tony Blair recently described tolerance as 'what makes Britain Britain' but in this extensive investigation Dispatches reveals how a message of hatred and segregation is being spread throughout the UK and examines how it is influenced by the religious establishment of Saudi Arabia.
Dispatches has investigated a number of mosques run by high profile national organisations that claim to be dedicated to moderation and dialogue with other faiths. But an undercover reporter joined worshippers to find a message of religious bigotry and extremism being preached.
He captures chilling sermons in which Saudi-trained preachers proclaim the supremacy of Islam, preach hatred for non-Muslims and for Muslims who do not follow their extreme beliefs - and predict a coming jihad. "An army of Muslims will arise," announces one preacher. Another preacher said British Muslims must "dismantle" British democracy - they must "live like a state within a state" until they are "strong enough to take over."
The investigation reveals Saudi Arabian universities are recruiting young Western Muslims to train them in their extreme theology, then sending them back to the West to spread the word. And the Dispatches reporter discovers that British Muslims can ask for fatwas, religious rulings, direct from the top religious leader in Saudi Arabia, the Grand Mufti.
Saudi-trained preachers are also promoted in DVDs and books on sale at religious centres and sermons broadcast on websites. These publications and webcasts disseminate beliefs about women such as: "Allah has created the woman deficient, her intellect is incomplete", and girls: "By the age of 10 if she doesn't wear hijab, we hit her," and there's an extreme hostility towards homosexuals.
The investigation reveals that the influence of Saudi Arabian Islam, Wahabism, extends beyond the walls of some mosques to influential organisations that advise the British government on inter-community relations and prevention of terrorism.
The Dispatches reporter attends talks at mosques run by key organisations whose public faces are presented as moderate and mainstream - and finds preachers condemning the idea of integration into British society, condemning British democracy as un-Islamic and praising the Taliban for killing British soldiers.
Undercover Mosque features interviews with moderate British Muslim figures who are speaking out against the influence of Saudi Arabia's extreme brand of Islam, which is seeking to overturn Islamic traditions of diversity and peaceful co-existence: "We are losing our children to extremists," says Haras Rafiq of the Sufi Muslim Council. Dr Al Alawi of the Islamic Heritage Foundation also warns: "If this continues, you will have extremist mosques in every corner of the UK. You will not have moderate Muslims walking on our streets anymore."
The truly astonishing thing is the lack of reaction there has been since the broadcast. It is sensational material - I cannot recommend a viewing highly enough - and yet, nothing in the papers, nothing in the news, no comments from MP's. Nowt.
--------------------
You Tube - Undercover Mosque
--------------------
Documentary Exposes Radical Muslim Rhetoric
Interview with Daniel Pipes
Fox News: Hannity & Colmes
February 1, 2007
--------------------
Dispatches - Undercover Mosque
Channel 4
Broadcast: Monday 15 January
A Dispatches reporter attends mosques run by organisations whose public faces are presented as moderate and finds preachers condemning integration into British society, condemning democracy and praising the Taliban for killing British soldiers.
Prime Minister Tony Blair recently described tolerance as 'what makes Britain Britain' but in this extensive investigation Dispatches reveals how a message of hatred and segregation is being spread throughout the UK and examines how it is influenced by the religious establishment of Saudi Arabia.
Dispatches has investigated a number of mosques run by high profile national organisations that claim to be dedicated to moderation and dialogue with other faiths. But an undercover reporter joined worshippers to find a message of religious bigotry and extremism being preached.
He captures chilling sermons in which Saudi-trained preachers proclaim the supremacy of Islam, preach hatred for non-Muslims and for Muslims who do not follow their extreme beliefs - and predict a coming jihad. "An army of Muslims will arise," announces one preacher. Another preacher said British Muslims must "dismantle" British democracy - they must "live like a state within a state" until they are "strong enough to take over."
The investigation reveals Saudi Arabian universities are recruiting young Western Muslims to train them in their extreme theology, then sending them back to the West to spread the word. And the Dispatches reporter discovers that British Muslims can ask for fatwas, religious rulings, direct from the top religious leader in Saudi Arabia, the Grand Mufti.
Saudi-trained preachers are also promoted in DVDs and books on sale at religious centres and sermons broadcast on websites. These publications and webcasts disseminate beliefs about women such as: "Allah has created the woman deficient, her intellect is incomplete", and girls: "By the age of 10 if she doesn't wear hijab, we hit her," and there's an extreme hostility towards homosexuals.
The investigation reveals that the influence of Saudi Arabian Islam, Wahabism, extends beyond the walls of some mosques to influential organisations that advise the British government on inter-community relations and prevention of terrorism.
The Dispatches reporter attends talks at mosques run by key organisations whose public faces are presented as moderate and mainstream - and finds preachers condemning the idea of integration into British society, condemning British democracy as un-Islamic and praising the Taliban for killing British soldiers.
Undercover Mosque features interviews with moderate British Muslim figures who are speaking out against the influence of Saudi Arabia's extreme brand of Islam, which is seeking to overturn Islamic traditions of diversity and peaceful co-existence: "We are losing our children to extremists," says Haras Rafiq of the Sufi Muslim Council. Dr Al Alawi of the Islamic Heritage Foundation also warns: "If this continues, you will have extremist mosques in every corner of the UK. You will not have moderate Muslims walking on our streets anymore."
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Daniel Pipes debates Ken Livingstone in London
Both Andy and I attended the excellent debate in London on Saturday featuring Daniel Pipes and Ken Livingstone as the key speakers. Here is Pipes' own record of the event, with some links and a couple of pictures. I keenly await a video of the discussion to be posted somewhere (keep your eyes pealed).
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My Debate with London Mayor Ken Livingstone
Daniel Pipes' Weblog
January 22, 2007
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My Debate with London Mayor Ken Livingstone
Daniel Pipes' Weblog
January 22, 2007
It all began with a faxed letter from Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, arriving out of the blue on April 4, 2006:
I will be hosting a conference to discuss the thesis of the "clash of civilizations" first popularized by Professor Samuel Huntington's book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. I would like to invite you to debate this thesis with me at the opening session of the conference, which will be held 10am-1pm on Saturday, 10 June 2006.
The conference was twice delayed, before finally taking place two days ago, on January 20, 2007. It was quite an event, held in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, across the street from Westminster Abbey. The mayor told me in a private chat before the event that when he conceived of the event two years ago, he wondered if anyone would show up. He need not have worried; the Greater London Authority's website indicated there had been "an unprecedented demand" for tickets and several days in advance of the event shut the ticketing. One organizer on the mayor's staff told me that the audience numbered about five thousand and that over 150 media had registered for the conference.
The mayor and I each invited a seconder to help us make our arguments: he chose Salma Yaqoob, a councillor in Birmingham, and I chose Douglas Murray, the London writer. Due to the large crowd, the event started a half hour late but even truncated, it still went for slightly over two hours.
Despite the many journalists and video cameras, and despite the GLA having recorded and simultaneously transcribed the event, and despite two and a half days having passed since it took place, there has been – quite to my surprise – not a single media account of the debate, nor a video made available, nor a transcript. (This reminds me in a way of my University of California-Berkeley talk three years ago, which created quite a stir but had zero media coverage.)
There have, however, been a number of blog accounts – interestingly, every one of them sympathetic to Murray and myself; it would seem that the mayor's supporters took a pass on reporting the event. In alphabetical order by author, here are are the fullest and most interesting accounts that I have located (the list will be updated as needed):
- Sharon Chadha, "Clash of Civilizations?" SharonChadha.com, 21 January 2007.
- Gandalf, "Clash of Civilizations." UpPompeii.com, 21 January 2007.
- Graham, "A Very Civilised Clash." Harry's Place, 22 January 2007.
- Jonathan Hoffman, "Daniel Pipes survives Livingstone's Lions' Den." Adloyada.com, 21 January 2007.
- David Pryce-Jones, "Debating Clash." National Review Online, 20 January 2007.
- Beila Rabinowitz and William A. Mayer, "Dr. Daniel Pipes and Douglas Murray Triumph over ‘Red' Ken Livingstone in London Debate." PipeLineNews.org, 22 January 2007.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Hamas Covenant and the Hizbollah Manifesto
Important to know what these groups say their aims are, I feel.
The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (ie Hamas)
18 August 1988
This one is too long to quote extensively, but do a text search for "jew" - it's worth it. Here's my fave para:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."
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An Open Letter
The Hizballah Program
Our Identity
We are often asked: Who are we, the Hizballah, and what is our identity? We are the sons of the umma (Muslim community) - the party of God (Hizb Allah) the vanguard of which was made victorious by God in Iran. There the vanguard succeeded to lay down the bases of a Muslim state which plays a central role in the world. We obey the orders of one leader, wise and just, that of our tutor and faqih (jurist) who fulfills all the necessary conditions: Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini. God save him!
By virtue of the above, we do not constitute an organized and closed party in Lebanon. nor are we a tight political cadre. We are an umma linked to the Muslims of the whole world by the solid doctrinal and religious connection of Islam, whose message God wanted to be fulfilled by the Seal of the Prophets, i.e., Muhammad. This is why whatever touches or strikes the Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines and elsewhere reverberates throughout the whole Muslim umma of which we are an integral part. Our behavior is dictated to us by legal principles laid down by the light of an overall political conception defined by the leading jurist (wilayat al-faqih).
As for our culture, it is based on the Holy Koran, the Sunna and the legal rulings of the faqih who is our source of imitation (marja' al-taqlid). Our culture is crystal clear. It is not complicated and is accessible to all.
No one can imagine the importance of our military potential as our military apparatus is not separate from our overall social fabric. Each of us is a fighting soldier. And when it becomes necessary to carry out the Holy War, each of us takes up his assignment in the fight in accordance with the injunctions of the Law, and that in the framework of the mission carried out under the tutelage of the Commanding Jurist.
Our Fight
The US has tried, through its local agents, to persuade the people that those who crushed their arrogance in Lebanon and frustrated their conspiracy against the oppressed (mustad'afin) were nothing but a bunch of fanatic terrorists whose sole aim is to dynamite bars and destroy slot machines. Such suggestions cannot and will not mislead our umma, for the whole world knows that whoever wishes to oppose the US, that arrogant superpower, cannot indulge in marginal acts which may make it deviate from its major objective. We combat abomination and we shall tear out its very roots, its primary roots, which are the US. All attempts made to drive us into marginal actions will fail, especially as our determination to fight the US is solid.
We declare openly and loudly that we are an umma which fears God only and is by no means ready to tolerate injustice, aggression and humiliation. America, its Atlantic Pact allies, and the Zionist entity in the holy land of Palestine, attacked us and continue to do so without respite. Their aim is to make us eat dust continually. This is why we are, more and more, in a state of permanent alert in order to repel aggression and defend our religion, our existence, our dignity. They invaded our country, destroyed our villages, slit the throats of our children, violated our sanctuaries and appointed masters over our people who committed the worst massacres against our umma. They do not cease to give support to these allies of Israel, and do not enable us to decide our future according to our own wishes.
In a single night the Israelis and the Phalangists executed thousands of our sons, women and children in Sabra and Shatilla. No international organization protested or denounced this ferocious massacre in an effective manner, a massacre perpetrated with the tacit accord of America's European allies, which had retreated a few days, maybe even a few hours earlier, from the Palestinian camps. The Lebanese defeatists accepted putting the camps under the protection of that crafty fox, the US envoy Philip Habib.
We have no alternative but to confront aggression by sacrifice. The coordination between the Phalangists and Israel continues and develops. A hundred thousand victims - this is the approximate balance sheet of crimes committed by them and by the US against us. Almost half a million Muslims were forced to leave their homes. Their quarters were virtually totally destroyed in Nab'a, my own Beirut suburb, as well as in Burj Hammud, Dekonaneh, Tel Zaatar, Sinbay, Ghawarina and Jubeil - all in areas controlled today by the 'Lebanese Forces',. The Zionist occupation then launched its usurpatory invasion of Lebanon in full and open collusion with the Phalanges. The latter condemned all attempts to resist the invading forces. They participated in the implementation of certain Israeli plans in order to accomplish its Lebanese dream and acceded to all Israeli requests in order to gain power.
And this is, in fact, what happened. Bashir Jumayyil, that butcher, seized power with the help also of OPEC countries and the Jumayyil family. Bashir tried to improve his ugly image by joining the six-member Committee of Public Safety presided over by former President Elias Sarkis, which was nothing but an American-Israeli bridge borrowed by the Phalangists in order to control the oppressed. Our people could not tolerate humiliation any more. It destroyed the oppressors, the invaders and their lackeys. But the US persisted in its folly and installed Amin Jumayyil to replace his brother. Some of his first so called achievements were to destroy the homes of refugees and other displaced persons, attack mosques, and order the army to bombard the southern suburbs of Beirut, where the oppressed people resided. He invited European troops to help him against us and signed the May 17th, [1984] accord with Israel making Lebanon an American protectorate.
Our people could not bear any more treachery. It decided to oppose infidelity - be it French, American or Israeli - by striking at their headquarters and launching a veritable war of resistance against the Occupation forces. Finally, the enemy had to decide to retreat by stages.
Our Objectives
Let us put it truthfully: the sons of Hizhallah know who are their major enemies in the Middle East - the Phalanges, Israel, France and the US. The sons of our umma are now in a state of growing confrontation with them, and will remain so until the realization of the following three objectives:
(a) to expel the Americans. the French and their allies definitely from Lebanon, putting an end to any colonialist entity on our land;
(b) to submit the Phalanges to a just power and bring them all to justice for the crimes they have perpetrated against Muslims and Christians;
(c) to permit all the sons of our people to determine their future and to choose in all the liberty the form of government they desire. We call upon all of them to pick the option of Islamic government which, alone, is capable of guaranteeing justice and liberty for all. Only an Islamic regime can stop any further tentative attempts of imperialistic infiltration into our country.
These are Lebanon's objectives; those are its enemies. As for our friends, they are all the world's oppressed peoples. Our friends are also those who combat our enemies and who defend us from their evil. Towards these friends, individuals as well as organizations, we turn and say:
Friends, wherever you are in Lebanon... we are in agreement with you on the great and necessary objectives: destroying American hegemony in our land; putting an end to the burdensome Israeli Occupation; beating back all the Phalangists' attempts to monopolize power and administration.
Even though we have, friends, quite different viewpoints as to the means of the struggle, on the levels upon which it must be carried out, we should surmount these tiny divergencies and consolidate cooperation between us in view of the grand design.
We are an umma which adheres to the message of Islam. We want all the oppressed to be able to study the divine message in order to bring justice, peace and tranquillity to the world. This is why we don't want to impose Islam upon anybody, as much as we that others impose upon us their convictions and their political systems. We don't want Islam to reign in Lebanon by force as is the case with the Maronites today. This is the minimum that we can accept in order to be able to accede by legal means to realize our ambitions, to save Lebanon from its dependence upon East and West, to put an end to foreign occupation and to adopt a regime freely wanted by the people of Lebanon.
This is our perception of the present state of affairs. This is the Lebanon we envision. In the light of our conceptions, our opposition to the present system is the function of two factors; (1) the present regime is the product of an arrogance so unjust that no reform or modification can remedy it. It should be changed radically, and (2) World Imperialism which is hostile to Islam.
We consider that all opposition in Lebanon voiced in the name of reform can only profit, ultimately, the present system. All such opposition which operates within the framework of the conservation and safeguarding of the present constitution without demanding changes at the level of the very foundation of the regime is, hence, an opposition of pure formality which cannot satisfy the interests of the oppressed masses. Likewise, any opposition which confronts the present regime but within the limits fixed by it, is an illusory opposition which renders a great service to the Jumayyil system. Moreover, we cannot be concerned by any proposition of political reform which accepts the rotten system actually in effect. We could not care less about the creation of this or that governmental coalition or about the participation of this or that political personality in some ministerial post, which is but a part of this unjust regime.
The politics followed by the chiefs of political Maronism through the 'Lebanese Front' and the 'Lebanese Forces' cannot guarantee peace and tranquillity for the Christians of Lebanon, whereas it is predicated upon 'asabiyya (narrow-minded particularism), on confessional privileges and on the alliance with colonialism. The Lebanese crisis has proven that confessional privileges are one of the principal causes of the great explosion which ravaged the country. It also proved that outside help was of no use to the Christians of Lebanon, just when they need it most. The bell tolled for the fanatic Christians to rid themselves of denominational allegiance and of illusion deriving from the monopolization of privileges to the detriment of other communities. The Christians should answer the appeal from heaven and have recourse to reason instead of arms, to persuasion instead of confessionalism.
To the Christians
If you, Christians, cannot tolerate that Muslims share with you certain domains of government, Allah has also made it intolerable for Muslims to participate in an unjust regime, unjust for you and for us, in a regime which is not predicated upon the prescriptions (ahkam) of religion and upon the basis of the Law (the Shari’a) as laid down by Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets. If you search for justice, who is more just than Allah? It is He who sent down from the sky the message of Islam through his successive prophets in order that they judge the people and give everyone his rights. If you were deceived and misled into believing that we anticipate vengeance against you - your fears are unjustified. For those of you who are peaceful, continue to live in our midst without anybody even thinking to trouble you.
We don't wish you evil. We call upon you to embrace Islam so that you can be happy in this world and the next. If you refuse to adhere to Islam, maintain your ties with the Muslims and don't take part in any activity against them. Free yourselves from the consequences of hateful confessionalism. Banish from your hearts all fanaticism and parochialism. Open your hearts to our Call (da'wa) which we address to you. Open yourselves up to Islam where you'll find salvation and happiness upon earth and in the hereafter. We extend this invitation also to all the oppressed among the non-Muslims. As for those who belong to Islam only formally, we exhort them to adhere to Islam in religious practice and to renounce all fanaticisms which are rejected by our religion.
World Scene
We reject both the USSR and the US, both Capitalism and Communism, for both are incapable of laying the foundations for a just society.
With special vehemence we reject UNIFIL as they were sent by world arrogance to occupy areas evacuated by Israel and serve for the latter as a buffer zone. They should be treated much like the Zionists. All should know that the goals of the Phalangists regime do not carry any weight with the Combatants of the Holy War, i.e., the Islamic resistance. This is the quagmire which awaits all foreign intervention.
There, then, are our conceptions and our objectives which serve as our basis and inspire our march. Those who accept them should know that all rights belong to Allah and He bestows them. Those who reject them, we'll be patient with them, till Allah decides between us and the people of injustice.
The Necessity for the Destruction of Israel
We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world. It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve. This enemy is the greatest danger to our future generations and to the destiny of our lands, particularly as it glorifies the ideas of settlement and expansion, initiated in Palestine, and yearning outward to the extension of the Great Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile.
Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.
We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, and regard all negotiators as enemies, for the reason that such negotiation is nothing but the recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Therefore we oppose and reject the Camp David Agreements, the proposals of King Fahd, the Fez and Reagan plan, Brezhnev's and the French-Egyptian proposals, and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity.
-----------
published in The Jerusalem Quarterly, number Forty-Eight, Fall 1988
This is a slightly abridged translation of "Nass al-Risala al-Maftuha allati wajahaha Hizballah ila-l-Mustad'afin fi Lubnan wa-l-Alam", published February 16, 1985 in al-Safir (Beirut), and also in a separate brochure. It carries the unmistakable imprint of Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the Hizballah mentor, and is inspired by his book Ma'maal-Quwma fi-l-Islam (Beirut 1979). See also his article in al-Muntalak (Beirut), October 1986.
The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (ie Hamas)
18 August 1988
This one is too long to quote extensively, but do a text search for "jew" - it's worth it. Here's my fave para:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."
-----------------
An Open Letter
The Hizballah Program
Our Identity
We are often asked: Who are we, the Hizballah, and what is our identity? We are the sons of the umma (Muslim community) - the party of God (Hizb Allah) the vanguard of which was made victorious by God in Iran. There the vanguard succeeded to lay down the bases of a Muslim state which plays a central role in the world. We obey the orders of one leader, wise and just, that of our tutor and faqih (jurist) who fulfills all the necessary conditions: Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini. God save him!
By virtue of the above, we do not constitute an organized and closed party in Lebanon. nor are we a tight political cadre. We are an umma linked to the Muslims of the whole world by the solid doctrinal and religious connection of Islam, whose message God wanted to be fulfilled by the Seal of the Prophets, i.e., Muhammad. This is why whatever touches or strikes the Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines and elsewhere reverberates throughout the whole Muslim umma of which we are an integral part. Our behavior is dictated to us by legal principles laid down by the light of an overall political conception defined by the leading jurist (wilayat al-faqih).
As for our culture, it is based on the Holy Koran, the Sunna and the legal rulings of the faqih who is our source of imitation (marja' al-taqlid). Our culture is crystal clear. It is not complicated and is accessible to all.
No one can imagine the importance of our military potential as our military apparatus is not separate from our overall social fabric. Each of us is a fighting soldier. And when it becomes necessary to carry out the Holy War, each of us takes up his assignment in the fight in accordance with the injunctions of the Law, and that in the framework of the mission carried out under the tutelage of the Commanding Jurist.
Our Fight
The US has tried, through its local agents, to persuade the people that those who crushed their arrogance in Lebanon and frustrated their conspiracy against the oppressed (mustad'afin) were nothing but a bunch of fanatic terrorists whose sole aim is to dynamite bars and destroy slot machines. Such suggestions cannot and will not mislead our umma, for the whole world knows that whoever wishes to oppose the US, that arrogant superpower, cannot indulge in marginal acts which may make it deviate from its major objective. We combat abomination and we shall tear out its very roots, its primary roots, which are the US. All attempts made to drive us into marginal actions will fail, especially as our determination to fight the US is solid.
We declare openly and loudly that we are an umma which fears God only and is by no means ready to tolerate injustice, aggression and humiliation. America, its Atlantic Pact allies, and the Zionist entity in the holy land of Palestine, attacked us and continue to do so without respite. Their aim is to make us eat dust continually. This is why we are, more and more, in a state of permanent alert in order to repel aggression and defend our religion, our existence, our dignity. They invaded our country, destroyed our villages, slit the throats of our children, violated our sanctuaries and appointed masters over our people who committed the worst massacres against our umma. They do not cease to give support to these allies of Israel, and do not enable us to decide our future according to our own wishes.
In a single night the Israelis and the Phalangists executed thousands of our sons, women and children in Sabra and Shatilla. No international organization protested or denounced this ferocious massacre in an effective manner, a massacre perpetrated with the tacit accord of America's European allies, which had retreated a few days, maybe even a few hours earlier, from the Palestinian camps. The Lebanese defeatists accepted putting the camps under the protection of that crafty fox, the US envoy Philip Habib.
We have no alternative but to confront aggression by sacrifice. The coordination between the Phalangists and Israel continues and develops. A hundred thousand victims - this is the approximate balance sheet of crimes committed by them and by the US against us. Almost half a million Muslims were forced to leave their homes. Their quarters were virtually totally destroyed in Nab'a, my own Beirut suburb, as well as in Burj Hammud, Dekonaneh, Tel Zaatar, Sinbay, Ghawarina and Jubeil - all in areas controlled today by the 'Lebanese Forces',. The Zionist occupation then launched its usurpatory invasion of Lebanon in full and open collusion with the Phalanges. The latter condemned all attempts to resist the invading forces. They participated in the implementation of certain Israeli plans in order to accomplish its Lebanese dream and acceded to all Israeli requests in order to gain power.
And this is, in fact, what happened. Bashir Jumayyil, that butcher, seized power with the help also of OPEC countries and the Jumayyil family. Bashir tried to improve his ugly image by joining the six-member Committee of Public Safety presided over by former President Elias Sarkis, which was nothing but an American-Israeli bridge borrowed by the Phalangists in order to control the oppressed. Our people could not tolerate humiliation any more. It destroyed the oppressors, the invaders and their lackeys. But the US persisted in its folly and installed Amin Jumayyil to replace his brother. Some of his first so called achievements were to destroy the homes of refugees and other displaced persons, attack mosques, and order the army to bombard the southern suburbs of Beirut, where the oppressed people resided. He invited European troops to help him against us and signed the May 17th, [1984] accord with Israel making Lebanon an American protectorate.
Our people could not bear any more treachery. It decided to oppose infidelity - be it French, American or Israeli - by striking at their headquarters and launching a veritable war of resistance against the Occupation forces. Finally, the enemy had to decide to retreat by stages.
Our Objectives
Let us put it truthfully: the sons of Hizhallah know who are their major enemies in the Middle East - the Phalanges, Israel, France and the US. The sons of our umma are now in a state of growing confrontation with them, and will remain so until the realization of the following three objectives:
(a) to expel the Americans. the French and their allies definitely from Lebanon, putting an end to any colonialist entity on our land;
(b) to submit the Phalanges to a just power and bring them all to justice for the crimes they have perpetrated against Muslims and Christians;
(c) to permit all the sons of our people to determine their future and to choose in all the liberty the form of government they desire. We call upon all of them to pick the option of Islamic government which, alone, is capable of guaranteeing justice and liberty for all. Only an Islamic regime can stop any further tentative attempts of imperialistic infiltration into our country.
These are Lebanon's objectives; those are its enemies. As for our friends, they are all the world's oppressed peoples. Our friends are also those who combat our enemies and who defend us from their evil. Towards these friends, individuals as well as organizations, we turn and say:
Friends, wherever you are in Lebanon... we are in agreement with you on the great and necessary objectives: destroying American hegemony in our land; putting an end to the burdensome Israeli Occupation; beating back all the Phalangists' attempts to monopolize power and administration.
Even though we have, friends, quite different viewpoints as to the means of the struggle, on the levels upon which it must be carried out, we should surmount these tiny divergencies and consolidate cooperation between us in view of the grand design.
We are an umma which adheres to the message of Islam. We want all the oppressed to be able to study the divine message in order to bring justice, peace and tranquillity to the world. This is why we don't want to impose Islam upon anybody, as much as we that others impose upon us their convictions and their political systems. We don't want Islam to reign in Lebanon by force as is the case with the Maronites today. This is the minimum that we can accept in order to be able to accede by legal means to realize our ambitions, to save Lebanon from its dependence upon East and West, to put an end to foreign occupation and to adopt a regime freely wanted by the people of Lebanon.
This is our perception of the present state of affairs. This is the Lebanon we envision. In the light of our conceptions, our opposition to the present system is the function of two factors; (1) the present regime is the product of an arrogance so unjust that no reform or modification can remedy it. It should be changed radically, and (2) World Imperialism which is hostile to Islam.
We consider that all opposition in Lebanon voiced in the name of reform can only profit, ultimately, the present system. All such opposition which operates within the framework of the conservation and safeguarding of the present constitution without demanding changes at the level of the very foundation of the regime is, hence, an opposition of pure formality which cannot satisfy the interests of the oppressed masses. Likewise, any opposition which confronts the present regime but within the limits fixed by it, is an illusory opposition which renders a great service to the Jumayyil system. Moreover, we cannot be concerned by any proposition of political reform which accepts the rotten system actually in effect. We could not care less about the creation of this or that governmental coalition or about the participation of this or that political personality in some ministerial post, which is but a part of this unjust regime.
The politics followed by the chiefs of political Maronism through the 'Lebanese Front' and the 'Lebanese Forces' cannot guarantee peace and tranquillity for the Christians of Lebanon, whereas it is predicated upon 'asabiyya (narrow-minded particularism), on confessional privileges and on the alliance with colonialism. The Lebanese crisis has proven that confessional privileges are one of the principal causes of the great explosion which ravaged the country. It also proved that outside help was of no use to the Christians of Lebanon, just when they need it most. The bell tolled for the fanatic Christians to rid themselves of denominational allegiance and of illusion deriving from the monopolization of privileges to the detriment of other communities. The Christians should answer the appeal from heaven and have recourse to reason instead of arms, to persuasion instead of confessionalism.
To the Christians
If you, Christians, cannot tolerate that Muslims share with you certain domains of government, Allah has also made it intolerable for Muslims to participate in an unjust regime, unjust for you and for us, in a regime which is not predicated upon the prescriptions (ahkam) of religion and upon the basis of the Law (the Shari’a) as laid down by Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets. If you search for justice, who is more just than Allah? It is He who sent down from the sky the message of Islam through his successive prophets in order that they judge the people and give everyone his rights. If you were deceived and misled into believing that we anticipate vengeance against you - your fears are unjustified. For those of you who are peaceful, continue to live in our midst without anybody even thinking to trouble you.
We don't wish you evil. We call upon you to embrace Islam so that you can be happy in this world and the next. If you refuse to adhere to Islam, maintain your ties with the Muslims and don't take part in any activity against them. Free yourselves from the consequences of hateful confessionalism. Banish from your hearts all fanaticism and parochialism. Open your hearts to our Call (da'wa) which we address to you. Open yourselves up to Islam where you'll find salvation and happiness upon earth and in the hereafter. We extend this invitation also to all the oppressed among the non-Muslims. As for those who belong to Islam only formally, we exhort them to adhere to Islam in religious practice and to renounce all fanaticisms which are rejected by our religion.
World Scene
We reject both the USSR and the US, both Capitalism and Communism, for both are incapable of laying the foundations for a just society.
With special vehemence we reject UNIFIL as they were sent by world arrogance to occupy areas evacuated by Israel and serve for the latter as a buffer zone. They should be treated much like the Zionists. All should know that the goals of the Phalangists regime do not carry any weight with the Combatants of the Holy War, i.e., the Islamic resistance. This is the quagmire which awaits all foreign intervention.
There, then, are our conceptions and our objectives which serve as our basis and inspire our march. Those who accept them should know that all rights belong to Allah and He bestows them. Those who reject them, we'll be patient with them, till Allah decides between us and the people of injustice.
The Necessity for the Destruction of Israel
We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world. It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve. This enemy is the greatest danger to our future generations and to the destiny of our lands, particularly as it glorifies the ideas of settlement and expansion, initiated in Palestine, and yearning outward to the extension of the Great Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile.
Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.
We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, and regard all negotiators as enemies, for the reason that such negotiation is nothing but the recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Therefore we oppose and reject the Camp David Agreements, the proposals of King Fahd, the Fez and Reagan plan, Brezhnev's and the French-Egyptian proposals, and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity.
-----------
published in The Jerusalem Quarterly, number Forty-Eight, Fall 1988
This is a slightly abridged translation of "Nass al-Risala al-Maftuha allati wajahaha Hizballah ila-l-Mustad'afin fi Lubnan wa-l-Alam", published February 16, 1985 in al-Safir (Beirut), and also in a separate brochure. It carries the unmistakable imprint of Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the Hizballah mentor, and is inspired by his book Ma'maal-Quwma fi-l-Islam (Beirut 1979). See also his article in al-Muntalak (Beirut), October 1986.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Jimmy Carters' book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid"
Jimmy Carter has written a book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid", that seems to be the worst sort of Socialist Worker "we are all Hizbollah now" drivel, riven with factual errors, reinforcing anti-semitic stereotypes of Jewish control of the media, and written by a man whose own Carter Center receives massive donations from the Arab world. Too much to quote, go read, starting with the excellent-as-ever Dershowitz.
Has Carter crossed the line?
Dec. 21, 2006 9:19
Alan Dershowitz
Ex-President for Sale
by Alan M. Dershowitz
January 08, 2007
About the Carter Center's Arab funding
Jimmy Carter and the Arab Lobby
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com
December 18, 2006
Clinton's Middle East envoy reveals how Carter misprepresents the Camp David talks
Don't Play With Maps
Dennis Ross
9/1/07
--------------------
Actually I'll just permit myself one interesting quote from the first Dershowitz article that has a more general application than the narrow discussion of Carter's book. I've read the book it's from and recommend it:
In my book, The Case for Peace, I argued that criticism of Israel - even unfair and strident criticism - should not be equated with anti-Semitism. I went on to list a series of criteria for determining whether the line had been crossed into the abyss of anti-Semitism. Among these criticisms are:
* Employing stereotypes against Israel that have traditionally been directed against "the Jews."
* Characterizing Israel as "the worst," when it is clear that this is not an accurate comparative assessment.
* Singling out only Israel for sanctions for policies that are widespread among other nations, or demanding that Jews be better or more moral than others because of their history as victims.
* Emphasizing and stereotyping certain characteristics among supporters of Israel that have traditionally been used in anti-Semitic attacks, for example, "pushy" American Jews, Jews "who control the media" and Jews "who control financial markets."
* Accusing Jews and only Jews of having dual loyalty.
* Blaming Israel for the problems of the world and exaggerating the influence of the Jewish state on world affairs.
* Falsely claiming that all legitimate criticism of Israeli policies is immediately and widely condemned by Jewish leaders as anti-Semitic, despite any evidence to support this accusation.
* Seeking to delegitimate Israel precisely as it moves toward peace.
* Circulating wild charges against Israel and Jews.
Has Carter crossed the line?
Dec. 21, 2006 9:19
Alan Dershowitz
Ex-President for Sale
by Alan M. Dershowitz
January 08, 2007
About the Carter Center's Arab funding
Jimmy Carter and the Arab Lobby
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com
December 18, 2006
Clinton's Middle East envoy reveals how Carter misprepresents the Camp David talks
Don't Play With Maps
Dennis Ross
9/1/07
--------------------
Actually I'll just permit myself one interesting quote from the first Dershowitz article that has a more general application than the narrow discussion of Carter's book. I've read the book it's from and recommend it:
In my book, The Case for Peace, I argued that criticism of Israel - even unfair and strident criticism - should not be equated with anti-Semitism. I went on to list a series of criteria for determining whether the line had been crossed into the abyss of anti-Semitism. Among these criticisms are:
* Employing stereotypes against Israel that have traditionally been directed against "the Jews."
* Characterizing Israel as "the worst," when it is clear that this is not an accurate comparative assessment.
* Singling out only Israel for sanctions for policies that are widespread among other nations, or demanding that Jews be better or more moral than others because of their history as victims.
* Emphasizing and stereotyping certain characteristics among supporters of Israel that have traditionally been used in anti-Semitic attacks, for example, "pushy" American Jews, Jews "who control the media" and Jews "who control financial markets."
* Accusing Jews and only Jews of having dual loyalty.
* Blaming Israel for the problems of the world and exaggerating the influence of the Jewish state on world affairs.
* Falsely claiming that all legitimate criticism of Israeli policies is immediately and widely condemned by Jewish leaders as anti-Semitic, despite any evidence to support this accusation.
* Seeking to delegitimate Israel precisely as it moves toward peace.
* Circulating wild charges against Israel and Jews.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Sex Education
A shocking story reaches us from the USA about a young, female, (and pretty hot) teacher who had sex with her underage student. Disgusting obviously, luckily nothing like that ever happened to me at school!
Read the full account (with photos and video) here.
Read the full account (with photos and video) here.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Iranians back Taliban in Afghanistan
So the Iranians are backing the Taliban in Afghanistan and nobody wants to acknowledge it. The West really *is* committing suicide.
War on two fronts in Afghanistan
By Con Coughlin
22/12/2006
Just when it seemed matters could not get any worse in Afghanistan, along comes an altogether more alarming threat to Nato's attempts to restore order to that strife-torn region — in the form of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
Ever since the US-led coalition overthrew the Taliban and their al-Qa'eda allies in late 2001, it has been assumed that the biggest threat to the successful restoration of Afghanistan as a functioning state was posed by the surviving remnants of the former regime and their sponsors in Pakistan.
Indeed, the main thrust of last summer's Nato offensive was concentrated along the Pakistani border, where a hard core of about 1,000 Taliban fighters have been attempting to re-establish a power base that could be used for an attempt to seize Kabul.
The British Army — which is in the vanguard of Nato's efforts to control the south — fought the fiercest engagements it has encountered since the Second World War in its campaign to subjugate the Taliban, and has been, in the main, successful in defeating a determined enemy.
The entire Nato effort in Afghanistan, moreover, has been predicated on the assumption that the key to success lies in suppressing the Taliban resurgence in the south, and persuading the Pakistanis to take effective action to dismantle the Taliban's training infrastructure in its lawless North-West Frontier provinces.
At no point have Nato's planners paid any serious attention to the other country whose border stretches for hundreds of miles along Afghanistan's western border, even though Iran's visceral hostility to the presence of a massive Western force so close to home is hardly a secret. This is despite the fact that the Iranians have actively supported, equipped and trained the insurgent groups that have caused coalition forces so much discomfort in southern Iraq.
But whenever I have raised the issue of Iranian involvement in Afghanistan on my visits to Nato headquarters over the past year, I have invariably been greeted with either blank stares or an eagerness on the part of senior commanders to move quickly to another, more amenable topic of conversation.
That state of affairs is unlikely to persist following the appearance in court earlier this week of a top British military aide on spying charges. Cpl Daniel James, who acted as the official translator for Lt-Gen David Richards, the British commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, has been charged with "prejudicing the safety of the state" by passing information "calculated to be directly or indirectly useful to the enemy" to a foreign power, whose identity sources have suggested is Iran.
Irrespective of the outcome of the James case, the mere suggestion that Iran should be seeking to recruit someone with access to the innermost counsels of Nato's high command is indicative both of Teheran's intense interest in Nato's activities in Afghanistan, and its determination to ensure that the West is not allowed to succeed in transforming the country from Islamic dictatorship into stable democracy.
It also makes a mockery of the recent suggestion, advanced in both Washington and London, that the only way to resolve the region's difficulties is by engaging in a constructive dialogue with Teheran. Whether it be in Iraq or Afghanistan, the over-riding priority of the regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is to ensure the coalition's efforts at nation-building end in failure.
As in Iraq, the history of Iran's involvement in Afghanistan has been complex, but rarely benign. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the Iranians supported one of the fiercest Mujahideen groups. More recently, the Iranians helped hundreds of al-Qa'eda fighters to escape from Afghanistan following the coalition's military campaign to remove the Taliban from power in 2001. Recent intelligence reports have indicated that many senior al-Qa'eda leaders — including two of Osama bin Laden's sons — are still living in Teheran under the protection of the Revolutionary Guards, where they are being groomed for a possible takeover of the al-Qa'eda leadership.
Nor is Iran's involvement in the region confined to Afghanistan. The Iranians also have close links with Pakistan, where they have been identified as one of the countries that bought blueprints for making nuclear weapons from A. Q. Khan, the so-called "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.
Given the extent of Iran's interests in the region, it might appear strange that Nato commanders have appeared reluctant even to discuss the possibility that the Iranians might have their own agenda in upsetting coalition attempts to establish an effective government, particularly when commanders in Iraq have been frank in blaming the Iranians for helping to orchestrate the roadside bombs that have killed and maimed so many soldiers.
The reason for this apparent reticence on the part of Nato commanders is that, given the limited resources at their disposal, they have a big enough challenge dealing with the threat posed by the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, without running the risk of extending their field of operations elsewhere. But all that might soon change if, as some intelligence reports suggest, concrete evidence emerges that Iran is actively supporting and providing equipment to Taliban-related groups fighting Nato forces in Afghanistan.
"The Iranians are playing a very clever game in Afghanistan," a Western intelligence official based in Kabul recently told me. "On the surface, they give the impression they have no interest in what is going on, but behind the scenes they are working hard to influence groups such as the Taliban who are causing Nato the most problems."
Which would explain why the heavily fortified Iranian embassy in central Kabul, which is located less than a mile from the British mission, is second in size only to that of the sprawling American embassy.
If, as now seems likely, the Iranians are to become serious players in the new Great Game taking place in Afghanistan, then it is essential that Nato be given sufficient numbers of combat troops to ensure that the hazardous mission it has been asked to undertake ultimately ends in victory.
War on two fronts in Afghanistan
By Con Coughlin
22/12/2006
Just when it seemed matters could not get any worse in Afghanistan, along comes an altogether more alarming threat to Nato's attempts to restore order to that strife-torn region — in the form of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
Ever since the US-led coalition overthrew the Taliban and their al-Qa'eda allies in late 2001, it has been assumed that the biggest threat to the successful restoration of Afghanistan as a functioning state was posed by the surviving remnants of the former regime and their sponsors in Pakistan.
Indeed, the main thrust of last summer's Nato offensive was concentrated along the Pakistani border, where a hard core of about 1,000 Taliban fighters have been attempting to re-establish a power base that could be used for an attempt to seize Kabul.
The British Army — which is in the vanguard of Nato's efforts to control the south — fought the fiercest engagements it has encountered since the Second World War in its campaign to subjugate the Taliban, and has been, in the main, successful in defeating a determined enemy.
The entire Nato effort in Afghanistan, moreover, has been predicated on the assumption that the key to success lies in suppressing the Taliban resurgence in the south, and persuading the Pakistanis to take effective action to dismantle the Taliban's training infrastructure in its lawless North-West Frontier provinces.
At no point have Nato's planners paid any serious attention to the other country whose border stretches for hundreds of miles along Afghanistan's western border, even though Iran's visceral hostility to the presence of a massive Western force so close to home is hardly a secret. This is despite the fact that the Iranians have actively supported, equipped and trained the insurgent groups that have caused coalition forces so much discomfort in southern Iraq.
But whenever I have raised the issue of Iranian involvement in Afghanistan on my visits to Nato headquarters over the past year, I have invariably been greeted with either blank stares or an eagerness on the part of senior commanders to move quickly to another, more amenable topic of conversation.
That state of affairs is unlikely to persist following the appearance in court earlier this week of a top British military aide on spying charges. Cpl Daniel James, who acted as the official translator for Lt-Gen David Richards, the British commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, has been charged with "prejudicing the safety of the state" by passing information "calculated to be directly or indirectly useful to the enemy" to a foreign power, whose identity sources have suggested is Iran.
Irrespective of the outcome of the James case, the mere suggestion that Iran should be seeking to recruit someone with access to the innermost counsels of Nato's high command is indicative both of Teheran's intense interest in Nato's activities in Afghanistan, and its determination to ensure that the West is not allowed to succeed in transforming the country from Islamic dictatorship into stable democracy.
It also makes a mockery of the recent suggestion, advanced in both Washington and London, that the only way to resolve the region's difficulties is by engaging in a constructive dialogue with Teheran. Whether it be in Iraq or Afghanistan, the over-riding priority of the regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is to ensure the coalition's efforts at nation-building end in failure.
As in Iraq, the history of Iran's involvement in Afghanistan has been complex, but rarely benign. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the Iranians supported one of the fiercest Mujahideen groups. More recently, the Iranians helped hundreds of al-Qa'eda fighters to escape from Afghanistan following the coalition's military campaign to remove the Taliban from power in 2001. Recent intelligence reports have indicated that many senior al-Qa'eda leaders — including two of Osama bin Laden's sons — are still living in Teheran under the protection of the Revolutionary Guards, where they are being groomed for a possible takeover of the al-Qa'eda leadership.
Nor is Iran's involvement in the region confined to Afghanistan. The Iranians also have close links with Pakistan, where they have been identified as one of the countries that bought blueprints for making nuclear weapons from A. Q. Khan, the so-called "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.
Given the extent of Iran's interests in the region, it might appear strange that Nato commanders have appeared reluctant even to discuss the possibility that the Iranians might have their own agenda in upsetting coalition attempts to establish an effective government, particularly when commanders in Iraq have been frank in blaming the Iranians for helping to orchestrate the roadside bombs that have killed and maimed so many soldiers.
The reason for this apparent reticence on the part of Nato commanders is that, given the limited resources at their disposal, they have a big enough challenge dealing with the threat posed by the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, without running the risk of extending their field of operations elsewhere. But all that might soon change if, as some intelligence reports suggest, concrete evidence emerges that Iran is actively supporting and providing equipment to Taliban-related groups fighting Nato forces in Afghanistan.
"The Iranians are playing a very clever game in Afghanistan," a Western intelligence official based in Kabul recently told me. "On the surface, they give the impression they have no interest in what is going on, but behind the scenes they are working hard to influence groups such as the Taliban who are causing Nato the most problems."
Which would explain why the heavily fortified Iranian embassy in central Kabul, which is located less than a mile from the British mission, is second in size only to that of the sprawling American embassy.
If, as now seems likely, the Iranians are to become serious players in the new Great Game taking place in Afghanistan, then it is essential that Nato be given sufficient numbers of combat troops to ensure that the hazardous mission it has been asked to undertake ultimately ends in victory.
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