I had never heard of the Hasidic pilgrimage to Usan in the Ukraine, the "Hasidic Mecca", before reading this article, and it's a fascinating topic. But over & above that, this is a truly magnificent bit of writing.
The Hasidim travel to the burial site of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, who in the hours before he stopped breathing, shouted in the presence of two witnesses that if when the Moon says it is Jewish New Year, a man should come to his grave in Uman and repent, he, Nachman, would pull him out of Hell by his sidelocks..
Intense religious madness. Read & enjoy.
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On Pilgrimage with the Hasids
Ben Judah
Standpoint Mag October 2013
...
In death the Rabbi was a tragic figure. Blinking out of a broken body, he saw his minions dancing around him. Nachman believed he had the soul of the Messiah. But he had achieved for his people — both socially and politically — precisely nothing.
He left behind obsessive writings about the dangers of masturbation, but also fables so enchanting when read in lilting Yiddish they can even induce a state of trance. He left the cryptic, frightening idea that we live in the universe of an "absent God". Nachman's writings are so fresh, yet so obscure. Read in a certain light, it would seem the Rabbi died knowing that the innermost secret of the mystical Kabbalah was that there is no God at all — he is merely what they call a "social construct", that God must constantly be created through chanted confessions and ecstatic prayer.
But then, read from another direction, his texts read like the ramblings of a medieval madman who believed he was the reincarnation of Moses, who lay sobbing, banging on the tomb of his great-grandfather in Medzhybizh, the holiest tzaddik of all, the Baal Shem Tov, demanding he reveal himself and all the secrets.
It doesn't even matter who the Rabbi really was. What matters is that in the hours before he stopped breathing, he shouted in the presence of two witnesses that if when the Moon says it is Jewish New Year, a man should come to his grave in Uman and repent, he, Nachman, would pull him out of Hell by his sidelocks.
What matters is that Hasidic Jews never stopped coming on that day to Uman. Hasids are the mystical Amish of Judaism. They go to extreme lengths to live the Torah's 613 commandments. Hasids still follow dynasties founded by charismatic Eastern European rabbis whose descendants guard specific traditions. Nachman's Hasids are different. They have no dynasty. Their tradition is coming to Uman.
Lenin sealed the city to foreigners in 1917; Hasids smuggled themselves in. The NKVD political police banned them; Hasids refused to listen. NKVD commissars were not used to being ignored. So in 1934 its agents laid a trap. They granted Hasids 34 visas. They killed half of them on the spot; the rest were deported to Siberia.
But Stalin could not stop them. Hasids kept smuggling themselves into Uman. Then Hitler invaded in 1941. The 20,000 Jews of Uman were drowned in the lake under the Rabbi's tomb. This did not stop the Hasids. Rabbis crept in incognito. Soviet refusenik Jews systematically aided the secret pilgrims coming every year. Gorbachev reopened Uman in 1988.
Uman is a Hasidic magnet. When Ukraine first reopened, 250 made the pilgrimage to the Rebbe's tomb. By the late 1990s, more than 5,000 were making the trip. Now almost 30,000 pilgrims come every New Year. Since Ukrainian independence 400,000 single pilgrimages to Uman have taken place. This has made Nachman's tomb Europe's largest — and only — Jewish mass pilgrimage. I had to see it for myself.
...
I woke up to the sound of bugling rams' horns. These were hundreds of ritual shofars, blown by Jews since they were Mesopotamian nomads. The Talmudist stopped chanting. He sighed: "Everybody is tripping the fuck out."
I closed the door. Electricity was dead in the stairwell. The stairs had turned into a health hazard. Hasids were leaving litter everywhere, from food packaging to popped juice cartons. Little boys etched Stars of David into the wall, blind to the Russian message scratched above them: "When You Litter Our Home Don't Forget To Honk, Piggies."
I was shocked to see Jews — whom I knew as lovers of degrees and certificates, accountancy courses and MBAs — rejecting every piece of modernity. I had always thought Jews a people who would do almost anything to send their daughters to Harvard. These men would disown their sons for wanting a degree.
Nightfall in Uman. The orange glow around the street lamps was brought out by the drizzle. I stumbled, psychologically. Uman hit hard, like time travel. The Yiddish child-beggars darting around my legs. The white-haired and wild-eyed Kabbalists mumbling magic incantations as they shuffled to the synagogue. The wild, rippling excitement filling the hour before Rosh Hashanah — our New Year.
The walls were plastered with Hebrew posters and Yiddish notices in the antique script that Babylonian rabbis called "the alphabet of flames". Fools hawked madman's literature on street corners while tubby rabbis threw out cartons of chocolate bread for the poor.
The hour was coming. I felt tingly and I felt lost. Under the bare bulbs of a makeshift prayer house I tried to ask what texts were being whispered. "Yiddish, Yiddish . . . Speak no Yiddish?" I shook my head. They shook theirs back in disgust. For a calming half-second I thought I had found another rationalist. Samuel was a watch salesman from Florida wearing cryptic Levantine amulets. His beard was a ketchup red. He stank of weed. But he gasped: "Uman is a taste of Messiah."
I tried to talk to a portly Hasid with a skin disease about his utter rejection of modernity but all he wanted to talk about was the exchange rate. I strode, sweating and confused, towards a stream. Hundreds of tents crammed its edge like a Jewish refugee camp. Someone tugged at my jacket pocket. It was a child, visibly disturbed. He wore a white dressing-gown. He shrieked: "Are you . . . Jewish? Are you . . . Jewish?"
I nodded.
"Can you . . . kick me in the stomach! I want to fight . . . Karate!"
Ringing laughter rushed past me. Little boys with shaved heads and shoulder-length blonde sidelocks raced their fathers to the synagogue. I struck up conversation with two Yiddish-speaking hoodies from Brooklyn's most fanatical enclave, the dominant one comically thin, his friend grotesquely overweight. They let me in on the subtext in exchange for a promise to help them track down 60 cartons of Marlboro Lights.
"This whole fucking thing is the most fun a Hasid gets all year. It's the furthest he gets from his wife he was forced to marry at 18. It's the furthest he gets out from his community. It's the furthest we get from our moms." The fat one butted in. "Is this what a festival is like?"
They swore me to anonymity before a Canadian neurologist engaged me. Between answering calls from his clinic in Toronto he made it clear it was time I faced up to "the Rebbe". We passed giant corrugated-steel warehouses turned into mega-synagogues lined with hundreds, thousands of plastic garden chairs laid out for pews. The three of them together, fleetingly, turned into the biggest synagogues in the world.
The neurologist was exulting: "Not since the Temple have so many Jews prayed in one place." The hour was here and he left me at the gate. Hebrew letters curled round the curved arch one must pass through to the Rebbe's tomb. Inside, the believers were speaking rapidly to each other as if the Rebbe was still alive: "The Rebbe is to the left." "The Rebbe is waiting for you." "May the Rebbe help you, my friend."
...
They began to scream — deep male, ungodly wails. Before sound left my mouth I imagined a hook inside my head and called it my reason. I pulled onto it. Screwing up my face, I tried not to let go, then ripped myself into the next room — the tomb itself.
The Sephardic wail of the silver-bearded cantor rushed through me. A hundred or more men crammed into small pews rocked back and forth. These were Aramaic prayers. I saw a man with pupils horrifically dilated. I saw a man in such ecstasy I thought he was convulsing. I saw a man collapse back, overcome, from the tomb. I saw sobbing men rip each other back by their shoulders just to touch it.
I tried to imagine who they were in their everyday lives in Baltimore or Eilat. But they had ceased to be those things. Behind the wall, behind the tomb, the men in white were thumping and wailing and howling out through the stone to the Rebbe. Howling that could wake the dead. Trance overcame me. Then the name of the Rebbe. In the enormity of that space I found inside me I named every family name for-whatever it was— to bless them. Then, red-eyed and tearful, I pulled myself outside. Terrified of collective hysteria. This was not my Judaism.
An old friend was sitting unfazed on the bench outside — a miserable and depressed sacked Russian diplomat. He liked to remind people he had "worked with the President himself", but I knew his attaché position in the Delhi embassy had mostly involved dealing with the visa problems of mad Russian Hari Krishnas refusing to leave ashrams.
"This is nothing compared to India. Very mild."
...
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
Monday, September 02, 2013
Steyn on Obama on Syria - "An Accidental War"
Excellent from Steyn. "In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy."
-----
An Accidental War
National Review
August 30, 2013
By Mark Steyn
Perfunctory and ineffectual war-making in Syria is worse than nothing.
I see the Obama “reset” is going so swimmingly that the president is now threatening to go to war against a dictator who gassed his own people. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything like the dictator who gassed his own people that the discredited warmonger Bush spent 2002 and early 2003 staggering ever more punchily around the country inveighing against. The 2003 dictator who gassed his own people was the leader of the Baath Party of Iraq. The 2013 dictator who gassed his own people is the leader of the Baath Party of Syria. Whole other ball of wax. The administration’s ingenious plan is to lose this war in far less time than we usually take. In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
...
The problem with the American way of war is that, technologically, it can’t lose, but, in every other sense, it can’t win. No one in his right mind wants to get into a tank battle or a naval bombardment with the guys responsible for over 40 percent of the planet’s military expenditures. Which is why these days there aren’t a lot of tank battles. The consummate interventionist Robert Kagan wrote in his recent book that the American military “remains unmatched.” It’s unmatched in the sense that the only guy in town with a tennis racket isn’t going to be playing a lot of tennis matches. But the object of war, in Liddell Hart’s famous distillation, is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks (or Russian helicopters) but his will. And on that front America loses, always. The “unmatched” superpower cannot impose its will on Kabul kleptocrats, Pashtun goatherds, Egyptian generals, or Benghazi militia. There is no reason to believe Syria would be an exception to this rule. America’s inability to win ought to be a burning national question, but it’s not even being asked.
Let us stipulate that many of those war-weary masses are ignorant and myopic. But at a certain level they grasp something that their leaders don’t: For a quarter-century, from Kuwait to Kosovo to Kandahar, the civilized world has gone to war only in order to save or liberate Muslims. The Pentagon is little more than central dispatch for the U.S. military’s Muslim Fast Squad. And what do we have to show for it? Liberating Syria isn’t like liberating the Netherlands: In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy. Yes, those BBC images of schoolchildren with burning flesh are heart-rending. So we’ll get rid of Assad and install the local branch of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever plucky neophyte democrat makes it to the presidential palace first — and then, instead of napalmed schoolyards, there will be, as in Egypt, burning Christian churches and women raped for going uncovered.
So what do we want in Syria? Obama can’t say, other than for him to look muscular without being mocked, like a camp bodybuilder admiring himself in the gym mirror.
Oh, well. If the British won’t be along for the ride, the French are apparently still in. What was the old gag from a decade ago during those interminable U.N. resolutions with Chirac saying “Non!” every time? Ah, yes: “Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion.” Oddly enough, the worst setback for the Islamic imperialists in recent years has been President Hollande’s intervention in Mali, where, unlike the money-no-object Pentagon, the French troops had such undernourished supply lines that they had to hitch a ride to the war on C-17 transports from the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force. And yet they won — insofar as anyone ever really wins on that benighted sod.
Meanwhile, the hyperpower is going to war because Obama wandered off prompter and accidentally made a threat. So he has to make good on it, or America will lose its credibility. But he only wants to make good on it in a perfunctory and ineffectual way. So America will lose its credibility anyway.
Maybe it’s time to learn the accordion . . .
-----
An Accidental War
National Review
August 30, 2013
By Mark Steyn
Perfunctory and ineffectual war-making in Syria is worse than nothing.
I see the Obama “reset” is going so swimmingly that the president is now threatening to go to war against a dictator who gassed his own people. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything like the dictator who gassed his own people that the discredited warmonger Bush spent 2002 and early 2003 staggering ever more punchily around the country inveighing against. The 2003 dictator who gassed his own people was the leader of the Baath Party of Iraq. The 2013 dictator who gassed his own people is the leader of the Baath Party of Syria. Whole other ball of wax. The administration’s ingenious plan is to lose this war in far less time than we usually take. In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
...
The problem with the American way of war is that, technologically, it can’t lose, but, in every other sense, it can’t win. No one in his right mind wants to get into a tank battle or a naval bombardment with the guys responsible for over 40 percent of the planet’s military expenditures. Which is why these days there aren’t a lot of tank battles. The consummate interventionist Robert Kagan wrote in his recent book that the American military “remains unmatched.” It’s unmatched in the sense that the only guy in town with a tennis racket isn’t going to be playing a lot of tennis matches. But the object of war, in Liddell Hart’s famous distillation, is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks (or Russian helicopters) but his will. And on that front America loses, always. The “unmatched” superpower cannot impose its will on Kabul kleptocrats, Pashtun goatherds, Egyptian generals, or Benghazi militia. There is no reason to believe Syria would be an exception to this rule. America’s inability to win ought to be a burning national question, but it’s not even being asked.
Let us stipulate that many of those war-weary masses are ignorant and myopic. But at a certain level they grasp something that their leaders don’t: For a quarter-century, from Kuwait to Kosovo to Kandahar, the civilized world has gone to war only in order to save or liberate Muslims. The Pentagon is little more than central dispatch for the U.S. military’s Muslim Fast Squad. And what do we have to show for it? Liberating Syria isn’t like liberating the Netherlands: In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy. Yes, those BBC images of schoolchildren with burning flesh are heart-rending. So we’ll get rid of Assad and install the local branch of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever plucky neophyte democrat makes it to the presidential palace first — and then, instead of napalmed schoolyards, there will be, as in Egypt, burning Christian churches and women raped for going uncovered.
So what do we want in Syria? Obama can’t say, other than for him to look muscular without being mocked, like a camp bodybuilder admiring himself in the gym mirror.
Oh, well. If the British won’t be along for the ride, the French are apparently still in. What was the old gag from a decade ago during those interminable U.N. resolutions with Chirac saying “Non!” every time? Ah, yes: “Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion.” Oddly enough, the worst setback for the Islamic imperialists in recent years has been President Hollande’s intervention in Mali, where, unlike the money-no-object Pentagon, the French troops had such undernourished supply lines that they had to hitch a ride to the war on C-17 transports from the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force. And yet they won — insofar as anyone ever really wins on that benighted sod.
Meanwhile, the hyperpower is going to war because Obama wandered off prompter and accidentally made a threat. So he has to make good on it, or America will lose its credibility. But he only wants to make good on it in a perfunctory and ineffectual way. So America will lose its credibility anyway.
Maybe it’s time to learn the accordion . . .
Tuesday, June 04, 2013
Riots in Turkey
Excellent.
--------------
The Good News in Turkey
by Daniel Pipes
Los Angeles Times
June 4, 2013
How to interpret the recent unrest on the streets of Istanbul and about 65 other Turkish cities? Specifically, is it comparable to the Arab uprisings over the last 2½ years in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain?
On one level, they appear unrelated, for Turkey is a far more advanced country, with a democratic culture and a modern economy. But two connections — autocracy and Syria — do tie them together, suggesting that the Turkish demonstrations could have a potentially deep importance.
The rebellion did not come out of nowhere. I was in Istanbul last fall, and it was clear then that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's dictatorial tendencies worried Turks more than his Islamic aspirations. I heard unceasing criticisms about his being "intoxicated with power," an "informal caliph" and "Turkey's elected chief social engineer."
Turks enumerated to me a lengthy list of authoritarian symptoms they suffered from the decade-long rule by Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or AKP: suppression of political criticism, crony capitalism, manipulation of the judiciary, unjust imprisonment, show trials and a disregard for the separation of powers. In particular, they evinced annoyance at the way Erdogan seeks to impose his personal tastes on the country.
The demonstrations since Friday are protesting these actions and more. What began as a localized dispute over the uprooting of a small park at Taksim Square in the heart of modern Istanbul has rapidly grown into a national statement of defiance.
Erdogan is no Moammar Kadafi or Bashar Assad, and he will not massacre peaceful demonstrators, but heavy-handed police operations have reportedly led to 2,300 injured and, according to Amnesty International, two deaths. Further, the prime minister has reacted defiantly, not just insisting on his original plan for the park but announcing he can do whatever he pleases.
Rival die-hard football fans do the unthinkable and join forces against Erdogan.
As paraphrased by Hürriyet Daily News: "A mosque will be built in Taksim, Erdogan said. He added that he did not have to take permission from the main opposition leader or a 'few marauders' for the projects, noting that the authority had already been given by people who voted for the AKP."
Erdogan is saying, in other words, that having voted the AKP into office, Turks have given him authority to do anything he wants. He is the elected, unaccountable padishah. Well, the demonstrators and those hitherto eager foreign investors have something to say about that, perhaps putting the country's China-like economic growth at risk.
Significantly, Abdullah Gül, the president of Turkey and increasingly Erdogan's rival, adopted a very different approach to the protests. "Democracy does not only mean elections," he said. "The messages delivered with good intentions have been received." By distancing himself from the prime minister, Gül exacerbated Erdogan's isolation.
As for Syria, after a charmed near-decade in power, Erdogan made his first major miscalculation by intensely involving Turkey in the Syrian civil war. He acted with pique when Assad, the Syrian despot and a onetime buddy, ignored his (sound) advice to make reforms. Not one to take well to being rebuffed, Erdogan responded emotionally and thrust his country into the civil war, hosting the rebels, provisioning and arming them and trying to guide them.
The results have been close to disastrous from Turkey's viewpoint. The country has experienced new hostilities with Moscow, Tehran and Baghdad, lost both overland trade routes to the Persian Gulf and trade with Syria, suffered terrorism on Turkish soil (in Reyhanli) and — perhaps most ominous — witnessed tensions surge between its stridently Sunni government and the country's heterodox Muslim populations.
Thanks to the Syrian imbroglio, Turkey has lost its enviable position of strength and popularity — its "zero problems with neighbors" policy that brought with it real accomplishments — in favor of a sense of being surrounded by foes. If President Obama once bragged of his "close working relationship" with Erdogan, last month's White House meeting between the two showed neither the personal chemistry nor the practical results vis-à-vis Syria that Erdogan had sought.
In short, it appears that a decade of electoral calm, political stability and plentiful foreign investment has come to a halt and a new, more difficult era has begun for the AKP government. The moribund opposition parties may find their voice. The antiwar faction may feel emboldened. The secularists may be able to tap the wide unhappiness with the regime's efforts to corral citizens into becoming more (Islamically) virtuous.
This is excellent news. Turkey has been heading in the wrong direction under the AKP. Although a democracy, the AKP government has jailed more journalists than any other state in the world. Although secular, it has with growing urgency imposed arrays of Islamist regulations, including last week's rushed limitation on alcohol as well as warnings against public displays of affection.
Although a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey engaged in 2010 in a joint air exercise with China. Although an applicant to the European Union, it plays footsie with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, founded in 1996 by Russian and Chinese leaders as an anti-NATO grouping. Although supposedly an American ally, Turkey has humiliated Israel, called Zionism a "crime against humanity," and acclaimed the terror-listed Hamas organization.
Thanks to the demonstrations, we can be newly hopeful that Turkey may avoid the path it had been on, that of despotism, Islamification and increasingly rogue foreign relations. Perhaps its secular, democratic and pro-Western heritage can be revived.
--------------
The Good News in Turkey
by Daniel Pipes
Los Angeles Times
June 4, 2013
How to interpret the recent unrest on the streets of Istanbul and about 65 other Turkish cities? Specifically, is it comparable to the Arab uprisings over the last 2½ years in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain?
On one level, they appear unrelated, for Turkey is a far more advanced country, with a democratic culture and a modern economy. But two connections — autocracy and Syria — do tie them together, suggesting that the Turkish demonstrations could have a potentially deep importance.
The rebellion did not come out of nowhere. I was in Istanbul last fall, and it was clear then that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's dictatorial tendencies worried Turks more than his Islamic aspirations. I heard unceasing criticisms about his being "intoxicated with power," an "informal caliph" and "Turkey's elected chief social engineer."
Turks enumerated to me a lengthy list of authoritarian symptoms they suffered from the decade-long rule by Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or AKP: suppression of political criticism, crony capitalism, manipulation of the judiciary, unjust imprisonment, show trials and a disregard for the separation of powers. In particular, they evinced annoyance at the way Erdogan seeks to impose his personal tastes on the country.
The demonstrations since Friday are protesting these actions and more. What began as a localized dispute over the uprooting of a small park at Taksim Square in the heart of modern Istanbul has rapidly grown into a national statement of defiance.
Erdogan is no Moammar Kadafi or Bashar Assad, and he will not massacre peaceful demonstrators, but heavy-handed police operations have reportedly led to 2,300 injured and, according to Amnesty International, two deaths. Further, the prime minister has reacted defiantly, not just insisting on his original plan for the park but announcing he can do whatever he pleases.
Rival die-hard football fans do the unthinkable and join forces against Erdogan.
As paraphrased by Hürriyet Daily News: "A mosque will be built in Taksim, Erdogan said. He added that he did not have to take permission from the main opposition leader or a 'few marauders' for the projects, noting that the authority had already been given by people who voted for the AKP."
Erdogan is saying, in other words, that having voted the AKP into office, Turks have given him authority to do anything he wants. He is the elected, unaccountable padishah. Well, the demonstrators and those hitherto eager foreign investors have something to say about that, perhaps putting the country's China-like economic growth at risk.
Significantly, Abdullah Gül, the president of Turkey and increasingly Erdogan's rival, adopted a very different approach to the protests. "Democracy does not only mean elections," he said. "The messages delivered with good intentions have been received." By distancing himself from the prime minister, Gül exacerbated Erdogan's isolation.
As for Syria, after a charmed near-decade in power, Erdogan made his first major miscalculation by intensely involving Turkey in the Syrian civil war. He acted with pique when Assad, the Syrian despot and a onetime buddy, ignored his (sound) advice to make reforms. Not one to take well to being rebuffed, Erdogan responded emotionally and thrust his country into the civil war, hosting the rebels, provisioning and arming them and trying to guide them.
The results have been close to disastrous from Turkey's viewpoint. The country has experienced new hostilities with Moscow, Tehran and Baghdad, lost both overland trade routes to the Persian Gulf and trade with Syria, suffered terrorism on Turkish soil (in Reyhanli) and — perhaps most ominous — witnessed tensions surge between its stridently Sunni government and the country's heterodox Muslim populations.
Thanks to the Syrian imbroglio, Turkey has lost its enviable position of strength and popularity — its "zero problems with neighbors" policy that brought with it real accomplishments — in favor of a sense of being surrounded by foes. If President Obama once bragged of his "close working relationship" with Erdogan, last month's White House meeting between the two showed neither the personal chemistry nor the practical results vis-à-vis Syria that Erdogan had sought.
In short, it appears that a decade of electoral calm, political stability and plentiful foreign investment has come to a halt and a new, more difficult era has begun for the AKP government. The moribund opposition parties may find their voice. The antiwar faction may feel emboldened. The secularists may be able to tap the wide unhappiness with the regime's efforts to corral citizens into becoming more (Islamically) virtuous.
This is excellent news. Turkey has been heading in the wrong direction under the AKP. Although a democracy, the AKP government has jailed more journalists than any other state in the world. Although secular, it has with growing urgency imposed arrays of Islamist regulations, including last week's rushed limitation on alcohol as well as warnings against public displays of affection.
Although a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey engaged in 2010 in a joint air exercise with China. Although an applicant to the European Union, it plays footsie with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, founded in 1996 by Russian and Chinese leaders as an anti-NATO grouping. Although supposedly an American ally, Turkey has humiliated Israel, called Zionism a "crime against humanity," and acclaimed the terror-listed Hamas organization.
Thanks to the demonstrations, we can be newly hopeful that Turkey may avoid the path it had been on, that of despotism, Islamification and increasingly rogue foreign relations. Perhaps its secular, democratic and pro-Western heritage can be revived.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Top 10 warning signs you may be a ‘Guardian Left’ anti-Semite
Top 10 warning signs you may be a ‘Guardian Left’ anti-Semite
CiFWatch
22/05/13
The Guardian’s associate editor Seumas Milne – who, in case it needs reminding, worked for the pro-Stalinist communist publication ‘Straight Left’ earlier in his career – was kind enough to Tweet a link to a piece in Foreign Policy Magazine by Stephen Walt.
The piece is titled ‘Top 10 warning signs you are a liberal imperialist‘.
The essay itself, written by the co-author of a book widely condemned for its shoddy scholarship and for arguing that Jews wield too much power in Washington, D.C., is unintentionally quite comical – a kind of ‘Western Guilt-Driven Guide to the Universe for Dummies’ – and includes, as #1, the following:
So, in the spirit of Walt’s mockery of those who ‘unknowingly’ are compromised by a deep-seeded imperialism lurking in their subconscious, here is CiF Watch’s own ‘Top 10 warning signs you may be a Guardian Left anti-Semite‘ – a list, per the links below, inspired by real life Guardianistas!)
1. You claim the mantle of human rights yet find yourself running interference for anti-Semitic world leaders and helping to spread the propaganda of Islamist extremists - and even terrorist leaders who openly call for the murder of Jews.
2. You claim to condemn racism at every opportunity yet are strangely silent or seriously downplay even the most egregious examples of antisemitic violence.
3. You claim to be a champion of progressive politics yet often use terms and advance tropes indistinguishable from classic right wing Judeophobia - such as the argument that Jews are too powerful, use their money to control politics, and are not loyal citizens.
4. You support nationalism, and don’t have a problem with the existence of more than 50 Muslim states, yet you oppose the existence of the only Jewish state in the world.
5. Even when putatively condemning antisemitism you can’t help but blame the Jews for causing antisemitism.
6. You condemn the Holocaust yet also obsessively condemn living Jews for their alleged ‘inhumanity’ and even argue that Jews haven’t learned the proper lessons from the attempt to annihilate their co-religionists from the planet.
7. You not only support Palestinian rights, but support their “right” to launch deadly terrorist attacks on Israeli Jews, under the mantle of anti-imperialist ”resistance”.
8. You characterize extremist reactionary Islamist movements as “progressive“.
9. You accuse Jews of cynically misusing the charge of antisemitism to “stifle” debate about the Jewish state.
10. You champion diversity and multiculturalism of all kinds, yet suggest that Jewish particularism represents an inherently tribal, ethnocentric and racist identity.
CiFWatch
22/05/13
The Guardian’s associate editor Seumas Milne – who, in case it needs reminding, worked for the pro-Stalinist communist publication ‘Straight Left’ earlier in his career – was kind enough to Tweet a link to a piece in Foreign Policy Magazine by Stephen Walt.
The piece is titled ‘Top 10 warning signs you are a liberal imperialist‘.
The essay itself, written by the co-author of a book widely condemned for its shoddy scholarship and for arguing that Jews wield too much power in Washington, D.C., is unintentionally quite comical – a kind of ‘Western Guilt-Driven Guide to the Universe for Dummies’ – and includes, as #1, the following:
You frequently find yourself advocating that the United States send troops, drones, weapons, Special Forces, or combat air patrols to some country that you have never visited, whose language(s) you don’t speak, and that you never paid much attention to until bad things started happening there.Whilst I don’t speak fluent academic-ese like the esteemed Harvard professor, I have become adept at deciphering an even more obscure dialect – the language of the Guardian Left.
So, in the spirit of Walt’s mockery of those who ‘unknowingly’ are compromised by a deep-seeded imperialism lurking in their subconscious, here is CiF Watch’s own ‘Top 10 warning signs you may be a Guardian Left anti-Semite‘ – a list, per the links below, inspired by real life Guardianistas!)
1. You claim the mantle of human rights yet find yourself running interference for anti-Semitic world leaders and helping to spread the propaganda of Islamist extremists - and even terrorist leaders who openly call for the murder of Jews.
2. You claim to condemn racism at every opportunity yet are strangely silent or seriously downplay even the most egregious examples of antisemitic violence.
3. You claim to be a champion of progressive politics yet often use terms and advance tropes indistinguishable from classic right wing Judeophobia - such as the argument that Jews are too powerful, use their money to control politics, and are not loyal citizens.
4. You support nationalism, and don’t have a problem with the existence of more than 50 Muslim states, yet you oppose the existence of the only Jewish state in the world.
5. Even when putatively condemning antisemitism you can’t help but blame the Jews for causing antisemitism.
6. You condemn the Holocaust yet also obsessively condemn living Jews for their alleged ‘inhumanity’ and even argue that Jews haven’t learned the proper lessons from the attempt to annihilate their co-religionists from the planet.
7. You not only support Palestinian rights, but support their “right” to launch deadly terrorist attacks on Israeli Jews, under the mantle of anti-imperialist ”resistance”.
8. You characterize extremist reactionary Islamist movements as “progressive“.
9. You accuse Jews of cynically misusing the charge of antisemitism to “stifle” debate about the Jewish state.
10. You champion diversity and multiculturalism of all kinds, yet suggest that Jewish particularism represents an inherently tribal, ethnocentric and racist identity.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Venezuela runs out of bog roll - viva la revolucion!
So this is where a "Bolivarian revolution" gets you.
----
Venezuela hopes to wipe out toilet paper shortage by importing 50m rolls
Associated Press in Caracas
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 16 May 2013
Minister blames shortage on 'excessive demand caused by media campaign generated to disrupt the country'
First milk, butter, coffee and cornmeal ran short. Now Venezuela is running out of the most basic of necessities – toilet paper. Blaming political opponents for the shortfall, as it does for other shortages, the government says it will import 50m rolls to boost supplies.
That was little comfort to consumers struggling to find toilet paper on Wednesday. "This is the last straw," said Manuel Fagundes, a shopper hunting for tissue in Caracas. "I'm 71 years old and this is the first time I've seen this."
One supermarket visited by the Associated Press in the capital on Wednesday was out of toilet paper. Another had just received a fresh batch, and it quickly filled up with shoppers as the word spread. "I've been looking for it for two weeks," said Cristina Ramos. "I was told that they had some here and now I'm in line."
Economists say Venezuela's shortages stem from price controls meant to make basic goods available to the poorest parts of society and the government's controls on foreign currency. "State-controlled prices – prices that are set below market-clearing price – always result in shortages. The shortage problem will only get worse, as it did over the years in the Soviet Union," said Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University.
President Nicolás Maduro, who was selected by the dying Hugo Chávez to carry on his "Bolivarian revolution", claims that anti-government forces, including the private sector, are causing the shortages in an effort to destabilise the country. ... Commerce minister Alejandro Fleming blamed the shortage of toilet tissue on "excessive demand" built up as a result of "a media campaign that has been generated to disrupt the country.
"The revolution will bring the country the equivalent of 50 million rolls of toilet paper," he was quoted as saying Tuesday by state news agency AVN. "We are going to saturate the market so that our people calm down."
more...
----
Venezuela hopes to wipe out toilet paper shortage by importing 50m rolls
Associated Press in Caracas
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 16 May 2013
Minister blames shortage on 'excessive demand caused by media campaign generated to disrupt the country'
First milk, butter, coffee and cornmeal ran short. Now Venezuela is running out of the most basic of necessities – toilet paper. Blaming political opponents for the shortfall, as it does for other shortages, the government says it will import 50m rolls to boost supplies.
That was little comfort to consumers struggling to find toilet paper on Wednesday. "This is the last straw," said Manuel Fagundes, a shopper hunting for tissue in Caracas. "I'm 71 years old and this is the first time I've seen this."
One supermarket visited by the Associated Press in the capital on Wednesday was out of toilet paper. Another had just received a fresh batch, and it quickly filled up with shoppers as the word spread. "I've been looking for it for two weeks," said Cristina Ramos. "I was told that they had some here and now I'm in line."
Economists say Venezuela's shortages stem from price controls meant to make basic goods available to the poorest parts of society and the government's controls on foreign currency. "State-controlled prices – prices that are set below market-clearing price – always result in shortages. The shortage problem will only get worse, as it did over the years in the Soviet Union," said Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University.
President Nicolás Maduro, who was selected by the dying Hugo Chávez to carry on his "Bolivarian revolution", claims that anti-government forces, including the private sector, are causing the shortages in an effort to destabilise the country. ... Commerce minister Alejandro Fleming blamed the shortage of toilet tissue on "excessive demand" built up as a result of "a media campaign that has been generated to disrupt the country.
"The revolution will bring the country the equivalent of 50 million rolls of toilet paper," he was quoted as saying Tuesday by state news agency AVN. "We are going to saturate the market so that our people calm down."
more...
Friday, May 10, 2013
Education in the UK - Gove attacks the 'Culture of Excuses'
At Last: Gove Goes For the Culture of Excuses
by Matthew Hunter
Standpoint April 2013
"However specious in theory the project might be of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness."
Davies Giddy MP, 1807
"The academic, subject-based curriculum is a middle-class creation . . . whose effect, if not intention, has been to make it difficult for many children not from a middle-class background to adjust to a highly academic school culture."
Professor John White, 2007
Although two centuries and the political spectrum divide these two quotations, they are united in an important sense: both deny the ability of poor children to benefit from an academic education. The first quotation comes from a Tory MP speaking against the 1807 Parochial Schools bill. The second comes from a man at the heart of today's education establishment, an emeritus professor at the Institute of Education, University of London. His is a different sort of bigotry, one that comes with the gentle inflection of liberal sympathy, but is no less socially damaging. "The soft bigotry of low expectations" is a phrase many, including the Education Secretary Michael Gove, have used to describe such thinking.
In February, Gove gave a speech to the Social Market Foundation which will be remembered as one of the definitive accounts of his mission. Introducing a new, more academic National Curriculum, Gove confronted the idea that such schooling is not suitable for all pupils. He described a pair of exceptional London state schools, and said such schools demonstrated that "children from every background are as capable of success — as able to grasp for the glittering prizes — as children from the wealthiest backgrounds, if they are given access to the sort of education which the rich have always felt they should enjoy by right."
The idea that all pupils should receive an academic education may sound like an incontrovertible platitude. In fact, it is a declaration of war on the received wisdom of state education. To understand the significance of this war, one has to know something of the intellectual history of British schooling. "The soft bigotry of low expectations" has its origins in what can be seen as a "sociological" view of education. In 1970, the radical sociologist Basil Bernstein wrote an essay for the now defunct magazine New Society entitled "Education cannot compensate for society". He argued that social and economic factors have such an overwhelmingly strong effect on children's upbringing that schools are powerless to overcome their socially predetermined chance of success. The title of his essay became something of an adage in schools; one professor at the Institute of Education observed, "We are all, in some respects, Bernsteinians now."
I am under no illusions about the challenges posed to schools in deprived areas. Throughout the country, parental income remains the best predictor of a pupil's success at school. It was revealed last year that only 4 per cent of pupils aged 15 eligible for free school meals end up going to university, compared with 33 per cent of their wealthier peers. However, while it is one thing to say that a low socioeconomic background tends to hold back a child's education, it is something completely different to say that their education can only improve once their low socioeconomic status is changed. When transferred from the lecture theatre to the classroom, this sociological determinism — we might call it "the sociological view" — breeds a culture of excuses and low expectations.
I teach at an inner-city state school, and the academic and behavioural expectations made of the pupils are distressingly low. Our catchment area is deprived, but it is hardly a ghetto. Unemployment is high, and about 40 per cent of the pupils are eligible for free school meals, meaning their parents have a combined income of less than £16,190. However, many of the pupils come from stable, hard-working families, and it is only a small minority whose home lives can be described as "chaotic".
One can judge the extent to which an "excuses culture" pervades a school by the frequency with which references are made to "our kids". At my school, this phrase, redolent with sympathy and concern, is used on a daily basis to keep standards low. When a pupil tells a new member of staff to "fuck off", senior staff explain such behaviour is to be expected from "our kids". When I asked why we did not teach a more academically challenging GCSE history course, I was told it would not be right for "our kids". When my teaching style is criticised for being didactic, I'm told "our kids" cannot listen to a teacher in anything more than five-minute bursts. On one memorable occasion, a French teacher decided to hand out detentions to pupils who did badly in their weekly vocabulary homework, but was told to stop by a member of senior management. Apparently, compulsory homework was unfair, considering the home backgrounds of "our kids". Choosing to teach in a deprived area, I expected to be surrounded by colleagues aiming to overcome social disadvantage, not capitulate to it.
In America, where I worked part-time as a teaching assistant, I often heard teachers claim: "We'll never solve education until we solve poverty." Rhetorically, the sociological view provides a very useful argument for those who wish to deflect all conversations about education standards to wider issues of social justice. Recently, a friend who is studying for a masters degree in education told me about a university seminar he had attended. The professor delivering it has written in a recently published book, "Social variables are too significant to be ignored and there can be no hope of improving education until we have understood and found ways to deal with the pernicious problems of poverty and social disadvantage."
At the seminar, he launched into a tirade against Michael Gove. How dare we expect schools to raise standards, he fulminated, while belonging to a government which is "making the poor poorer".
The idea that education can only be improved through solving the root cause of social disadvantage has a rotten effect on our nation's classrooms. Consider the following claim from Matthew Taylor, former head of Tony Blair's policy unit, now chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts and a prominent education commentator, writing about a 2007 study into educational outcomes: "This unprecedented project has revealed that a child's social background is the crucial factor in academic performance, and that a school's success is based not on its teachers, the way it is run, or what type of school it is, but, overwhelmingly, on the class background of its pupils." As a teacher, I find it hard to think of a sentiment that does more to undervalue the profession. The sociological view of education is a gospel of defeatism.
It is not hard to see how in many of the nation's classrooms the sociological view becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. In her speech to the Conservative party conference in 2010, Katharine Birbalsingh criticised schools which avoid punishing misbehaving black pupils for fear of being labelled racist. She concluded, "Black children underachieve because of what the well-meaning liberal does to them."
The same effect can be seen in academic expectations, where school curricula are relentlessly dumbed down by sympathetic educators hoping to make schoolwork more "accessible" for their pupils. "Subject to Change", a 2007 report by Martin Johnson, deputy general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, criticised the teaching of discrete, academic subjects. Johnson wrote that this "classical and elite model containing a narrow range of intellectual knowledge and skill is inappropriate for an age of universal education". In one of the most absurd recommendations I have read, he proposed a new national curriculum focused on "principles, concepts and attitudes". As an example, he recommended "physical skills such as walking, which involves a disposition as well as a technique, and digging".
However, there is hope to be found in the trends emerging in some of Britain's most ambitious state schools. A new mindset of "no excuses" designed to combat the decades-long rot of "low expectations" is gaining ground. This approach originated in the American charter school movement, on which Britain's free schools policy is partly based. KIPP schools, the largest and best-known network of charter schools in the US, have an enviable track record in educating pupils from deprived backgrounds: 94 per cent of their pupils are either African-American or Hispanic, and 76 per cent qualify for the federally-supported free meals programme. By the end of eighth grade, 94 per cent of KIPP classes outperform their local districts in reading, and 96 per cent in maths.
Central to this success is the KIPP network's core "operating principle" of high expectations. "KIPP schools have clearly defined and measurable high expectations for academic achievement and conduct that makes no excuses based on the students' backgrounds." There is no secret as to how such expectations are upheld. They are achieved through "a range of formal and informal rewards and consequences for academic performance and behaviour".
The same thinking has been expressed by the current head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw. His achievements as headmaster of Mossbourne Academy in East London are now the stuff of legend, but bear repetition. The school had the same proportion of pupils on free school meals as the one where I teach, but 89 per cent of them obtain five A*-C grades at GCSE, including English and maths. This is not achieved through a cynical focus on the C grade borderline, as Mossbourne also cultivates high achievers. Last year, 63 per cent of its pupils gained an A*-A grade in English literature GCSE, and 52 per cent of its A-level grades were A*-B. This places it in the top 1 per cent of schools nationwide, an astonishing achievement. Wilshaw said: "There are a growing number of schools producing fantastic results in areas of deprivation. We've got to stop making excuses for background, culture and ethnicity and get on with it."
A key part of such advances is adopting strict rules and punishments. "We teach the children the difference between right and wrong, good and evil," said Wilshaw. "They know that if they disrupt class or are rude to teachers, there will be consequences." Sadly, this is not a particularly fashionable way to run a school within Britain's state sector, and many of Wilshaw's detractors criticise the "prison camp" ethos of his old school. Apologists for contemporary British education tend to prefer a more child-centred, progressive outlook where pupils comply through choice, not coercion.
Such a philosophy forms a convenient alliance with the sociological view. I have lost count of the number of times the terrible behaviour at our school has been blamed on the social background of the pupils, instead of the school's unwillingness to implement a functioning behaviour policy. The sociological view is also used to discount the importance of the different methods employed in rapidly improving schools. In her book School Wars, Melissa Benn implies that the real root of Mossbourne's success is not its traditionalist outlook, but instead a change in the catchment area's social makeup. She points out that the predecessor school had 77 per cent of pupils on free school meals, nearly double the current number. So there are sociological excuses for success as well as failure.
In order to fulfil its professional responsibility, a school must strenuously resist taking on the sociological view. This is difficult when education departments in British universities turn out acres of paper every year reinforcing the message that socioeconomic background dictates success. What they show is undeniable: in the broad averages of large-scale longitudinal studies, social background does correlate with educational outcome. But schools deal with individuals, not averages. It is a school's responsibility to do all it can to iron out such differences and never treat them as a foregone conclusion. Recent research suggests that there are more than 440 secondary schools where the average GCSE score for children on free school meals is above the national average. Taught well in a good school, poor pupils can succeed.
It is a paradox that idealistic educators in favour of social justice are seduced by the sociological view into accepting their own inability to achieve it. In today's Britain, schools which use social background as an excuse for the underachievement of their pupils are the cause of a far greater deprivation than the social background itself.
by Matthew Hunter
Standpoint April 2013
"However specious in theory the project might be of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness."
Davies Giddy MP, 1807
"The academic, subject-based curriculum is a middle-class creation . . . whose effect, if not intention, has been to make it difficult for many children not from a middle-class background to adjust to a highly academic school culture."
Professor John White, 2007
Although two centuries and the political spectrum divide these two quotations, they are united in an important sense: both deny the ability of poor children to benefit from an academic education. The first quotation comes from a Tory MP speaking against the 1807 Parochial Schools bill. The second comes from a man at the heart of today's education establishment, an emeritus professor at the Institute of Education, University of London. His is a different sort of bigotry, one that comes with the gentle inflection of liberal sympathy, but is no less socially damaging. "The soft bigotry of low expectations" is a phrase many, including the Education Secretary Michael Gove, have used to describe such thinking.
In February, Gove gave a speech to the Social Market Foundation which will be remembered as one of the definitive accounts of his mission. Introducing a new, more academic National Curriculum, Gove confronted the idea that such schooling is not suitable for all pupils. He described a pair of exceptional London state schools, and said such schools demonstrated that "children from every background are as capable of success — as able to grasp for the glittering prizes — as children from the wealthiest backgrounds, if they are given access to the sort of education which the rich have always felt they should enjoy by right."
The idea that all pupils should receive an academic education may sound like an incontrovertible platitude. In fact, it is a declaration of war on the received wisdom of state education. To understand the significance of this war, one has to know something of the intellectual history of British schooling. "The soft bigotry of low expectations" has its origins in what can be seen as a "sociological" view of education. In 1970, the radical sociologist Basil Bernstein wrote an essay for the now defunct magazine New Society entitled "Education cannot compensate for society". He argued that social and economic factors have such an overwhelmingly strong effect on children's upbringing that schools are powerless to overcome their socially predetermined chance of success. The title of his essay became something of an adage in schools; one professor at the Institute of Education observed, "We are all, in some respects, Bernsteinians now."
I am under no illusions about the challenges posed to schools in deprived areas. Throughout the country, parental income remains the best predictor of a pupil's success at school. It was revealed last year that only 4 per cent of pupils aged 15 eligible for free school meals end up going to university, compared with 33 per cent of their wealthier peers. However, while it is one thing to say that a low socioeconomic background tends to hold back a child's education, it is something completely different to say that their education can only improve once their low socioeconomic status is changed. When transferred from the lecture theatre to the classroom, this sociological determinism — we might call it "the sociological view" — breeds a culture of excuses and low expectations.
I teach at an inner-city state school, and the academic and behavioural expectations made of the pupils are distressingly low. Our catchment area is deprived, but it is hardly a ghetto. Unemployment is high, and about 40 per cent of the pupils are eligible for free school meals, meaning their parents have a combined income of less than £16,190. However, many of the pupils come from stable, hard-working families, and it is only a small minority whose home lives can be described as "chaotic".
One can judge the extent to which an "excuses culture" pervades a school by the frequency with which references are made to "our kids". At my school, this phrase, redolent with sympathy and concern, is used on a daily basis to keep standards low. When a pupil tells a new member of staff to "fuck off", senior staff explain such behaviour is to be expected from "our kids". When I asked why we did not teach a more academically challenging GCSE history course, I was told it would not be right for "our kids". When my teaching style is criticised for being didactic, I'm told "our kids" cannot listen to a teacher in anything more than five-minute bursts. On one memorable occasion, a French teacher decided to hand out detentions to pupils who did badly in their weekly vocabulary homework, but was told to stop by a member of senior management. Apparently, compulsory homework was unfair, considering the home backgrounds of "our kids". Choosing to teach in a deprived area, I expected to be surrounded by colleagues aiming to overcome social disadvantage, not capitulate to it.
In America, where I worked part-time as a teaching assistant, I often heard teachers claim: "We'll never solve education until we solve poverty." Rhetorically, the sociological view provides a very useful argument for those who wish to deflect all conversations about education standards to wider issues of social justice. Recently, a friend who is studying for a masters degree in education told me about a university seminar he had attended. The professor delivering it has written in a recently published book, "Social variables are too significant to be ignored and there can be no hope of improving education until we have understood and found ways to deal with the pernicious problems of poverty and social disadvantage."
At the seminar, he launched into a tirade against Michael Gove. How dare we expect schools to raise standards, he fulminated, while belonging to a government which is "making the poor poorer".
The idea that education can only be improved through solving the root cause of social disadvantage has a rotten effect on our nation's classrooms. Consider the following claim from Matthew Taylor, former head of Tony Blair's policy unit, now chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts and a prominent education commentator, writing about a 2007 study into educational outcomes: "This unprecedented project has revealed that a child's social background is the crucial factor in academic performance, and that a school's success is based not on its teachers, the way it is run, or what type of school it is, but, overwhelmingly, on the class background of its pupils." As a teacher, I find it hard to think of a sentiment that does more to undervalue the profession. The sociological view of education is a gospel of defeatism.
It is not hard to see how in many of the nation's classrooms the sociological view becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. In her speech to the Conservative party conference in 2010, Katharine Birbalsingh criticised schools which avoid punishing misbehaving black pupils for fear of being labelled racist. She concluded, "Black children underachieve because of what the well-meaning liberal does to them."
The same effect can be seen in academic expectations, where school curricula are relentlessly dumbed down by sympathetic educators hoping to make schoolwork more "accessible" for their pupils. "Subject to Change", a 2007 report by Martin Johnson, deputy general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, criticised the teaching of discrete, academic subjects. Johnson wrote that this "classical and elite model containing a narrow range of intellectual knowledge and skill is inappropriate for an age of universal education". In one of the most absurd recommendations I have read, he proposed a new national curriculum focused on "principles, concepts and attitudes". As an example, he recommended "physical skills such as walking, which involves a disposition as well as a technique, and digging".
However, there is hope to be found in the trends emerging in some of Britain's most ambitious state schools. A new mindset of "no excuses" designed to combat the decades-long rot of "low expectations" is gaining ground. This approach originated in the American charter school movement, on which Britain's free schools policy is partly based. KIPP schools, the largest and best-known network of charter schools in the US, have an enviable track record in educating pupils from deprived backgrounds: 94 per cent of their pupils are either African-American or Hispanic, and 76 per cent qualify for the federally-supported free meals programme. By the end of eighth grade, 94 per cent of KIPP classes outperform their local districts in reading, and 96 per cent in maths.
Central to this success is the KIPP network's core "operating principle" of high expectations. "KIPP schools have clearly defined and measurable high expectations for academic achievement and conduct that makes no excuses based on the students' backgrounds." There is no secret as to how such expectations are upheld. They are achieved through "a range of formal and informal rewards and consequences for academic performance and behaviour".
The same thinking has been expressed by the current head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw. His achievements as headmaster of Mossbourne Academy in East London are now the stuff of legend, but bear repetition. The school had the same proportion of pupils on free school meals as the one where I teach, but 89 per cent of them obtain five A*-C grades at GCSE, including English and maths. This is not achieved through a cynical focus on the C grade borderline, as Mossbourne also cultivates high achievers. Last year, 63 per cent of its pupils gained an A*-A grade in English literature GCSE, and 52 per cent of its A-level grades were A*-B. This places it in the top 1 per cent of schools nationwide, an astonishing achievement. Wilshaw said: "There are a growing number of schools producing fantastic results in areas of deprivation. We've got to stop making excuses for background, culture and ethnicity and get on with it."
A key part of such advances is adopting strict rules and punishments. "We teach the children the difference between right and wrong, good and evil," said Wilshaw. "They know that if they disrupt class or are rude to teachers, there will be consequences." Sadly, this is not a particularly fashionable way to run a school within Britain's state sector, and many of Wilshaw's detractors criticise the "prison camp" ethos of his old school. Apologists for contemporary British education tend to prefer a more child-centred, progressive outlook where pupils comply through choice, not coercion.
Such a philosophy forms a convenient alliance with the sociological view. I have lost count of the number of times the terrible behaviour at our school has been blamed on the social background of the pupils, instead of the school's unwillingness to implement a functioning behaviour policy. The sociological view is also used to discount the importance of the different methods employed in rapidly improving schools. In her book School Wars, Melissa Benn implies that the real root of Mossbourne's success is not its traditionalist outlook, but instead a change in the catchment area's social makeup. She points out that the predecessor school had 77 per cent of pupils on free school meals, nearly double the current number. So there are sociological excuses for success as well as failure.
In order to fulfil its professional responsibility, a school must strenuously resist taking on the sociological view. This is difficult when education departments in British universities turn out acres of paper every year reinforcing the message that socioeconomic background dictates success. What they show is undeniable: in the broad averages of large-scale longitudinal studies, social background does correlate with educational outcome. But schools deal with individuals, not averages. It is a school's responsibility to do all it can to iron out such differences and never treat them as a foregone conclusion. Recent research suggests that there are more than 440 secondary schools where the average GCSE score for children on free school meals is above the national average. Taught well in a good school, poor pupils can succeed.
It is a paradox that idealistic educators in favour of social justice are seduced by the sociological view into accepting their own inability to achieve it. In today's Britain, schools which use social background as an excuse for the underachievement of their pupils are the cause of a far greater deprivation than the social background itself.
Feminism or Islamism: which side are you on?
Outstanding.
Worth reading along with these older posts:
Feminism Or Islamism: Which Side Are You On?
Nick Cohen
Standpoint
April 2013
No group is better than liberal academics at illustrating how racist anti-racism has become. As liberals, they ought to respect individual rights and oppose reactionary attempts to corral and control. As academics, they ought to look for evidence that shakes comfortable opinions. As it is, they do neither.
In human rights organisations, leftish political parties, liberal newspapers and, above all, in the universities, committed and morally earnest people would rather die than admit that radical Islam is a murderous and oppressive movement. The effect of their evasion is to promote the racism they say they oppose, while denying their supposed allies in "Muslim lands" and immigrant communities the same rights as they enjoy. Hypocrisy is too meagre a word to cover their behaviour.
Take the latest effort to land in my pigeonhole: On the Muslim Question by Anne Norton, a professor of political science at Pennsylvania University. Norton's publishers, Princeton University Press, modestly declare that she is a "fearless, original and surprising" author. In truth she is timid, unthinking and hackneyed. Like thousands of her contemporaries, Norton argues that conservative elites in the West use radical Islam to befuddle the doltish masses. There is truth in the charge that ever since 9/11 security services have taken the opportunity to bring in excessive coercive powers to fight the menace of Islamist violence. If that were the end of the argument, I could not object. Norton is a typical representative of the Anglo-American intelligentsia because she goes on to pretend that there is no real menace, and to cover up the mistreatment of women, the suppression of free speech, the inquisitorial punishment of heresy, and all the other woes armed and militant religion brings.
As with everyone of my generation (I was born in 1961), the "Rushdie test" tells you all you need to know about a political writer's willingness to choose freedom or brute power. Norton fails it, and seems to me to want to fail it. She tells us that Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie, was a "very local fuss" and a "very British affair" — as bland and unthreatening as a walk in the park. She assures the reader without caveat or elaboration that "no arrests or injuries occurred as a result of the demonstrations" against Rushdie. Even as a description of the formal demonstrations against The Satanic Verses that isn't true — the police arrested 84 people as they hung effigies of Rushdie outside Parliament in May 1989. But formal demonstrations were not the end of the protests, as she must know. Norton does not tell the reader how the supporters of religious reaction murdered or attempted to murder Rushdie's translators, staged riots in which dozens died in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Turkey, and bombed bookshops in central London and the US for stocking copies of the blasphemous novel.
Instead of speaking plainly about the violence and the chilling effect on criticism of Islam that followed, Norton sneers. She implies that the true friends of the oppressed should not have sympathised with Rushdie because he had crossed over to the other side. Rushdie "was wealthy, educated and famous", she says, and had "won the acceptance and acclaim that many fellow immigrants lacked". Her lip curls again when she goes on to discuss Theo van Gogh, whom you may remember a Jew-obsessed fanatic slaughtered for making a "blasphemous" film with the Somali-Dutch feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Van Gogh belonged to the Amsterdam of "cannabis and copulation", she says, and "enjoyed the freedoms of the wealthy and the privileged: of people who can buy goods and command pleasures".
You do not need to read the tabloids to recognise the trick she is pulling. Half-envious and half-disgusted finger-wagging about sex, wealth and education is a way of implying that Rushdie and van Gogh had it coming to them. Not that she is justifying murder and attempted murder, of course, but she wants the reader to understand why the poor and the unprivileged — the traditional objects of leftish concern — might take against them.
To notice the slipperiness of Norton's prose, however, is to miss the wider point. In On the Muslim Question, Muslims form an undifferentiated bloc. The notion that there are conflicts within Islam and choices to be made is never entertained. She brushes aside the Arab and Iranian artists who supported Rushdie, the Danish Muslim politicians who supported the right of newspapers to publish cartoons of Muhammad, the Iranian green movement, the Egyptian and Tunisian secularists and Christians now confronting the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Bangladeshi secularists and Hindus now fighting Jamaat-e-Islami.
It is as if in her mind a global reactionary movement, which is based on identity politics and systematically discriminates against women and sexual and religious minorities, does not exist. As if Muslims and non-Muslims are not fighting it. As if there is no need for American academics to take sides, or even acknowledge there are sides to take.
You can present such blindness as a polite averting of the eyes. But it is the mirror image of anti-Muslim racism. The French National Front, say, or the British National Party or Serb and Hindu nationalists, portray "the Muslims" as a bloc of terrorists or barbarians. Leftists denounce the stereotypes but then reinforce them. Their motives are different but the effect is the same. "No one should have to argue any longer that terrorism can be a rational and reasonable strategy," says Norton as she justifies violence. As for worrying about women's rights, that is to fall into an imperialist trap. "Attention to the plight of women in the Muslim world turns the gaze of potential critics away from the continuing inequality of women in the West."
Forget that you should oppose misogyny wherever you find it, and notice that by implying that violence and sexism are excusable Norton does not refute stereotypes but excuses them. With an ignorance remarkable in a professor of political science, she makes my point for me by saying that Marx's On the Jewish Question inspired her. This founding document of left-wing anti-Semitism was hardly friendly to the Jewish people. Marx repeated every prejudice. The religion of the Jews was "huckstering" and their god was money. He concluded that only when "society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism — huckstering and its preconditions — [will] the Jew have become impossible". For left-wing Muslims and ex-Muslims Norton's writing is just as insulting. Yet I suspect that she thinks of herself as being left-wing in some sense.
In her essential pamphlet Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left and Universal Human Rights (The Centre for Secular Space), Meredith Tax asks why leftists and liberals — who once said they believed in the separation of church and state, social equality and the emancipation of women — are siding with or condoning a religious Right that has made it violently clear that it agrees with none of the above.
Tax is well-placed to dissect the duplicities of our time. She is a distinguished member of a dissenting movement in modern feminism that is hugely unfashionable, and all the more necessary for that. It refuses to accept "the double bind" that says the emancipation of women must always wait. Far-leftists placed women in it when they said, "You must put up with sexism until the revolution comes." You could not be against sexism and for socialism simultaneously. Now hopes of revolution have vanished, its proponents say, "Women must put up with sexism until American imperialism has gone."
Tax quotes the example of Leila Ahmed, the Harvard scholar of women and Islam. At one point in her writings, Ahmed lets out a cry of pain. She says that she believes that the rights of women "in Muslim-majority societies often are acutely in need of improvement, as indeed they are in many other societies. But the question now is how we address such issues while not allowing our work and concerns to aid and abet imperialist projects, including war projects that mete out death and trauma to Muslim women under the guise and to the accompaniment of a rhetoric of saving them."
Put like this, Ahmed sounds ridiculous. What is the problem? Why can't you oppose, say, the war in Afghanistan, if you wish, while also opposing the subjugation of women? Why can't you say that Western societies give women greater rights, while also opposing this or that Western policy decision or politician? Why, in short, can you not walk and chew gum at the same time?
I don't mean to single out academics for special condemnation. The postmodern university may not be able to guide society, but it reflects its deformities and double standards. I know civil servants, liberal journalists, broadcasters, politicians, diplomats and police officers who never read an academic paper from one year until the next. They will condemn the gender pay gap or the sexual abuse of white-skinned women, but stay silent about the religious oppression of brown-skinned women. Fear of violent reprisals, fear of causing offence, fear that their enemies will denounce them for possessing a racial or sectarian hatred play their part. On the Left, there is the strong fear of accusations of complicity with the status quo, which never go down well in arts and humanities departments. Tax quotes one left-wing academic booming at a colleague: "Secular feminists' concern that Muslim fundamentalist religious codes impose and sanction violence on women and queers relies on a myopia that understands Muslim women only as victims of Muslim men and Islam, ignoring the role of imperial violence in defining Muslim realities around the world." No one looking for tenure wants to hear words like that directed against them.
But we should be able to acknowledge that there is now a general taboo against discussing religious oppression, which is not confined to campuses or left-wing meetings. Universal standards are everywhere in retreat.
Tax and her allies are among the few who will fight back. Her friends include members of Southall Black Sisters, who took considerable risks when they took to the streets during the Rushdie affair to declare that they were as against mullahs who wanted to subjugate Asian women because of the arrangement of their chromosones as racists who wanted to subjugate them because of the colour of their skin. Together they have formed a new feminist pressure group, the Centre for Secular Space, along with Gita Sahgal, whose treatment by Amnesty International encapsulated a rotten culture in one disgraceful moment.
Sahgal objected to Amnesty's relationship with Moazzam Begg. She did not complain that Amnesty demanded due process for an Islamist interned in Guantánamo but that it treated him as a respectable partner. And not just Amnesty. A roll call of supposedly liberal organisations followed suit. Freedom from Torture, Human Rights Watch, Justice, Liberty, Redress, Reprieve, and the US Center for Constitutional Rights all promoted Begg. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trustan organisation set up by pacifist Quakers — and the Roddick Foundation — which was set up by a feminist — funded him. I speak from experience when I say that not only the managers of human rights charities but their supporters could not get enough of him. To the left-wing middle class of the last decade, Begg was a star: the ideal victim.
He was also an Islamist fighter in Bosnia, and the manager of a bookshop in Birmingham that was a magnet for cranks and extremists. He moved his family to Afghanistan because he admired Taliban rule so much he wanted to live under it. While there, he helped at a school for the children of al-Qaeda fighters, and one can guess that "empowering" girls through education was not the first aim of its curriculum. Nato forces captured him, and after the Americans released him from Guantánamo, he set up Cageprisoners. It claimed to be a human rights organisation of the sort that liberal ladies and gentlemen should endorse. Sahgal examined its websites and literature and found that the only prisoners it was interested in were jihadis — not much support for universal human rights there — and that Cageprisoners endorsed the oxymoronic concept of "defensive jihad", which in the case of Afghanistan involved para-militaries murdering civilians and executing teachers for allowing girls to learn to read and write.
Sahgal raised her concerns with her superiors at Amnesty. Their response said it all. Faced with a conflict between feminism and Islamism, Amnesty chose Islamism and in 2010 forced Sahgal out. (She later won compensation under laws that protect whistleblowers.) The "liberal" human rights group then announced that in its considered opinion defensive jihad was not "antithetical" to human rights.
The Sahgal affair was the biggest scandal the human rights movement has seen in years. In her attempt to explain why so many liberals and leftists have gone along with ideologists who want to kill liberals and leftists, Meredith Tax shows a novelist's insight into the psychology of delusion and betrayal.
When confronted with the horrors of the wars of Bush and Blair, many saw groups that can be fairly described as clerical fascists, as "anti-imperialist". As Vijay Prashad of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, explained in an interview with Asian online journal, Political Notes, last year, while leftists opposed evangelical Christians in the US, and Hindu and Jewish nationalists, when it came to Hamas, the Taliban, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, "we are divided from them but not against them". They are against "imperialism" and therefore cannot be our enemies.
Many another professor has parroted that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". Many have opined that we in the West know nothing of the desperation that pushes men to violence, and that in the circumstances of imperialist occupation such violence is as justified in Afghanistan or Iraq as it was in South Africa or Algeria in the 20th century.
I have had this argument many times, and I always ask the question: "Who is doing the killing and where?" There is no Western "imperialism" in Iran, Nigeria, Bangladesh or the Yemen, I say. This normally slows people down, unless of course my opponents believe that the puppet-masters of Western imperialism secretly rule the world, in which case they are beyond argument. Tax quotes a 2009 study of Arabic media sources by the Combating Terrorism Centre, which reinforces my point. It found that only 15 per cent of all of the casualties caused by al-Qaeda between 2004 and 2008 were Westerners. The main target of Muslim extremism is Muslims. The main financial support for Salafi-jihadi groups is Saudi Arabia, arguably the most reactionary country in the world and, we should not forget, a staunch ally of the same US imperialists the jihadis say they are fighting.
"When fundamentalists come to power", Tax says, "they silence the people; they physically eliminate dissidents, writers, journalists, poets, musicians, painters like fascists do. Like fascists, they physically eliminate the ‘untermensch' — the subhuman — among them ‘inferior races', gays, mentally or physically disabled people. And they lock women ‘in their place', which as we know from experience ends up being a straitjacket."
Turn on the news and you will see the fatuity of "anti-imperialist" alliances. In Mali, to take the latest example, the jihadist group Ansar Dine took control of the north of the country and sacked the libraries and mosques of Timbuktu — a truly "Islamophobic" crime, although you will never hear it described as such. "We are against independence," its spokesman declared. "We are against revolutions [that are] not in the name of Islam." Ansar Dine proceeded to show what an Islamic revolution looks like by banning television, alcohol and music, forcing women to veil, cutting off the hands of robbers and stoning couples to death for having children outside wedlock. The refugees who fled, and the survivors who cheered François Hollande after "imperialist" French forces intervened, were Muslims.
The supporters of defensive jihad practise the same policies when they seize power in "occupied Muslim lands". The absurdity of calling them anti-imperialists or comparing them to the anti-colonial nationalists of the 20th century ought to be evident.
Nor is the phrase "Muslim lands", which I hear Western broadcasters use too often, as neutral as it seems. Are they the lands controlled by Turkey during the widest extent of the Ottoman Empire, which would include most of the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus Emirate and large parts of Eastern Europe? Spain or India? What about Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines? What about Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia? What about Western countries with substantial Muslim populations? Not all Salafi-jihadis have the same definition of the territory they plan to liberate. The Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiyah, for instance, has in mind an Asian version of the Caliphate stretching from southern Thailand through Malaysia across Indonesia and into the Philippines, which would link with other branches established by al-Qaeda. But whichever way you cut it, fanatics who wish to establish a global caliphate are pro- rather than anti-imperialist. This is hardly a secret. But for far too many Westerners it is a secret in plain view, which is not talked about — or, more importantly, not thought about.
To Meredith Tax and Gita Sahgal the sight of people who call themselves human rights defenders going along with the omerta is close to unbearable. I heard them speak at the launch of the Centre for Secular Space in Toynbee Hall, east London, and understood their anger. For Tax and Sahgal, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is one of the most optimistic documents in history, the benchmark against which governments, corporations and, indeed, defensive jihadis must be judged. To see it ignored by the very people who claim to defend human rights has forced them to change their assumptions. As they point out, a state or pan-Islamic empire ruled by a hardline version of Sharia law directly contravenes just about every clause in the declaration. Article 7 states "all are equal before the law", not that Muslims are more equal than non-Muslims, or that Shia Muslims in Iran are more equal than Sunni Muslims, or that Sunni Muslims in Pakistan are more equal than Shia Muslims, or that men everywhere are more equal than women anywhere. Article 18 states "everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion", not that the punishment for blasphemy or apostasy is death.
As for "Islamophobia", feminists have had that charge thrown at them so often that they have come to doubt the motives of their accusers. Obviously fascist groups and some nationalist politicians do their best to whip up prejudice against immigrants and are currently focusing on Muslims for that purpose. But is discrimination against Muslims worse than, say, racism against people of Caribbean descent in the UK or Latinos and African-Americans in the US? If police harassment is a criterion, young Caribbean men are the group that suffers the most.
Where Muslims are the victims of racism, once again the question arises: why can't people oppose white racism and clerical reaction with equal strength and for the same reasons? A commitment to fight prejudice does not exclude the possibility of criticising religious texts and religious movements. Indeed, any serious commitment against prejudice must include a willingness to fight men who would use religion to censor, subjugate and kill.
Tax ends with a radical suggestion for the Anglo-American Left: "Instead of allying with and protecting the Muslim Right, how about solidarity with actual popular movements of democrats and feminists struggling in the Global South?" I have been saying the same thing for years and know as well as Tax and Sahgal do that there is a long struggle to shift attitudes.
I don't want to criticise them, for they are among the best people I know, but they underestimate how it suits Westerners to ignore religious oppression. On the Left, radical Islam has taken the place once filled by socialism. As I said in my book What's Left?, when the dreams of Karl Marx died, many leftists concluded that any enemy of the West was better than none. It did not matter that the most violent enemies of the West were against everything leftists supported. They were also against America and that was all that mattered. Beyond the Left, in the politically indifferent mainstream, ignoring oppression has its advantages. Members of a consumer society do not want to campaign against the mistreatment of women in immigrant communities at home or support costly and dangerous interventions abroad. They want to get and spend. Rousing a nation of shoppers against injustice is always a hard task, and it seems to me that one of the chief functions of Anglo-American intellectuals is to provide respectable reasons for staying quiet.
That so many liberals are prepared to urge quiescence is a scandal. That Southall Black Sisters, Meredith Tax and Gita Sahgal are prepared to fight them is a reason for hope. Their Centre for Secular Space is, by the way, desperately short of money. The rich Quakers and progressives who opened their wallets for Cageprisoners will not fund feminists. If you can afford to help, may I point you in their direction and suggest that there is no worthier cause around?
Worth reading along with these older posts:
- The Left-Islamist Alliance
- Has Amnesty given up on human rights?
- Anti-Israel bias in human rights groups
Feminism Or Islamism: Which Side Are You On?
Nick Cohen
Standpoint
April 2013
No group is better than liberal academics at illustrating how racist anti-racism has become. As liberals, they ought to respect individual rights and oppose reactionary attempts to corral and control. As academics, they ought to look for evidence that shakes comfortable opinions. As it is, they do neither.
In human rights organisations, leftish political parties, liberal newspapers and, above all, in the universities, committed and morally earnest people would rather die than admit that radical Islam is a murderous and oppressive movement. The effect of their evasion is to promote the racism they say they oppose, while denying their supposed allies in "Muslim lands" and immigrant communities the same rights as they enjoy. Hypocrisy is too meagre a word to cover their behaviour.
Take the latest effort to land in my pigeonhole: On the Muslim Question by Anne Norton, a professor of political science at Pennsylvania University. Norton's publishers, Princeton University Press, modestly declare that she is a "fearless, original and surprising" author. In truth she is timid, unthinking and hackneyed. Like thousands of her contemporaries, Norton argues that conservative elites in the West use radical Islam to befuddle the doltish masses. There is truth in the charge that ever since 9/11 security services have taken the opportunity to bring in excessive coercive powers to fight the menace of Islamist violence. If that were the end of the argument, I could not object. Norton is a typical representative of the Anglo-American intelligentsia because she goes on to pretend that there is no real menace, and to cover up the mistreatment of women, the suppression of free speech, the inquisitorial punishment of heresy, and all the other woes armed and militant religion brings.
As with everyone of my generation (I was born in 1961), the "Rushdie test" tells you all you need to know about a political writer's willingness to choose freedom or brute power. Norton fails it, and seems to me to want to fail it. She tells us that Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie, was a "very local fuss" and a "very British affair" — as bland and unthreatening as a walk in the park. She assures the reader without caveat or elaboration that "no arrests or injuries occurred as a result of the demonstrations" against Rushdie. Even as a description of the formal demonstrations against The Satanic Verses that isn't true — the police arrested 84 people as they hung effigies of Rushdie outside Parliament in May 1989. But formal demonstrations were not the end of the protests, as she must know. Norton does not tell the reader how the supporters of religious reaction murdered or attempted to murder Rushdie's translators, staged riots in which dozens died in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Turkey, and bombed bookshops in central London and the US for stocking copies of the blasphemous novel.
Instead of speaking plainly about the violence and the chilling effect on criticism of Islam that followed, Norton sneers. She implies that the true friends of the oppressed should not have sympathised with Rushdie because he had crossed over to the other side. Rushdie "was wealthy, educated and famous", she says, and had "won the acceptance and acclaim that many fellow immigrants lacked". Her lip curls again when she goes on to discuss Theo van Gogh, whom you may remember a Jew-obsessed fanatic slaughtered for making a "blasphemous" film with the Somali-Dutch feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Van Gogh belonged to the Amsterdam of "cannabis and copulation", she says, and "enjoyed the freedoms of the wealthy and the privileged: of people who can buy goods and command pleasures".
You do not need to read the tabloids to recognise the trick she is pulling. Half-envious and half-disgusted finger-wagging about sex, wealth and education is a way of implying that Rushdie and van Gogh had it coming to them. Not that she is justifying murder and attempted murder, of course, but she wants the reader to understand why the poor and the unprivileged — the traditional objects of leftish concern — might take against them.
To notice the slipperiness of Norton's prose, however, is to miss the wider point. In On the Muslim Question, Muslims form an undifferentiated bloc. The notion that there are conflicts within Islam and choices to be made is never entertained. She brushes aside the Arab and Iranian artists who supported Rushdie, the Danish Muslim politicians who supported the right of newspapers to publish cartoons of Muhammad, the Iranian green movement, the Egyptian and Tunisian secularists and Christians now confronting the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Bangladeshi secularists and Hindus now fighting Jamaat-e-Islami.
It is as if in her mind a global reactionary movement, which is based on identity politics and systematically discriminates against women and sexual and religious minorities, does not exist. As if Muslims and non-Muslims are not fighting it. As if there is no need for American academics to take sides, or even acknowledge there are sides to take.
You can present such blindness as a polite averting of the eyes. But it is the mirror image of anti-Muslim racism. The French National Front, say, or the British National Party or Serb and Hindu nationalists, portray "the Muslims" as a bloc of terrorists or barbarians. Leftists denounce the stereotypes but then reinforce them. Their motives are different but the effect is the same. "No one should have to argue any longer that terrorism can be a rational and reasonable strategy," says Norton as she justifies violence. As for worrying about women's rights, that is to fall into an imperialist trap. "Attention to the plight of women in the Muslim world turns the gaze of potential critics away from the continuing inequality of women in the West."
Forget that you should oppose misogyny wherever you find it, and notice that by implying that violence and sexism are excusable Norton does not refute stereotypes but excuses them. With an ignorance remarkable in a professor of political science, she makes my point for me by saying that Marx's On the Jewish Question inspired her. This founding document of left-wing anti-Semitism was hardly friendly to the Jewish people. Marx repeated every prejudice. The religion of the Jews was "huckstering" and their god was money. He concluded that only when "society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism — huckstering and its preconditions — [will] the Jew have become impossible". For left-wing Muslims and ex-Muslims Norton's writing is just as insulting. Yet I suspect that she thinks of herself as being left-wing in some sense.
In her essential pamphlet Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left and Universal Human Rights (The Centre for Secular Space), Meredith Tax asks why leftists and liberals — who once said they believed in the separation of church and state, social equality and the emancipation of women — are siding with or condoning a religious Right that has made it violently clear that it agrees with none of the above.
Tax is well-placed to dissect the duplicities of our time. She is a distinguished member of a dissenting movement in modern feminism that is hugely unfashionable, and all the more necessary for that. It refuses to accept "the double bind" that says the emancipation of women must always wait. Far-leftists placed women in it when they said, "You must put up with sexism until the revolution comes." You could not be against sexism and for socialism simultaneously. Now hopes of revolution have vanished, its proponents say, "Women must put up with sexism until American imperialism has gone."
Tax quotes the example of Leila Ahmed, the Harvard scholar of women and Islam. At one point in her writings, Ahmed lets out a cry of pain. She says that she believes that the rights of women "in Muslim-majority societies often are acutely in need of improvement, as indeed they are in many other societies. But the question now is how we address such issues while not allowing our work and concerns to aid and abet imperialist projects, including war projects that mete out death and trauma to Muslim women under the guise and to the accompaniment of a rhetoric of saving them."
Put like this, Ahmed sounds ridiculous. What is the problem? Why can't you oppose, say, the war in Afghanistan, if you wish, while also opposing the subjugation of women? Why can't you say that Western societies give women greater rights, while also opposing this or that Western policy decision or politician? Why, in short, can you not walk and chew gum at the same time?
I don't mean to single out academics for special condemnation. The postmodern university may not be able to guide society, but it reflects its deformities and double standards. I know civil servants, liberal journalists, broadcasters, politicians, diplomats and police officers who never read an academic paper from one year until the next. They will condemn the gender pay gap or the sexual abuse of white-skinned women, but stay silent about the religious oppression of brown-skinned women. Fear of violent reprisals, fear of causing offence, fear that their enemies will denounce them for possessing a racial or sectarian hatred play their part. On the Left, there is the strong fear of accusations of complicity with the status quo, which never go down well in arts and humanities departments. Tax quotes one left-wing academic booming at a colleague: "Secular feminists' concern that Muslim fundamentalist religious codes impose and sanction violence on women and queers relies on a myopia that understands Muslim women only as victims of Muslim men and Islam, ignoring the role of imperial violence in defining Muslim realities around the world." No one looking for tenure wants to hear words like that directed against them.
But we should be able to acknowledge that there is now a general taboo against discussing religious oppression, which is not confined to campuses or left-wing meetings. Universal standards are everywhere in retreat.
Tax and her allies are among the few who will fight back. Her friends include members of Southall Black Sisters, who took considerable risks when they took to the streets during the Rushdie affair to declare that they were as against mullahs who wanted to subjugate Asian women because of the arrangement of their chromosones as racists who wanted to subjugate them because of the colour of their skin. Together they have formed a new feminist pressure group, the Centre for Secular Space, along with Gita Sahgal, whose treatment by Amnesty International encapsulated a rotten culture in one disgraceful moment.
Sahgal objected to Amnesty's relationship with Moazzam Begg. She did not complain that Amnesty demanded due process for an Islamist interned in Guantánamo but that it treated him as a respectable partner. And not just Amnesty. A roll call of supposedly liberal organisations followed suit. Freedom from Torture, Human Rights Watch, Justice, Liberty, Redress, Reprieve, and the US Center for Constitutional Rights all promoted Begg. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trustan organisation set up by pacifist Quakers — and the Roddick Foundation — which was set up by a feminist — funded him. I speak from experience when I say that not only the managers of human rights charities but their supporters could not get enough of him. To the left-wing middle class of the last decade, Begg was a star: the ideal victim.
He was also an Islamist fighter in Bosnia, and the manager of a bookshop in Birmingham that was a magnet for cranks and extremists. He moved his family to Afghanistan because he admired Taliban rule so much he wanted to live under it. While there, he helped at a school for the children of al-Qaeda fighters, and one can guess that "empowering" girls through education was not the first aim of its curriculum. Nato forces captured him, and after the Americans released him from Guantánamo, he set up Cageprisoners. It claimed to be a human rights organisation of the sort that liberal ladies and gentlemen should endorse. Sahgal examined its websites and literature and found that the only prisoners it was interested in were jihadis — not much support for universal human rights there — and that Cageprisoners endorsed the oxymoronic concept of "defensive jihad", which in the case of Afghanistan involved para-militaries murdering civilians and executing teachers for allowing girls to learn to read and write.
Sahgal raised her concerns with her superiors at Amnesty. Their response said it all. Faced with a conflict between feminism and Islamism, Amnesty chose Islamism and in 2010 forced Sahgal out. (She later won compensation under laws that protect whistleblowers.) The "liberal" human rights group then announced that in its considered opinion defensive jihad was not "antithetical" to human rights.
The Sahgal affair was the biggest scandal the human rights movement has seen in years. In her attempt to explain why so many liberals and leftists have gone along with ideologists who want to kill liberals and leftists, Meredith Tax shows a novelist's insight into the psychology of delusion and betrayal.
When confronted with the horrors of the wars of Bush and Blair, many saw groups that can be fairly described as clerical fascists, as "anti-imperialist". As Vijay Prashad of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, explained in an interview with Asian online journal, Political Notes, last year, while leftists opposed evangelical Christians in the US, and Hindu and Jewish nationalists, when it came to Hamas, the Taliban, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, "we are divided from them but not against them". They are against "imperialism" and therefore cannot be our enemies.
Many another professor has parroted that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". Many have opined that we in the West know nothing of the desperation that pushes men to violence, and that in the circumstances of imperialist occupation such violence is as justified in Afghanistan or Iraq as it was in South Africa or Algeria in the 20th century.
I have had this argument many times, and I always ask the question: "Who is doing the killing and where?" There is no Western "imperialism" in Iran, Nigeria, Bangladesh or the Yemen, I say. This normally slows people down, unless of course my opponents believe that the puppet-masters of Western imperialism secretly rule the world, in which case they are beyond argument. Tax quotes a 2009 study of Arabic media sources by the Combating Terrorism Centre, which reinforces my point. It found that only 15 per cent of all of the casualties caused by al-Qaeda between 2004 and 2008 were Westerners. The main target of Muslim extremism is Muslims. The main financial support for Salafi-jihadi groups is Saudi Arabia, arguably the most reactionary country in the world and, we should not forget, a staunch ally of the same US imperialists the jihadis say they are fighting.
"When fundamentalists come to power", Tax says, "they silence the people; they physically eliminate dissidents, writers, journalists, poets, musicians, painters like fascists do. Like fascists, they physically eliminate the ‘untermensch' — the subhuman — among them ‘inferior races', gays, mentally or physically disabled people. And they lock women ‘in their place', which as we know from experience ends up being a straitjacket."
Turn on the news and you will see the fatuity of "anti-imperialist" alliances. In Mali, to take the latest example, the jihadist group Ansar Dine took control of the north of the country and sacked the libraries and mosques of Timbuktu — a truly "Islamophobic" crime, although you will never hear it described as such. "We are against independence," its spokesman declared. "We are against revolutions [that are] not in the name of Islam." Ansar Dine proceeded to show what an Islamic revolution looks like by banning television, alcohol and music, forcing women to veil, cutting off the hands of robbers and stoning couples to death for having children outside wedlock. The refugees who fled, and the survivors who cheered François Hollande after "imperialist" French forces intervened, were Muslims.
The supporters of defensive jihad practise the same policies when they seize power in "occupied Muslim lands". The absurdity of calling them anti-imperialists or comparing them to the anti-colonial nationalists of the 20th century ought to be evident.
Nor is the phrase "Muslim lands", which I hear Western broadcasters use too often, as neutral as it seems. Are they the lands controlled by Turkey during the widest extent of the Ottoman Empire, which would include most of the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus Emirate and large parts of Eastern Europe? Spain or India? What about Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines? What about Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia? What about Western countries with substantial Muslim populations? Not all Salafi-jihadis have the same definition of the territory they plan to liberate. The Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiyah, for instance, has in mind an Asian version of the Caliphate stretching from southern Thailand through Malaysia across Indonesia and into the Philippines, which would link with other branches established by al-Qaeda. But whichever way you cut it, fanatics who wish to establish a global caliphate are pro- rather than anti-imperialist. This is hardly a secret. But for far too many Westerners it is a secret in plain view, which is not talked about — or, more importantly, not thought about.
To Meredith Tax and Gita Sahgal the sight of people who call themselves human rights defenders going along with the omerta is close to unbearable. I heard them speak at the launch of the Centre for Secular Space in Toynbee Hall, east London, and understood their anger. For Tax and Sahgal, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is one of the most optimistic documents in history, the benchmark against which governments, corporations and, indeed, defensive jihadis must be judged. To see it ignored by the very people who claim to defend human rights has forced them to change their assumptions. As they point out, a state or pan-Islamic empire ruled by a hardline version of Sharia law directly contravenes just about every clause in the declaration. Article 7 states "all are equal before the law", not that Muslims are more equal than non-Muslims, or that Shia Muslims in Iran are more equal than Sunni Muslims, or that Sunni Muslims in Pakistan are more equal than Shia Muslims, or that men everywhere are more equal than women anywhere. Article 18 states "everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion", not that the punishment for blasphemy or apostasy is death.
As for "Islamophobia", feminists have had that charge thrown at them so often that they have come to doubt the motives of their accusers. Obviously fascist groups and some nationalist politicians do their best to whip up prejudice against immigrants and are currently focusing on Muslims for that purpose. But is discrimination against Muslims worse than, say, racism against people of Caribbean descent in the UK or Latinos and African-Americans in the US? If police harassment is a criterion, young Caribbean men are the group that suffers the most.
Where Muslims are the victims of racism, once again the question arises: why can't people oppose white racism and clerical reaction with equal strength and for the same reasons? A commitment to fight prejudice does not exclude the possibility of criticising religious texts and religious movements. Indeed, any serious commitment against prejudice must include a willingness to fight men who would use religion to censor, subjugate and kill.
Tax ends with a radical suggestion for the Anglo-American Left: "Instead of allying with and protecting the Muslim Right, how about solidarity with actual popular movements of democrats and feminists struggling in the Global South?" I have been saying the same thing for years and know as well as Tax and Sahgal do that there is a long struggle to shift attitudes.
I don't want to criticise them, for they are among the best people I know, but they underestimate how it suits Westerners to ignore religious oppression. On the Left, radical Islam has taken the place once filled by socialism. As I said in my book What's Left?, when the dreams of Karl Marx died, many leftists concluded that any enemy of the West was better than none. It did not matter that the most violent enemies of the West were against everything leftists supported. They were also against America and that was all that mattered. Beyond the Left, in the politically indifferent mainstream, ignoring oppression has its advantages. Members of a consumer society do not want to campaign against the mistreatment of women in immigrant communities at home or support costly and dangerous interventions abroad. They want to get and spend. Rousing a nation of shoppers against injustice is always a hard task, and it seems to me that one of the chief functions of Anglo-American intellectuals is to provide respectable reasons for staying quiet.
That so many liberals are prepared to urge quiescence is a scandal. That Southall Black Sisters, Meredith Tax and Gita Sahgal are prepared to fight them is a reason for hope. Their Centre for Secular Space is, by the way, desperately short of money. The rich Quakers and progressives who opened their wallets for Cageprisoners will not fund feminists. If you can afford to help, may I point you in their direction and suggest that there is no worthier cause around?
Friday, March 29, 2013
Stratfor - Israel's Insightful Cynicism
Excellent analysis.
-----
Israel's Insightful Cynicism
March 27, 2013
By Robert D. Kaplan
Chief Geopolitical Analyst, Stratfor
Israel is in the process of watching a peace treaty unravel. I don't mean the one with Egypt, but the one with Syria. No, I'm not crazy. Since Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy in 1974, the Israelis have had a de facto peace agreement of sorts with the al Assad family. After all, there were clear red lines that both sides knew they shouldn't cross, as well as reasonable predictability on both sides. Forget about the uplifting rhetoric, the requirement to exchange ambassadors and the other public policy frills that normally define peace treaties. What counts in this case is that both sides observed limits and constraints, so that the contested border between them was secure. Even better, because there was no formal peace agreement in writing, neither side had to make inconvenient public and strategic concessions. Israel did not have to give up the Golan Heights, for example. And if Syria stepped over a red line in Lebanon, or say, sought a nuclear capacity as it did, Israel was free to punish it through targeted military strikes. There was usefully no peace treaty that Israel would have had to violate.
Of course, the Syrians built up a chemical arsenal and invited the Iranians all over their country and Lebanon. But no formal treaty in the real world -- given the nature of the Syrian regime -- would likely have prevented those things. In an imperfect world of naked power, the al Assads were at least tolerable. Moreover, they represented a minority sect, which prevented Syria from becoming a larger and much more powerful version of radical, Sunni Arab Gaza. In February 1993 in The Atlantic Monthly, I told readers that Syria was not a state but a writhing underworld of sectarian and ethnic divides and that the al Assads might exit the stage through an Alawite mini-state in the northwest of their country that could be quietly supported by the Israeli security services. That may yet come to pass.
Israeli political leaders may periodically tell the media that Bashar al Assad's days are numbered, but that does not necessarily mean Israelis themselves believe that is an altogether good scenario. Indeed, I strongly suspect that, for example, when the Israelis and the Russians meet, they have much in common regarding Syria. Russia is supporting the al Assad regime through arms transfers by sea and through Iraq and Iran. Israelis may see some benefits in this. Russian President Vladimir Putin may actually enjoy his meetings with Israelis -- who likely don't lecture him about human rights and the evils of the al Assad regime the way the Americans do.
True, a post-al Assad Syria may undermine Iranian influence in the Levant, which would be a great benefit to Israel, as well as to the United States. On the other hand, a post-al Assad Syria will probably be an anarchic mess in which the Iranians will skillfully back proxy guerrilla groups and still be able to move weapons around. Again, al Assad is the devil you know. And the fact that he is no longer, functionally speaking, the president of Syria but, rather, the country's leading warlord, presents challenges that Israelis would prefer not to face.
What about Hezbollah, in this admittedly cynical Israeli view? Hezbollah is not a strategic threat to Israel. Hezbollah fighters are not about to march en masse over the border into Haifa and Tiberias. Anti-missile systems like Iron Dome and David's Sling could reasonably contain the military threat from the north. Then there are Israel's bomb shelters -- a one-time only expense. Hezbollah, moreover, needs Israel. For without a powerful Israel, Hezbollah would be robbed of the existential adversary that provides Hezbollah with its immense prestige in the Lebanese political universe, making Hezbollah so much more than just another Shiite group battling Sunnis.
Israel's war against Hezbollah in 2006 is known as a disaster. But it did have its positive side effects: Israel has had seven years of relative peace on its northern border, even as the war usefully exposed many inadequacies in the Israeli military and reserve system that had been building for years and were henceforth decisively repaired, making Israel stronger as a consequence.
Threats abound, truly. The collapse of the al Assad regime may lead to a weapons free-for-all -- just like in post-Gadhafi Libya -- that might force Israel to "mow the lawn" again in southern Lebanon. As for Hassan Nasrallah, the charismatic and capable Hezbollah leader, maybe he, too, is the devil you know, informally obeying red lines with Israel since 2006. Nasrallah appears to be less extreme than his deputy, Naim Qassim, who would take over if Nasrallah were ever assassinated by the Israelis, unless the Sunnis in a Lebanon and Syria thrown into utter, post-al Assad chaos assassinate him sooner.
Then there is Gaza: once again, like southern Lebanon, "mow the lawn" once or twice a decade, though this might be harder in a post-Arab Spring geopolitical environment because of the greater danger of unhinging Israeli-Egyptian relations. Still, in Gaza there is no existential threat, nor a real solution, regardless of what the diplomats say. Idealists in the West talk about peace; realists inside Israel talk about spacing out limited wars by enough years so that Israeli society can continue to thrive in the meantime. As one highly placed Israeli security analyst explained to me, the East Coast of the United States and the Caribbean have periodic hurricanes. After each one, people rebuild, even as they are aware that a decade or so down the road there will be another hurricane. Israel's wars are like that, he said.
Presently a real underlying worry for Israel appears to be Jordan. Yes, King Abdullah has so far expertly manipulated the growing unrest there, but to speculate about the collapse of the Hashemite dynasty is only prudent. More anarchy. More reason to heed Ariel Sharon's analysis of four decades ago to the effect that Jordan is the real Palestinian state, more so than the West Bank. And because Jordan and Saudi Arabia could conceivably unravel in coming decades, maybe Israel should seek to avoid attacking Iran -- which along with Israel is the only real state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Iranian Plateau. Iran may have a repulsive regime, but its society is probably healthier than most in the Arab world. So there is some hope.
You get the picture. Israel had a convenient situation for decades, surrounded as it was by stable Arab dictatorships. Israel could promote itself as the region's only real democracy, even as it quietly depended on the likes of Hosni Mubarak, the al Assad clan and the Hashemites to ensure order and more-or-less few surprises. Now dictators are falling and anarchy is on the rise. Fighting state armies of the kind that the Arab dictators built in wars in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 was simpler compared totoday's wars: Because the Arabs never really believed in their dysfunctional states, they didn't always fight very well in state-organized formations. But sub-state militaries like Hezbollah and Hamas have been more of a challenge. In the old days, Israel could destroy an Egyptian air force on the ground and solve its security dilemma in the south. Nowadays, to repeat, there are no solutions for Israel: only sub-state adversaries that hide among civilian concentrations in order to attack your own civilian concentrations. No peace ever, therefore, just periodic wars, hopefully spaced-out.
The Middle East today has turned out perfectly if you are a Jewish West Bank settler. The divisions within Palestinian ranks, coupled with the increasing anarchy of the Arab world, mean the opportunities for territorial concessions on Israel's part have diminished. In fact, Israel's only option may be more unilateral withdrawals. That is probably the only thing the settlers have to worry about.
But the Zionist dream lives on. Jerusalem and much of the rest of Israel are thriving. Light rail and pedestrian walkways make Jerusalem more vibrant than ever. The Arabs in the Old City survive well -- under the circumstances, that is -- on the "Jewish" side of the "fence," where the standard of living and quality of life is so much better than on the Arab side. The "fence" is both a monstrosity in abstract moralistic terms and a practical solution in an age of repeated diplomatic failure and fewer and fewer diplomatic opportunities. From 28 percent of the gross domestic product in the mid-1970s, Israeli military spending is down to between 6 and 8 percent of the country's GDP. Life is good in Israel. The unemployment rate is lower than in the United States and Europe, despite high housing costs and the need for reform in health care and education. One could argue that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- so vilified in the West -- has not handled the economy altogether badly.
But what about idealism? What about a better, more humane Middle East? What about the wise and talented statesmen who periodically see opportunities where others see none? What about slowing down Israel's drift to a quasi-Apartheid society, characterized by Israeli domination of the more numerous Arabs and something certainly not in Israel's interest? These are all real things to constantly keep in mind and to struggle for. But the Levant remains a zero-sum struggle for physical survival. So it is a place where there will always be benefits to dealing with strong dictators. Given their geographical circumstances, Israelis can be forgiven their cynicism.
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Israel's Insightful Cynicism
March 27, 2013
By Robert D. Kaplan
Chief Geopolitical Analyst, Stratfor
Israel is in the process of watching a peace treaty unravel. I don't mean the one with Egypt, but the one with Syria. No, I'm not crazy. Since Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy in 1974, the Israelis have had a de facto peace agreement of sorts with the al Assad family. After all, there were clear red lines that both sides knew they shouldn't cross, as well as reasonable predictability on both sides. Forget about the uplifting rhetoric, the requirement to exchange ambassadors and the other public policy frills that normally define peace treaties. What counts in this case is that both sides observed limits and constraints, so that the contested border between them was secure. Even better, because there was no formal peace agreement in writing, neither side had to make inconvenient public and strategic concessions. Israel did not have to give up the Golan Heights, for example. And if Syria stepped over a red line in Lebanon, or say, sought a nuclear capacity as it did, Israel was free to punish it through targeted military strikes. There was usefully no peace treaty that Israel would have had to violate.
Of course, the Syrians built up a chemical arsenal and invited the Iranians all over their country and Lebanon. But no formal treaty in the real world -- given the nature of the Syrian regime -- would likely have prevented those things. In an imperfect world of naked power, the al Assads were at least tolerable. Moreover, they represented a minority sect, which prevented Syria from becoming a larger and much more powerful version of radical, Sunni Arab Gaza. In February 1993 in The Atlantic Monthly, I told readers that Syria was not a state but a writhing underworld of sectarian and ethnic divides and that the al Assads might exit the stage through an Alawite mini-state in the northwest of their country that could be quietly supported by the Israeli security services. That may yet come to pass.
Israeli political leaders may periodically tell the media that Bashar al Assad's days are numbered, but that does not necessarily mean Israelis themselves believe that is an altogether good scenario. Indeed, I strongly suspect that, for example, when the Israelis and the Russians meet, they have much in common regarding Syria. Russia is supporting the al Assad regime through arms transfers by sea and through Iraq and Iran. Israelis may see some benefits in this. Russian President Vladimir Putin may actually enjoy his meetings with Israelis -- who likely don't lecture him about human rights and the evils of the al Assad regime the way the Americans do.
True, a post-al Assad Syria may undermine Iranian influence in the Levant, which would be a great benefit to Israel, as well as to the United States. On the other hand, a post-al Assad Syria will probably be an anarchic mess in which the Iranians will skillfully back proxy guerrilla groups and still be able to move weapons around. Again, al Assad is the devil you know. And the fact that he is no longer, functionally speaking, the president of Syria but, rather, the country's leading warlord, presents challenges that Israelis would prefer not to face.
What about Hezbollah, in this admittedly cynical Israeli view? Hezbollah is not a strategic threat to Israel. Hezbollah fighters are not about to march en masse over the border into Haifa and Tiberias. Anti-missile systems like Iron Dome and David's Sling could reasonably contain the military threat from the north. Then there are Israel's bomb shelters -- a one-time only expense. Hezbollah, moreover, needs Israel. For without a powerful Israel, Hezbollah would be robbed of the existential adversary that provides Hezbollah with its immense prestige in the Lebanese political universe, making Hezbollah so much more than just another Shiite group battling Sunnis.
Israel's war against Hezbollah in 2006 is known as a disaster. But it did have its positive side effects: Israel has had seven years of relative peace on its northern border, even as the war usefully exposed many inadequacies in the Israeli military and reserve system that had been building for years and were henceforth decisively repaired, making Israel stronger as a consequence.
Threats abound, truly. The collapse of the al Assad regime may lead to a weapons free-for-all -- just like in post-Gadhafi Libya -- that might force Israel to "mow the lawn" again in southern Lebanon. As for Hassan Nasrallah, the charismatic and capable Hezbollah leader, maybe he, too, is the devil you know, informally obeying red lines with Israel since 2006. Nasrallah appears to be less extreme than his deputy, Naim Qassim, who would take over if Nasrallah were ever assassinated by the Israelis, unless the Sunnis in a Lebanon and Syria thrown into utter, post-al Assad chaos assassinate him sooner.
Then there is Gaza: once again, like southern Lebanon, "mow the lawn" once or twice a decade, though this might be harder in a post-Arab Spring geopolitical environment because of the greater danger of unhinging Israeli-Egyptian relations. Still, in Gaza there is no existential threat, nor a real solution, regardless of what the diplomats say. Idealists in the West talk about peace; realists inside Israel talk about spacing out limited wars by enough years so that Israeli society can continue to thrive in the meantime. As one highly placed Israeli security analyst explained to me, the East Coast of the United States and the Caribbean have periodic hurricanes. After each one, people rebuild, even as they are aware that a decade or so down the road there will be another hurricane. Israel's wars are like that, he said.
Presently a real underlying worry for Israel appears to be Jordan. Yes, King Abdullah has so far expertly manipulated the growing unrest there, but to speculate about the collapse of the Hashemite dynasty is only prudent. More anarchy. More reason to heed Ariel Sharon's analysis of four decades ago to the effect that Jordan is the real Palestinian state, more so than the West Bank. And because Jordan and Saudi Arabia could conceivably unravel in coming decades, maybe Israel should seek to avoid attacking Iran -- which along with Israel is the only real state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Iranian Plateau. Iran may have a repulsive regime, but its society is probably healthier than most in the Arab world. So there is some hope.
You get the picture. Israel had a convenient situation for decades, surrounded as it was by stable Arab dictatorships. Israel could promote itself as the region's only real democracy, even as it quietly depended on the likes of Hosni Mubarak, the al Assad clan and the Hashemites to ensure order and more-or-less few surprises. Now dictators are falling and anarchy is on the rise. Fighting state armies of the kind that the Arab dictators built in wars in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 was simpler compared totoday's wars: Because the Arabs never really believed in their dysfunctional states, they didn't always fight very well in state-organized formations. But sub-state militaries like Hezbollah and Hamas have been more of a challenge. In the old days, Israel could destroy an Egyptian air force on the ground and solve its security dilemma in the south. Nowadays, to repeat, there are no solutions for Israel: only sub-state adversaries that hide among civilian concentrations in order to attack your own civilian concentrations. No peace ever, therefore, just periodic wars, hopefully spaced-out.
The Middle East today has turned out perfectly if you are a Jewish West Bank settler. The divisions within Palestinian ranks, coupled with the increasing anarchy of the Arab world, mean the opportunities for territorial concessions on Israel's part have diminished. In fact, Israel's only option may be more unilateral withdrawals. That is probably the only thing the settlers have to worry about.
But the Zionist dream lives on. Jerusalem and much of the rest of Israel are thriving. Light rail and pedestrian walkways make Jerusalem more vibrant than ever. The Arabs in the Old City survive well -- under the circumstances, that is -- on the "Jewish" side of the "fence," where the standard of living and quality of life is so much better than on the Arab side. The "fence" is both a monstrosity in abstract moralistic terms and a practical solution in an age of repeated diplomatic failure and fewer and fewer diplomatic opportunities. From 28 percent of the gross domestic product in the mid-1970s, Israeli military spending is down to between 6 and 8 percent of the country's GDP. Life is good in Israel. The unemployment rate is lower than in the United States and Europe, despite high housing costs and the need for reform in health care and education. One could argue that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- so vilified in the West -- has not handled the economy altogether badly.
But what about idealism? What about a better, more humane Middle East? What about the wise and talented statesmen who periodically see opportunities where others see none? What about slowing down Israel's drift to a quasi-Apartheid society, characterized by Israeli domination of the more numerous Arabs and something certainly not in Israel's interest? These are all real things to constantly keep in mind and to struggle for. But the Levant remains a zero-sum struggle for physical survival. So it is a place where there will always be benefits to dealing with strong dictators. Given their geographical circumstances, Israelis can be forgiven their cynicism.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
The Media Imperialists - Morsi's anti-semitic comments finally reported
Wow. Powerful and important story. Best read at the original site, there are lots of links to follow in the text.
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The Media Imperialists
Gatestone Institute
by Samuel Westrop
March 20, 2013
When the New York Times finally decided in January to report the anti-Semitic comments made by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood President, Mohammed Morsi, almost two weeks after the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] broke the story, the report prompted further coverage in newspapers across the world, and even forced a statement from the White House in condemnation of the remarks.
But why did it take so long? While hundreds of articles have labeled, say, the Israeli politician Naftali Bennett an "extremist", why does the media try to avoid criticizing actual despots and extremists in other countries?
In a number of interviews, uncovered by MEMRI in January, President Morsi condemned Zionists -- and Jews -- by describing them as "bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs." Morsi called for "military resistance in Palestine against these Zionist criminals assaulting the land of Palestine and Palestinians". Another video, also unearthed by MEMRI, showed Morsi addressing a crowd in the Nile Delta, urging Egyptians to "nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews."
In June 2012, major media outlets completely ignored a video posted online, which showed Morsi chanting: "Jihad is our path. And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration."
Why did most newspapers hesitate to criticize Morsi in the first place? One would at least expect some kind of coverage from the Western media of unfolding events, especially in solidarity with their Egyptian counterparts. More Egyptian journalists have been prosecuted for insulting Morsi during his six months in office than during Mubarak's thirty years in power.
The media eventually broke its silence over Morsi's comments after criticism from a number of commentators, including a piece by Forbes' writer, Richard Behar, who wrote:
"Needless to say, this was HUGE NEWS for American mass media! Only it wasn't. (Knock, knock, New York Times? Anybody home?) In fact, to be fair to the paper of record, not a single major outlet has covered it. Not AP or Reuters. Not CBS News or CNN. Not Time magazine or U.S. News & World Report. Not the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today … Most would agree that, even in the internet age, the Times is still the leading agenda-setter for major media … But it does seem to avoid covering Islamist incitement against Jews (and Christians) like the plagues."
Once the New York Times finally reported the Morsi story, other newspapers across the world followed suit. Well, not all of them did. The British Independent has not carried a single mention of the story. It has, however, run dozens of condemnatory articles on, for example, Naftali Bennett.
Provocative stories -- mostly untrue and usually concerning Jews -- appear, by newspaper editors, to be considered more important. A few weeks ago, the Independent ran a story: "Did Israeli troops deliberately provoke boy, only to shoot him in the back?" Needless to say, the article did not even begin to corroborate the accusatory headline.
Even those papers that did report Morsi's comments managed to devote far more column inches to the ostensible immorality in Israel of Bennett's position. Yet Bennett has never uttered anything remotely so violent as Morsi's call for Arabs to nurture their children to hate the Jews.
Further, even though New York Times eventually did cover the Morsi story, his comments were presented as an aberration. There was no reference to the institutionalized anti-Jewish and pro-terror sentiment rooted deep within Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood's own website features articles denying the Holocaust and warning Muslims against the exploitative nature of the "Jewish character." Other articles advocate jihad and martyrdom, condemn Egypt's peace treaty with Israel and denounce all forms of negotiation or compromise. All of this goes unreported.
Back in May 2012, New York Times journalist David Kirkpatrick responded to readers' questions about Egypt's elections. Answering an inquiry about anti-Semitism in Egypt, Kirkpatrick dismissed the claim and downplayed the idea that the Brotherhood was hostile to Israel:
"I have not seen or heard any slurs against Jews on the campaign trail, and I do not think that has figured in the campaign in any way. … It may be interesting to note which candidates are most hostile to Israel. Not the Islamists. Mohamed Morsi and Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh are relatively positive about the importance of the peace."
Sky News has been one of the few media outlets to offer some accurate journalism. Foreign editor Tim Marshall wrote:
"Describing Jews as sons of pigs and monkeys is commonplace throughout the Middle East, it is routinely repeated on the street, in mosques, in TV debates, in cartoons, and in newspaper articles.
…
In Europe, when Europeans say things such as expressed above, we recognise them as 'Fascistic'. When expressed by people in some other parts of the globe we appear frightened to call things what they are."
Morsi faced the (somewhat forced) opprobrium of the West only after a number of commentators condemned the media's silence. Other equally outspoken extremists escape criticism completely. Palestinian President Mohammed Abbas, regularly praised as a "moderate" by Western media, has said of suicide bombers that, "Allah loves the martyr." He has described wanted terrorists as "heroes fighting for freedom," and recently said that, "We have a legitimate right to direct our guns against Israeli occupation. It is forbidden to use these guns against Palestinians. … Our rifles, all our rifles are aimed at the occupation."
Palestinian Media Watch has uncovered further evidence of such aggressive rhetoric by Abbas's government. Recently, on Fatah's 48th anniversary, a television broadcast by the Palestinian Authority's television station, showed a new film, "Revolution until Victory," about the history of the Fatah movement. The program declared that Europe had "suffered a tragedy by providing refuge for the Jews," and that, "faced with the Jews' schemes, Europe could not bear their character traits, monopolies, corruption, and their control and climbing up positions in government."
Similarly, amid the tumult of the protests and marches in Pakistan last month the only clear inference from the media's reporting was that Tahir ul Qadri, the leading figure behind the demonstrations, was harmless – even a welcome influence. The Guardian explained:
"Qadri has no interest in introducing Taliban-style sharia law. He was best known for his unexceptional career as an elected member of parliament and the 600-page fatwa, or religious ruling, that he issued against terrorism and suicide bombing."
The Guardian and others completely ignored Qadri's efforts to ensure that those who blaspheme should be executed:
"For three days from November 14 to 17, 1985 Dr Qadri presented his arguments continuously before the Federal Sharia Court of Pakistan to determine the quantum of punishment to be awarded to a person guilty of contempt of the finality of the Holy Prophet … He established, on evidence from the Quran and Sunna, that a person guilty of contempt of the finality of the Holy Prophet … deserved death sentence and the punishment will be imposed as Hadd. … The crime is so sanguine that even his repentance cannot exempt him from the penalty of death."
This move was particularly aimed at Pakistan's much-persecuted Ahmadiyya minority, whom Qadri describes as "heretics."
While Egypt's Morsi describes Jews as "apes and pigs," arrests his critics and violently suppresses all protest, Turkey's Islamist government jails journalists and political dissidents, murders Kurds and supports terrorist financing groups such as the Humanitarian Relief Foundation. Despite this, the London Times's leading article recently opined:
"Political Islam is perfectly compatible with democracy. Turkey has been governed since 2012 by the Justice and Development Party, an Islamist organisation. There is no necessary reason that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt should, having won an election, exercise power autocratically."
In November 1998, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research quoted the then-mayor of Istanbul who, in June 1997, during a meeting organized by the municipality to celebrate the city's conquest by the Ottoman Turks, said, "The Jews started to oppress the Muslims of Palestine in the name of political Judaism which is called Zionism. Today the image of the Jew is no different from that of the Nazis." That mayor's name was Recep Tayyip Erdogan; he later became, and still is, the Prime Minister of Turkey -- a man whom President Obama describes as a personal friend. Turkey is a member of NATO, and has a government which, as illustrated by The Times, is regarded as "moderate."
It is easy to forget that before the uprising in Syria, the media described Bashar al-Assad as a "moderate" and a "reformer," and Vogue magazine published a glowing profile of his wife. Even then, however, all dissent in Syria was harshly suppressed, political prisoners were executed and Syrian Palestinians were denied equal rights – all either laundered or overlooked by the Western media.
Assad's father was described in the same terms. In 1977, the Washington Post, welcoming a meeting between President Carter and Hafez al-Assad, wrote that Assad was "considered a moderate" and commended his "flexibility" in dealing with Israel [Washington Post, May 8, 1977, "Carter-Assad Meeting in Geneva Underlines Syria's Key Role", Stuart Auerbach]. The same Hafez Assad -- establishing a tradition continued today by his son, Bashar -- would later slaughter tens of thousands of his own people and violently suppress all political dissent.
Why does the mainstream media require Assad to murder 60,000 people before newspapers can consider him a brutal dictator? Why do, say, Naftali Bennett's statements receive front-page coverage while Erdogan's and Abbas's bigotries escape media mention completely?
Is it possible that many in the West are so desperate to support "moderates," whether or not they exist, that they embrace any figure who, on the face of it, seems slightly less extreme or corrupt than the existing despot?
The naivety of this desperation is far outweighed by the other possibility: a number of Western commentators regard ideological figureheads such as Morsi to be bulwarks against Western interference in the East (whether military, cultural or ideological) – most often described by Islamists and their Western apologists as a modern-day "imperialism".
The BBC, for example, upon finally reporting Morsi's anti-Semitic comments, decided to sanitize his words, claiming: "In the clip from Palestinian broadcaster Al-Quds TV, Mr Morsi referred to Jewish settlers as 'occupiers of Palestine' and 'warmongers.'" As monitoring group BBC Watch notes, Al Quds TV is not merely a "Palestinian broadcaster;" it is a television station owned and run by the Palestinian terror group Hamas. Moreover, Morsi never mentioned "Jewish settlers;" his anti-Semitic, pro-terror remarks condemned all of Israel's Jewish population.Meanwhile, the Guardian has painted a sympathetic picture of Islamist terrorists complicit in murderous attacks upon civilians, published pieces praising Morsi's recent power grab as a move to "protect against judicial repression" and has produced editorials claiming criticism of Morsi is an attack on the Egyptians' democratic aspirations. Guardian columnist and associate editor Seamus Milne has condemned purported Western attempts to crush the "anti-imperialist" Muslim Brotherhood's rise to power:
"The fact that they [the Arab uprisings] kicked off against western-backed dictatorships meant they posed an immediate threat to the strategic order … Since the day Hosni Mubarak fell in Egypt, there has been a relentless counter-drive by the western powers and their Gulf allies to buy off, crush or hijack the Arab revolutions. … The original crucial link between western imperial power and the Zionist project became a permanent strategic alliance after the establishment of Israel – throughout the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians, multiple wars, 44 years of military occupation and the continuing illegal colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The unconditional nature of that alliance, which remains the pivot of US policy in the Middle East, is one reason why democratically elected Arab governments are likely to find it harder to play patsy to US power than the dictatorial Mubaraks and Gulf monarchs."
"Anti-imperialists" enjoy a powerful legitimacy, provided by Western commentators, predicated on the idea that the most violent of extremists is still better than the decadence and supremacy of Western influence. As a consequence, the media can safely ignore the iniquities of many violent demagogues. Israeli politicians can be condemned as Western oppressors while the murderous or bigoted actions of collectivist ideologies and their cheerleaders are, in the eyes of much of the media, a compassionate product of their environment -- former colonies indefinitely corrupted by the past misdeeds of the West.
As the academic and author Barry Rubin has asked, what of the lonely authentic reformers in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere, who receive no support at all from Western media? Their message of freedom and democracy is lost in the media's rush to extoll the virtues of the "moderate" Abbas, the "moderate" Erdogan, the "moderate" Qadri and the "moderate" Assad. If there is Western "imperialism" at all, it can be found in the Guardian and New York Times, as their journalists impose their brand of "moderation" onto the people of the East.
-----------
The Media Imperialists
Gatestone Institute
by Samuel Westrop
March 20, 2013
When the New York Times finally decided in January to report the anti-Semitic comments made by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood President, Mohammed Morsi, almost two weeks after the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] broke the story, the report prompted further coverage in newspapers across the world, and even forced a statement from the White House in condemnation of the remarks.
But why did it take so long? While hundreds of articles have labeled, say, the Israeli politician Naftali Bennett an "extremist", why does the media try to avoid criticizing actual despots and extremists in other countries?
In a number of interviews, uncovered by MEMRI in January, President Morsi condemned Zionists -- and Jews -- by describing them as "bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs." Morsi called for "military resistance in Palestine against these Zionist criminals assaulting the land of Palestine and Palestinians". Another video, also unearthed by MEMRI, showed Morsi addressing a crowd in the Nile Delta, urging Egyptians to "nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews."
In June 2012, major media outlets completely ignored a video posted online, which showed Morsi chanting: "Jihad is our path. And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration."
Why did most newspapers hesitate to criticize Morsi in the first place? One would at least expect some kind of coverage from the Western media of unfolding events, especially in solidarity with their Egyptian counterparts. More Egyptian journalists have been prosecuted for insulting Morsi during his six months in office than during Mubarak's thirty years in power.
The media eventually broke its silence over Morsi's comments after criticism from a number of commentators, including a piece by Forbes' writer, Richard Behar, who wrote:
"Needless to say, this was HUGE NEWS for American mass media! Only it wasn't. (Knock, knock, New York Times? Anybody home?) In fact, to be fair to the paper of record, not a single major outlet has covered it. Not AP or Reuters. Not CBS News or CNN. Not Time magazine or U.S. News & World Report. Not the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today … Most would agree that, even in the internet age, the Times is still the leading agenda-setter for major media … But it does seem to avoid covering Islamist incitement against Jews (and Christians) like the plagues."
Once the New York Times finally reported the Morsi story, other newspapers across the world followed suit. Well, not all of them did. The British Independent has not carried a single mention of the story. It has, however, run dozens of condemnatory articles on, for example, Naftali Bennett.
Provocative stories -- mostly untrue and usually concerning Jews -- appear, by newspaper editors, to be considered more important. A few weeks ago, the Independent ran a story: "Did Israeli troops deliberately provoke boy, only to shoot him in the back?" Needless to say, the article did not even begin to corroborate the accusatory headline.
Even those papers that did report Morsi's comments managed to devote far more column inches to the ostensible immorality in Israel of Bennett's position. Yet Bennett has never uttered anything remotely so violent as Morsi's call for Arabs to nurture their children to hate the Jews.
Further, even though New York Times eventually did cover the Morsi story, his comments were presented as an aberration. There was no reference to the institutionalized anti-Jewish and pro-terror sentiment rooted deep within Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood's own website features articles denying the Holocaust and warning Muslims against the exploitative nature of the "Jewish character." Other articles advocate jihad and martyrdom, condemn Egypt's peace treaty with Israel and denounce all forms of negotiation or compromise. All of this goes unreported.
Back in May 2012, New York Times journalist David Kirkpatrick responded to readers' questions about Egypt's elections. Answering an inquiry about anti-Semitism in Egypt, Kirkpatrick dismissed the claim and downplayed the idea that the Brotherhood was hostile to Israel:
"I have not seen or heard any slurs against Jews on the campaign trail, and I do not think that has figured in the campaign in any way. … It may be interesting to note which candidates are most hostile to Israel. Not the Islamists. Mohamed Morsi and Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh are relatively positive about the importance of the peace."
Sky News has been one of the few media outlets to offer some accurate journalism. Foreign editor Tim Marshall wrote:
"Describing Jews as sons of pigs and monkeys is commonplace throughout the Middle East, it is routinely repeated on the street, in mosques, in TV debates, in cartoons, and in newspaper articles.
…
In Europe, when Europeans say things such as expressed above, we recognise them as 'Fascistic'. When expressed by people in some other parts of the globe we appear frightened to call things what they are."
Morsi faced the (somewhat forced) opprobrium of the West only after a number of commentators condemned the media's silence. Other equally outspoken extremists escape criticism completely. Palestinian President Mohammed Abbas, regularly praised as a "moderate" by Western media, has said of suicide bombers that, "Allah loves the martyr." He has described wanted terrorists as "heroes fighting for freedom," and recently said that, "We have a legitimate right to direct our guns against Israeli occupation. It is forbidden to use these guns against Palestinians. … Our rifles, all our rifles are aimed at the occupation."
Palestinian Media Watch has uncovered further evidence of such aggressive rhetoric by Abbas's government. Recently, on Fatah's 48th anniversary, a television broadcast by the Palestinian Authority's television station, showed a new film, "Revolution until Victory," about the history of the Fatah movement. The program declared that Europe had "suffered a tragedy by providing refuge for the Jews," and that, "faced with the Jews' schemes, Europe could not bear their character traits, monopolies, corruption, and their control and climbing up positions in government."
Similarly, amid the tumult of the protests and marches in Pakistan last month the only clear inference from the media's reporting was that Tahir ul Qadri, the leading figure behind the demonstrations, was harmless – even a welcome influence. The Guardian explained:
"Qadri has no interest in introducing Taliban-style sharia law. He was best known for his unexceptional career as an elected member of parliament and the 600-page fatwa, or religious ruling, that he issued against terrorism and suicide bombing."
The Guardian and others completely ignored Qadri's efforts to ensure that those who blaspheme should be executed:
"For three days from November 14 to 17, 1985 Dr Qadri presented his arguments continuously before the Federal Sharia Court of Pakistan to determine the quantum of punishment to be awarded to a person guilty of contempt of the finality of the Holy Prophet … He established, on evidence from the Quran and Sunna, that a person guilty of contempt of the finality of the Holy Prophet … deserved death sentence and the punishment will be imposed as Hadd. … The crime is so sanguine that even his repentance cannot exempt him from the penalty of death."
This move was particularly aimed at Pakistan's much-persecuted Ahmadiyya minority, whom Qadri describes as "heretics."
While Egypt's Morsi describes Jews as "apes and pigs," arrests his critics and violently suppresses all protest, Turkey's Islamist government jails journalists and political dissidents, murders Kurds and supports terrorist financing groups such as the Humanitarian Relief Foundation. Despite this, the London Times's leading article recently opined:
"Political Islam is perfectly compatible with democracy. Turkey has been governed since 2012 by the Justice and Development Party, an Islamist organisation. There is no necessary reason that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt should, having won an election, exercise power autocratically."
In November 1998, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research quoted the then-mayor of Istanbul who, in June 1997, during a meeting organized by the municipality to celebrate the city's conquest by the Ottoman Turks, said, "The Jews started to oppress the Muslims of Palestine in the name of political Judaism which is called Zionism. Today the image of the Jew is no different from that of the Nazis." That mayor's name was Recep Tayyip Erdogan; he later became, and still is, the Prime Minister of Turkey -- a man whom President Obama describes as a personal friend. Turkey is a member of NATO, and has a government which, as illustrated by The Times, is regarded as "moderate."
It is easy to forget that before the uprising in Syria, the media described Bashar al-Assad as a "moderate" and a "reformer," and Vogue magazine published a glowing profile of his wife. Even then, however, all dissent in Syria was harshly suppressed, political prisoners were executed and Syrian Palestinians were denied equal rights – all either laundered or overlooked by the Western media.
Assad's father was described in the same terms. In 1977, the Washington Post, welcoming a meeting between President Carter and Hafez al-Assad, wrote that Assad was "considered a moderate" and commended his "flexibility" in dealing with Israel [Washington Post, May 8, 1977, "Carter-Assad Meeting in Geneva Underlines Syria's Key Role", Stuart Auerbach]. The same Hafez Assad -- establishing a tradition continued today by his son, Bashar -- would later slaughter tens of thousands of his own people and violently suppress all political dissent.
Why does the mainstream media require Assad to murder 60,000 people before newspapers can consider him a brutal dictator? Why do, say, Naftali Bennett's statements receive front-page coverage while Erdogan's and Abbas's bigotries escape media mention completely?
Is it possible that many in the West are so desperate to support "moderates," whether or not they exist, that they embrace any figure who, on the face of it, seems slightly less extreme or corrupt than the existing despot?
The naivety of this desperation is far outweighed by the other possibility: a number of Western commentators regard ideological figureheads such as Morsi to be bulwarks against Western interference in the East (whether military, cultural or ideological) – most often described by Islamists and their Western apologists as a modern-day "imperialism".
The BBC, for example, upon finally reporting Morsi's anti-Semitic comments, decided to sanitize his words, claiming: "In the clip from Palestinian broadcaster Al-Quds TV, Mr Morsi referred to Jewish settlers as 'occupiers of Palestine' and 'warmongers.'" As monitoring group BBC Watch notes, Al Quds TV is not merely a "Palestinian broadcaster;" it is a television station owned and run by the Palestinian terror group Hamas. Moreover, Morsi never mentioned "Jewish settlers;" his anti-Semitic, pro-terror remarks condemned all of Israel's Jewish population.Meanwhile, the Guardian has painted a sympathetic picture of Islamist terrorists complicit in murderous attacks upon civilians, published pieces praising Morsi's recent power grab as a move to "protect against judicial repression" and has produced editorials claiming criticism of Morsi is an attack on the Egyptians' democratic aspirations. Guardian columnist and associate editor Seamus Milne has condemned purported Western attempts to crush the "anti-imperialist" Muslim Brotherhood's rise to power:
"The fact that they [the Arab uprisings] kicked off against western-backed dictatorships meant they posed an immediate threat to the strategic order … Since the day Hosni Mubarak fell in Egypt, there has been a relentless counter-drive by the western powers and their Gulf allies to buy off, crush or hijack the Arab revolutions. … The original crucial link between western imperial power and the Zionist project became a permanent strategic alliance after the establishment of Israel – throughout the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians, multiple wars, 44 years of military occupation and the continuing illegal colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The unconditional nature of that alliance, which remains the pivot of US policy in the Middle East, is one reason why democratically elected Arab governments are likely to find it harder to play patsy to US power than the dictatorial Mubaraks and Gulf monarchs."
"Anti-imperialists" enjoy a powerful legitimacy, provided by Western commentators, predicated on the idea that the most violent of extremists is still better than the decadence and supremacy of Western influence. As a consequence, the media can safely ignore the iniquities of many violent demagogues. Israeli politicians can be condemned as Western oppressors while the murderous or bigoted actions of collectivist ideologies and their cheerleaders are, in the eyes of much of the media, a compassionate product of their environment -- former colonies indefinitely corrupted by the past misdeeds of the West.
As the academic and author Barry Rubin has asked, what of the lonely authentic reformers in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere, who receive no support at all from Western media? Their message of freedom and democracy is lost in the media's rush to extoll the virtues of the "moderate" Abbas, the "moderate" Erdogan, the "moderate" Qadri and the "moderate" Assad. If there is Western "imperialism" at all, it can be found in the Guardian and New York Times, as their journalists impose their brand of "moderation" onto the people of the East.
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
CIA operating drone base in Saudi Arabia
For those who oppose drone strikes (an indefensible position in my opinion - see the Moral Maze episode on this topic), this news story is interesting, as the drone base was constructed to reduce civilian casualties.
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CIA operating drone base in Saudi Arabia, US media reveal
BBC News
6 February 2013
The US Central Intelligence Agency has been operating a secret airbase for unmanned drones in Saudi Arabia for the past two years.
...
[C]onstruction was ordered after a December 2009 cruise missile strike in Yemen, according to the New York Times. It was the first strike ordered by the Obama administration, and ended in disaster, with dozens of civilians, including women and children, killed.
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CIA operating drone base in Saudi Arabia, US media reveal
BBC News
6 February 2013
The US Central Intelligence Agency has been operating a secret airbase for unmanned drones in Saudi Arabia for the past two years.
...
[C]onstruction was ordered after a December 2009 cruise missile strike in Yemen, according to the New York Times. It was the first strike ordered by the Obama administration, and ended in disaster, with dozens of civilians, including women and children, killed.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
More Israel-bashing at the UN - the "Universal Periodic Review"
Israel in the firing line for refusing to participate in this little farce at the UN:
An anti-Semitic agenda at the UN
Jerusalem Post
01/29/2013
Israel has taken a stand against suffering through a review by a council that commends Syria and demonizes its southern neighbor.
Just days after the UN put on a show about Holocaust remembrance, it is business as usual in terms of demonizing and encouraging hatred of Jews in the present. In Geneva, the UN’s top human rights body, the Human Rights Council, is conducting its so-called “Universal Periodic Review” (UPR), and Israel was supposed to arrive before the firing squad on January 29 to listen to Iran itemize the failings of "the Zionist entity."
....
During the UPR, country representatives turn up in Geneva while diplomats from other states proceed to make comments and recommendations on improving the country's human rights record. Since the country can “accept” or “reject” those recommendations, it is in its interest to line up friendly participants, a disingenuous role willingly played only by rogue states. At the end, the President of the Council thanks the country concerned, regardless of the statements made by its representatives, the recommendations it has rejected, or its actual human rights record.
So here’s how the UPR rubber hit the road of crimes against humanity in Syria. On October 7, 2011, the Syrian vice-minister of foreign affairs and his entourage took their places in the Council chamber. And then the Cubans said: “the Syrian government is working for the human rights of its people.” The North Koreans said: “we commend Syria on its efforts taken to maintain security and stability.” The Iranians said: “we appreciate the efforts of the government of Syria to promote and protect human rights.” Ditto Sudan, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Algeria, Lebanon, China, Zimbabwe, Burma/Myanmar, and so on.
Four days later, on behalf of the three countries charged with compiling recommendations, Mexico reported to the Council: “Syria received a total of 179 recommendations…It is a pleasure to inform you that 98 recommendations were accepted and 26 shall be considered.” Among the recommendations that "did not enjoy the support" of Syria were “immediately end attacks on peaceful protesters and bring violators to account,” “put an end to secret detentions” and “allow journalists to freely exercise their profession.” At the end of this stage of the UPR, the President of the Council turned to Syria and signed off with “I thank both you and your delegation for your participation in the UPR.”
At the time, there were 2,600 dead Syrian citizens at the hands of their own government. And Assad got the message about the human rights bona fides of the UN.
The next and final stage of the UPR took place in Geneva on March 15, 2012 – by which time there were 11,000 dead. On that occasion, the Council formally adopted the so-called “outcome” of the UPR – a report containing no findings and no decision to take action. It was gaveled through without comment from the President with these words: “May I now propose that the Council adopts the decision on the outcome of the Universal Periodic Review of Syria?” I see no objection.”
There are now over 60,000 dead in Syria.
...
The discrimination against Israel by the UN human rights system is not hard to find. The UN Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda of 10 items, one reserved for condemning Israel and one for considering all other 192 UN members. Almost 40 percent of all Council resolutions condemning specific countries have been directed at Israel alone. There have been more special sessions on Israel than any other country. Israel is the only UN state excluded from full membership in any of the UN’s regional groups, where key negotiations and information-sharing occurs.
The official UN document entitled “summary of stakeholder submissions,” which is intended to drive Israel’s UPR, includes allegations from NGOs that object to “the Jewish character of the state,” and demand that “five million Palestinians” should “return” to Israel to seal the deal.
...
After another Council investigation on settlements was initiated last year, Israel said enough; it would not cooperate with the Council, which entailed not attending the UPR session today. Its absence at Tuesday’s UPR is the first time that anybody has cared that the hatemongering might take place in the country’s absence.
...
An anti-Semitic agenda at the UN
Jerusalem Post
01/29/2013
Israel has taken a stand against suffering through a review by a council that commends Syria and demonizes its southern neighbor.
Just days after the UN put on a show about Holocaust remembrance, it is business as usual in terms of demonizing and encouraging hatred of Jews in the present. In Geneva, the UN’s top human rights body, the Human Rights Council, is conducting its so-called “Universal Periodic Review” (UPR), and Israel was supposed to arrive before the firing squad on January 29 to listen to Iran itemize the failings of "the Zionist entity."
....
During the UPR, country representatives turn up in Geneva while diplomats from other states proceed to make comments and recommendations on improving the country's human rights record. Since the country can “accept” or “reject” those recommendations, it is in its interest to line up friendly participants, a disingenuous role willingly played only by rogue states. At the end, the President of the Council thanks the country concerned, regardless of the statements made by its representatives, the recommendations it has rejected, or its actual human rights record.
So here’s how the UPR rubber hit the road of crimes against humanity in Syria. On October 7, 2011, the Syrian vice-minister of foreign affairs and his entourage took their places in the Council chamber. And then the Cubans said: “the Syrian government is working for the human rights of its people.” The North Koreans said: “we commend Syria on its efforts taken to maintain security and stability.” The Iranians said: “we appreciate the efforts of the government of Syria to promote and protect human rights.” Ditto Sudan, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Algeria, Lebanon, China, Zimbabwe, Burma/Myanmar, and so on.
Four days later, on behalf of the three countries charged with compiling recommendations, Mexico reported to the Council: “Syria received a total of 179 recommendations…It is a pleasure to inform you that 98 recommendations were accepted and 26 shall be considered.” Among the recommendations that "did not enjoy the support" of Syria were “immediately end attacks on peaceful protesters and bring violators to account,” “put an end to secret detentions” and “allow journalists to freely exercise their profession.” At the end of this stage of the UPR, the President of the Council turned to Syria and signed off with “I thank both you and your delegation for your participation in the UPR.”
At the time, there were 2,600 dead Syrian citizens at the hands of their own government. And Assad got the message about the human rights bona fides of the UN.
The next and final stage of the UPR took place in Geneva on March 15, 2012 – by which time there were 11,000 dead. On that occasion, the Council formally adopted the so-called “outcome” of the UPR – a report containing no findings and no decision to take action. It was gaveled through without comment from the President with these words: “May I now propose that the Council adopts the decision on the outcome of the Universal Periodic Review of Syria?” I see no objection.”
There are now over 60,000 dead in Syria.
...
The discrimination against Israel by the UN human rights system is not hard to find. The UN Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda of 10 items, one reserved for condemning Israel and one for considering all other 192 UN members. Almost 40 percent of all Council resolutions condemning specific countries have been directed at Israel alone. There have been more special sessions on Israel than any other country. Israel is the only UN state excluded from full membership in any of the UN’s regional groups, where key negotiations and information-sharing occurs.
The official UN document entitled “summary of stakeholder submissions,” which is intended to drive Israel’s UPR, includes allegations from NGOs that object to “the Jewish character of the state,” and demand that “five million Palestinians” should “return” to Israel to seal the deal.
...
After another Council investigation on settlements was initiated last year, Israel said enough; it would not cooperate with the Council, which entailed not attending the UPR session today. Its absence at Tuesday’s UPR is the first time that anybody has cared that the hatemongering might take place in the country’s absence.
...
Friday, January 18, 2013
Anti-GM? Then you are anti-science, anti-environment, pro-hunger
A brilliant article about one environmental campaigner's intellectual journey on GM. A must-read. Greenpeace and Europe do not come out of this well.
There's a video and comment thread at the original posting.
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Anti-GM? Then you are anti-science, anti-environment, pro-hunger
Mark Lynas
Lecture to Oxford Farming Conference
3 January 2013
I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.
As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.
So I guess you’ll be wondering – what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.
When I first heard about Monsanto’s GM soya I knew exactly what I thought. Here was a big American corporation with a nasty track record, putting something new and experimental into our food without telling us. Mixing genes between species seemed to be about as unnatural as you can get – here was humankind acquiring too much technological power; something was bound to go horribly wrong. These genes would spread like some kind of living pollution. It was the stuff of nightmares.
These fears spread like wildfire, and within a few years GM was essentially banned in Europe, and our worries were exported by NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Africa, India and the rest of Asia, where GM is still banned today. This was the most successful campaign I have ever been involved with.
This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag – this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we didn’t realise at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.
For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change. I published my first book on global warming in 2004, and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than just a collection of anecdotes.
So I had to back up the story of my trip to Alaska with satellite data on sea ice, and I had to justify my pictures of disappearing glaciers in the Andes with long-term records of mass balance of mountain glaciers. That meant I had to learn how to read scientific papers, understand basic statistics and become literate in very different fields from oceanography to paleoclimate, none of which my degree in politics and modern history helped me with a great deal.
I found myself arguing constantly with people who I considered to be incorrigibly anti-science, because they wouldn’t listen to the climatologists and denied the scientific reality of climate change. So I lectured them about the value of peer-review, about the importance of scientific consensus and how the only facts that mattered were the ones published in the most distinguished scholarly journals.
My second climate book, Six Degrees, was so sciency that it even won the Royal Society science books prize, and climate scientists I had become friendly with would joke that I knew more about the subject than them. And yet, incredibly, at this time in 2008 I was still penning screeds in the Guardian attacking the science of GM – even though I had done no academic research on the topic, and had a pretty limited personal understanding. I don’t think I’d ever read a peer-reviewed paper on biotechnology or plant science even at this late stage.
Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian article. In particular one critic said to me: so you’re opposed to GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you also opposed to the wheel because because it is marketed by the big auto companies?
So I did some reading. And I discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths.
I’d assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals. It turned out that pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.
I’d assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers needing fewer inputs.
I’d assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.
I’d assumed that no-one wanted GM. Actually what happened was that Bt cotton was pirated into India and roundup ready soya into Brazil because farmers were so eager to use them.
I’d assumed that GM was dangerous. It turned out that it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding using mutagenesis for example; GM just moves a couple of genes, whereas conventional breeding mucks about with the entire genome in a trial and error way.
But what about mixing genes between unrelated species? The fish and the tomato? Turns out viruses do that all the time, as do plants and insects and even us – it’s called gene flow.
But this was still only the beginning. So in my third book The God Species I junked all the environmentalist orthodoxy at the outset and tried to look at the bigger picture on a planetary scale.
And this is the challenge that faces us today: we are going to have to feed 9.5 billion hopefully much less poor people by 2050 on about the same land area as we use today, using limited fertiliser, water and pesticides and in the context of a rapidly-changing climate.
Let’s unpack this a bit. I know in a previous year’s lecture in this conference there was the topic of population growth. This area too is beset by myths. People think that high rates of fertility in the developing world are the big issue – in other words, poor people are having too many children, and we therefore need either family planning or even something drastic like mass one-child policies.
The reality is that global average fertility is down to about 2.5 – and if you consider that natural replacement is 2.2, this figure is not much above that. So where is the massive population growth coming from? It is coming because of declining infant mortality – more of today’s youngsters are growing up to have their own children rather than dying of preventable diseases in early childhood.
The rapid decline in infant mortality rates is one of the best news stories of our decade and the heartland of this great success story is sub-Saharan Africa. It’s not that there are legions more children being born – in fact, in the words of Hans Rosling, we are already at ‘peak child’. That is, about 2 billion children are alive today, and there will never be more than that because of declining fertility.
But so many more of these 2 billion children will survive into adulthood today to have their own children. They are the parents of the young adults of 2050. That’s the source of the 9.5 billion population projection for 2050. You don’t have to have lost a child, God forbid, or even be a parent, to know that declining infant mortality is a good thing.
So how much food will all these people need? According to the latest projections, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we are looking at a global demand increase of well over 100% by mid-century. This is almost entirely down to GDP growth, especially in developing countries.
In other words, we need to produce more food not just to keep up with population but because poverty is gradually being eradicated, along with the widespread malnutrition that still today means close to 800 million people go to bed hungry each night. And I would challenge anyone in a rich country to say that this GDP growth in poor countries is a bad thing.
But as a result of this growth we have very serious environmental challenges to tackle. Land conversion is a large source of greenhouse gases, and perhaps the greatest source of biodiversity loss. This is another reason why intensification is essential – we have to grow more on limited land in order to save the rainforests and remaining natural habitats from the plough.
We also have to deal with limited water – not just depleting aquifers but also droughts that are expected to strike with increasing intensity in the agricultural heartlands of continents thanks to climate change. If we take more water from rivers we accelerate biodiversity loss in these fragile habitats.
We also need to better manage nitrogen use: artificial fertiliser is essential to feed humanity, but its inefficient use means dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and many coastal areas around the world, as well as eutrophication in fresh water ecosystems.
It is not enough to sit back and hope that technological innovation will solve our problems. We have to be much more activist and strategic than that. We have to ensure that technological innovation moves much more rapidly, and in the right direction for those who most need it.
In a sense we’ve been here before. When Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb in 1968, he wrote: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The advice was explicit – in basket-case countries like India, people might as well starve sooner rather than later, and therefore food aid to them should be eliminated to reduce population growth.
It was not pre-ordained that Ehrlich would be wrong. In fact, if everyone had heeded his advice hundreds of millions of people might well have died needlessly. But in the event, malnutrition was cut dramatically, and India became food self-sufficient, thanks to Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution.
It is important to recall that Borlaug was equally as worried about population growth as Ehrlich. He just thought it was worth trying to do something about it. He was a pragmatist because he believed in doing what was possible, but he was also an idealist because he believed that people everywhere deserved to have enough to eat.
So what did Norman Borlaug do? He turned to science and technology. Humans are a tool-making species – from clothes to ploughs, technology is primarily what distinguishes us from other apes. And much of this work was focused on the genome of major domesticated crops – if wheat, for example, could be shorter and put more effort into seed-making rather than stalks, then yields would improve and grain loss due to lodging would be minimised.
Before Borlaug died in 2009 he spent many years campaigning against those who for political and ideological reasons oppose modern innovation in agriculture. To quote: “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”
And, thanks to supposedly environmental campaigns spread from affluent countries, we are perilously close to this position now. Biotechnology has not been stopped, but it has been made prohibitively expensive to all but the very biggest corporations.
It now costs tens of millions to get a crop through the regulatory systems in different countries. In fact the latest figures I’ve just seen from CropLife suggest it costs $139 million to move from discovering a new crop trait to full commercialisation, so open-source or public sector biotech really does not stand a chance.
There is a depressing irony here that the anti-biotech campaigners complain about GM crops only being marketed by big corporations when this is a situation they have done more than anyone to help bring about.
In the EU the system is at a standstill, and many GM crops have been waiting a decade or more for approval but are permanently held up by the twisted domestic politics of anti-biotech countries like France and Austria. Around the whole world the regulatory delay has increased to more than 5 and a half years now, from 3.7 years back in 2002. The bureaucratic burden is getting worse.
France, remember, long refused to accept the potato because it was an American import. As one commentator put it recently, Europe is on the verge of becoming a food museum. We well-fed consumers are blinded by romantic nostalgia for the traditional farming of the past. Because we have enough to eat, we can afford to indulge our aesthetic illusions.
But at the same time the growth of yields worldwide has stagnated for many major food crops, as research published only last month by Jonathan Foley and others in the journal Nature Communications showed. If we don’t get yield growth back on track we are indeed going to have trouble keeping up with population growth and resulting demand, and prices will rise as well as more land being converted from nature to agriculture.
To quote Norman Borlaug again: “I now say that the world has the technology — either available or well advanced in the research pipeline — to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called ‘organic’ methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.”
As Borlaug was saying, perhaps the most pernicious myth of all is that organic production is better, either for people or the environment. The idea that it is healthier has been repeatedly disproved in the scientific literature. We also know from many studies that organic is much less productive, with up to 40-50% lower yields in terms of land area. The Soil Association went to great lengths in a recent report on feeding the world with organic not to mention this productivity gap.
Nor did it mention that overall, if you take into account land displacement effects, organic is also likely worse for biodiversity. Instead they talk about an ideal world where people in the west eat less meat and fewer calories overall so that people in developing countries can have more. This is simplistic nonsense.
If you think about it, the organic movement is at its heart a rejectionist one. It doesn’t accept many modern technologies on principle. Like the Amish in Pennsylvania, who froze their technology with the horse and cart in 1850, the organic movement essentially freezes its technology in somewhere around 1950, and for no better reason.
It doesn’t even apply this idea consistently however. I was reading in a recent Soil Association magazine that it is OK to blast weeds with flamethrowers or fry them with electric currents, but benign herbicides like glyphosate are still a no-no because they are ‘artificial chemicals’.
In reality there is no reason at all why avoiding chemicals should be better for the environment – quite the opposite in fact. Recent research by Jesse Ausubel and colleagues at Rockefeller University looked at how much extra farmland Indian farmers would have had to cultivate today using the technologies of 1961 to get today’s overall yield. The answer is 65 million hectares, an area the size of France.
In China, maize farmers spared 120 million hectares, an area twice the size of France, thanks to modern technologies getting higher yields. On a global scale, between 1961 and 2010 the area farmed grew by only 12%, whilst kilocalories per person rose from 2200 to 2800. So even with three billion more people, everyone still had more to eat thanks to a production increase of 300% in the same period.
So how much land worldwide was spared in the process thanks to these dramatic yield improvements, for which chemical inputs played a crucial role? The answer is 3 billion hectares, or the equivalent of two South Americas. There would have been no Amazon rainforest left today without this improvement in yields. Nor would there be any tigers in India or orang utans in Indonesia. That is why I don’t know why so many of those opposing the use of technology in agriculture call themselves environmentalists.
So where does this opposition come from? There seems to be a widespread assumption that modern technology equals more risk. Actually there are many very natural and organic ways to face illness and early death, as the debacle with Germany’s organic beansprouts proved in 2011. This was a public health catastrophe, with the same number of deaths and injuries as were caused by Chernobyl, because E.-coli probably from animal manure infected organic beansprout seeds imported from Egypt.
In total 53 people died and 3,500 suffered serious kidney failure. And why were these consumers choosing organic? Because they thought it was safer and healthier, and they were more scared of entirely trivial risks from highly-regulated chemical pesticides and fertilisers.
If you look at the situation without prejudice, much of the debate, both in terms of anti-biotech and organic, is simply based on the naturalistic fallacy – the belief that natural is good, and artificial is bad. This is a fallacy because there are plenty of entirely natural poisons and ways to die, as the relatives of those who died from E.-coli poisoning would tell you.
For organic, the naturalistic fallacy is elevated into the central guiding principle for an entire movement. This is irrational and we owe it to the Earth and to our children to do better.
This is not to say that organic farming has nothing to offer – there are many good techniques which have been developed, such as intercropping and companion planting, which can be environmentally very effective, even it they do tend to be highly labour-intensive. Principles of agro-ecology such as recyling nutrients and promoting on-farm diversity should also be taken more seriously everywhere.
But organic is in the way of progress when it refuses to allow innovation. Again using GM as the most obvious example, many third-generation GM crops allow us not to use environmentally-damaging chemicals because the genome of the crop in question has been altered so the plant can protect itself from pests. Why is that not organic?
Organic is also in the way when it is used to take away choice from others. One of the commonest arguments against GM is that organic farmers will be ‘contaminated’ with GM pollen, and therefore no-one should be allowed to use it. So the rights of a well-heeled minority, which come down ultimately to a consumer preference based on aesthetics, trump the rights of everyone else to use improved crops which would benefit the environment.
I am all for a world of diversity, but that means one farming system cannot claim to have a monopoly of virtue and aim at excluding all other options. Why can’t we have peaceful co-existence? This is particularly the case when it shackles us to old technologies which have higher inherent risks than the new.
It seems like almost everyone has to pay homage to ‘organic’ and to question this orthodoxy is unthinkable. Well I am here to question it today.
The biggest risk of all is that we do not take advantage of all sorts of opportunities for innovation because of what is in reality little more than blind prejudice. Let me give you two examples, both regrettably involving Greenpeace.
Last year Greenpeace destroyed a GM wheat crop in Australia, for all the traditional reasons, which I am very familiar with having done it myself. This was publicly funded research carried out by the Commonwealth Scientific Research institute, but no matter. They were against it because it was GM and unnatural.
What few people have since heard is that one of the other trials being undertaken, which Greenpeace activists with their strimmers luckily did not manage to destroy, accidentally found a wheat yield increase of an extraordinary 30%. Just think. This knowledge might never have been produced at all, if Greenpeace had succeeded in destroying this innovation. As the president of the NFU Peter Kendall recently suggeseted, this is analogous to burning books in a library before anyone has been able to read them.
The second example comes from China, where Greenpeace managed to trigger a national media panic by claiming that two dozen children had been used as human guinea pigs in a trial of GM golden rice. They gave no consideration to the fact that this rice is healthier, and could save thousands of children from vitamin A deficiency-related blindness and death each year.
What happened was that the three Chinese scientists named in the Greenpeace press release were publicly hounded and have since lost their jobs, and in an autocratic country like China they are at serious personal risk. Internationally because of over-regulation golden rice has already been on the shelf for over a decade, and thanks to the activities of groups like Greenpeace it may never become available to vitamin-deficient poor people.
This to my mind is immoral and inhumane, depriving the needy of something that would help them and their children because of the aesthetic preferences of rich people far away who are in no danger from Vitamin A shortage. Greenpeace is a $100-million a year multinational, and as such it has moral responsibilities just like any other large company.
The fact that golden rice was developed in the public sector and for public benefit cuts no ice with the antis. Take Rothamsted Research, whose director Maurice Moloney is speaking tomorrow. Last year Rothamsted began a trial of an aphid-resistant GM wheat which would need no pesticides to combat this serious pest.
Because it is GM the antis were determined to destroy it. They failed because of the courage of Professor John Pickett and his team, who took to YouTube and the media to tell the important story of why their research mattered and why it should not be trashed. They gathered thousands of signatures on a petition when the antis could only manage a couple of hundred, and the attempted destruction was a damp squib.
One intruder did manage to scale the fence, however, who turned out to be the perfect stereotypical anti-GM protestor – an old Etonian aristocrat whose colourful past makes our Oxford local Marquess of Blandford look like the model of responsible citizenry.
This high-born activist scattered organic wheat seeds around the trial site in what was presumably a symbolic statement of naturalness. Professor Pickett’s team tell me they had a very low-tech solution to getting rid of it – they went round with a cordless portable hoover to clear it up.
This year, as well as repeating the wheat trial, Rothamsted is working on an omega 3 oilseed that could replace wild fish in food for farmed salmon. So this could help reduce overfishing by allowing land-based feedstocks to be used in aquaculture. Yes it’s GM, so expect the antis to oppose this one too, despite the obvious potential environmental benefits in terms of marine biodiversity.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. So my conclusion here today is very clear: the GM debate is over. It is finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe – over a decade and a half with three trillion GM meals eaten there has never been a single substantiated case of harm. You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food. More to the point, people have died from choosing organic, but no-one has died from eating GM.
Just as I did 10 years ago, Greenpeace and the Soil Association claim to be guided by consensus science, as on climate change. Yet on GM there is a rock-solid scientific consensus, backed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society, health institutes and national science academies around the world. Yet this inconvenient truth is ignored because it conflicts with their ideology.
One final example is the sad story of the GM blight-resistant potato. This was being developed by both the Sainsbury Lab and Teagasc, a publicly-funded institute in Ireland – but the Irish Green Party, whose leader often attends this very conference, was so opposed that they even took out a court case against it.
This is despite the fact that the blight-resistant potato would save farmers from doing 15 fungicide sprays per season, that pollen transfer is not an issue because potatoes are clonally propagated and that the offending gene came from a wild relative of the potato.
There would have been a nice historical resonance to having a blight-resistant potato developed in Ireland, given the million or more who died due to the potato famine in the mid 19th century. It would have been a wonderful thing for Ireland to be the country that defeated blight. But thanks to the Irish Green Party, this is not to be.
And unfortunately the antis now have the bureaucrats on their side. Wales and Scotland are officially GM free, taking medieval superstition as a strategic imperative for devolved governments supposedly guided by science.
It is unfortunately much the same in much of Africa and Asia. India has rejected Bt brinjal, even though it would reduce insecticide applications in the field, and residues on the fruit. The government in India is increasingly in thrall to backward-looking ideologues like Vandana Shiva, who idealise pre-industrial village agriculture despite the historical fact that it was an age of repeated famines and structural insecurity.
In Africa, ‘no GM’ is still the motto for many governments. Kenya for example has actually banned GM foods because of the supposed “health risks” despite the fact that they could help reduce the malnutrition that is still rampant in the country – and malnutrition is by the way a proven health risk, with no further evidence needed. In Kenya if you develop a GM crop which has better nutrition or a higher yield to help poorer farmers then you will go to jail for 10 years.
Thus desperately-needed agricultural innovation is being strangled by a suffocating avalanche of regulations which are not based on any rational scientific assessment of risk. The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food, but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food, because a vocal minority of people in rich countries want their meals to be what they consider natural.
I hope now things are changing. The wonderful Bill and Melinda Gates foundation recently gave $10 million to the John Innes Centre to begin efforts to integrate nitrogen fixing capabilities into major food crops, starting with maize. Yes, Greenpeace, this will be GM. Get over it. If we are going to reduce the global-scale problem of nitrogen pollution then having major crop plants fixing their own nitrogen is a worthy goal.
I know it is politically incorrect to say all this, but we need a a major dose of both international myth-busting and de-regulation. The plant scientists I know hold their heads in their hands when I talk about this with them because governments and so many people have got their sense of risk so utterly wrong, and are foreclosing a vitally necessary technology.
Norman Borlaug is dead now, but I think we honour his memory and his vision when we refuse to give in to politically correct orthodoxies when we know they are incorrect. The stakes are high. If we continue to get this wrong, the life prospects of billions of people will be harmed.
So I challenge all of you today to question your beliefs in this area and to see whether they stand up to rational examination. Always ask for evidence, as the campaigning group Sense About Science advises, and make sure you go beyond the self-referential reports of campaigning NGOs.
But most important of all, farmers should be free to choose what kind of technologies they want to adopt. If you think the old ways are the best, that’s fine. You have that right.
What you don’t have the right to do is to stand in the way of others who hope and strive for ways of doing things differently, and hopefully better. Farmers who understand the pressures of a growing population and a warming world. Who understand that yields per hectare are the most important environmental metric. And who understand that technology never stops developing, and that even the fridge and the humble potato were new and scary once.
So my message to the anti-GM lobby, from the ranks of the British aristocrats and celebrity chefs to the US foodies to the peasant groups of India is this. You are entitled to your views. But you must know by now that they are not supported by science. We are coming to a crunch point, and for the sake of both people and the planet, now is the time for you to get out of the way and let the rest of us get on with feeding the world sustainably.
Thank you.
There's a video and comment thread at the original posting.
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Anti-GM? Then you are anti-science, anti-environment, pro-hunger
Mark Lynas
Lecture to Oxford Farming Conference
3 January 2013
I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.
As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.
So I guess you’ll be wondering – what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.
When I first heard about Monsanto’s GM soya I knew exactly what I thought. Here was a big American corporation with a nasty track record, putting something new and experimental into our food without telling us. Mixing genes between species seemed to be about as unnatural as you can get – here was humankind acquiring too much technological power; something was bound to go horribly wrong. These genes would spread like some kind of living pollution. It was the stuff of nightmares.
These fears spread like wildfire, and within a few years GM was essentially banned in Europe, and our worries were exported by NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Africa, India and the rest of Asia, where GM is still banned today. This was the most successful campaign I have ever been involved with.
This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag – this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we didn’t realise at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.
For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change. I published my first book on global warming in 2004, and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than just a collection of anecdotes.
So I had to back up the story of my trip to Alaska with satellite data on sea ice, and I had to justify my pictures of disappearing glaciers in the Andes with long-term records of mass balance of mountain glaciers. That meant I had to learn how to read scientific papers, understand basic statistics and become literate in very different fields from oceanography to paleoclimate, none of which my degree in politics and modern history helped me with a great deal.
I found myself arguing constantly with people who I considered to be incorrigibly anti-science, because they wouldn’t listen to the climatologists and denied the scientific reality of climate change. So I lectured them about the value of peer-review, about the importance of scientific consensus and how the only facts that mattered were the ones published in the most distinguished scholarly journals.
My second climate book, Six Degrees, was so sciency that it even won the Royal Society science books prize, and climate scientists I had become friendly with would joke that I knew more about the subject than them. And yet, incredibly, at this time in 2008 I was still penning screeds in the Guardian attacking the science of GM – even though I had done no academic research on the topic, and had a pretty limited personal understanding. I don’t think I’d ever read a peer-reviewed paper on biotechnology or plant science even at this late stage.
Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian article. In particular one critic said to me: so you’re opposed to GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you also opposed to the wheel because because it is marketed by the big auto companies?
So I did some reading. And I discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths.
I’d assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals. It turned out that pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.
I’d assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers needing fewer inputs.
I’d assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.
I’d assumed that no-one wanted GM. Actually what happened was that Bt cotton was pirated into India and roundup ready soya into Brazil because farmers were so eager to use them.
I’d assumed that GM was dangerous. It turned out that it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding using mutagenesis for example; GM just moves a couple of genes, whereas conventional breeding mucks about with the entire genome in a trial and error way.
But what about mixing genes between unrelated species? The fish and the tomato? Turns out viruses do that all the time, as do plants and insects and even us – it’s called gene flow.
But this was still only the beginning. So in my third book The God Species I junked all the environmentalist orthodoxy at the outset and tried to look at the bigger picture on a planetary scale.
And this is the challenge that faces us today: we are going to have to feed 9.5 billion hopefully much less poor people by 2050 on about the same land area as we use today, using limited fertiliser, water and pesticides and in the context of a rapidly-changing climate.
Let’s unpack this a bit. I know in a previous year’s lecture in this conference there was the topic of population growth. This area too is beset by myths. People think that high rates of fertility in the developing world are the big issue – in other words, poor people are having too many children, and we therefore need either family planning or even something drastic like mass one-child policies.
The reality is that global average fertility is down to about 2.5 – and if you consider that natural replacement is 2.2, this figure is not much above that. So where is the massive population growth coming from? It is coming because of declining infant mortality – more of today’s youngsters are growing up to have their own children rather than dying of preventable diseases in early childhood.
The rapid decline in infant mortality rates is one of the best news stories of our decade and the heartland of this great success story is sub-Saharan Africa. It’s not that there are legions more children being born – in fact, in the words of Hans Rosling, we are already at ‘peak child’. That is, about 2 billion children are alive today, and there will never be more than that because of declining fertility.
But so many more of these 2 billion children will survive into adulthood today to have their own children. They are the parents of the young adults of 2050. That’s the source of the 9.5 billion population projection for 2050. You don’t have to have lost a child, God forbid, or even be a parent, to know that declining infant mortality is a good thing.
So how much food will all these people need? According to the latest projections, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we are looking at a global demand increase of well over 100% by mid-century. This is almost entirely down to GDP growth, especially in developing countries.
In other words, we need to produce more food not just to keep up with population but because poverty is gradually being eradicated, along with the widespread malnutrition that still today means close to 800 million people go to bed hungry each night. And I would challenge anyone in a rich country to say that this GDP growth in poor countries is a bad thing.
But as a result of this growth we have very serious environmental challenges to tackle. Land conversion is a large source of greenhouse gases, and perhaps the greatest source of biodiversity loss. This is another reason why intensification is essential – we have to grow more on limited land in order to save the rainforests and remaining natural habitats from the plough.
We also have to deal with limited water – not just depleting aquifers but also droughts that are expected to strike with increasing intensity in the agricultural heartlands of continents thanks to climate change. If we take more water from rivers we accelerate biodiversity loss in these fragile habitats.
We also need to better manage nitrogen use: artificial fertiliser is essential to feed humanity, but its inefficient use means dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and many coastal areas around the world, as well as eutrophication in fresh water ecosystems.
It is not enough to sit back and hope that technological innovation will solve our problems. We have to be much more activist and strategic than that. We have to ensure that technological innovation moves much more rapidly, and in the right direction for those who most need it.
In a sense we’ve been here before. When Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb in 1968, he wrote: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The advice was explicit – in basket-case countries like India, people might as well starve sooner rather than later, and therefore food aid to them should be eliminated to reduce population growth.
It was not pre-ordained that Ehrlich would be wrong. In fact, if everyone had heeded his advice hundreds of millions of people might well have died needlessly. But in the event, malnutrition was cut dramatically, and India became food self-sufficient, thanks to Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution.
It is important to recall that Borlaug was equally as worried about population growth as Ehrlich. He just thought it was worth trying to do something about it. He was a pragmatist because he believed in doing what was possible, but he was also an idealist because he believed that people everywhere deserved to have enough to eat.
So what did Norman Borlaug do? He turned to science and technology. Humans are a tool-making species – from clothes to ploughs, technology is primarily what distinguishes us from other apes. And much of this work was focused on the genome of major domesticated crops – if wheat, for example, could be shorter and put more effort into seed-making rather than stalks, then yields would improve and grain loss due to lodging would be minimised.
Before Borlaug died in 2009 he spent many years campaigning against those who for political and ideological reasons oppose modern innovation in agriculture. To quote: “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”
And, thanks to supposedly environmental campaigns spread from affluent countries, we are perilously close to this position now. Biotechnology has not been stopped, but it has been made prohibitively expensive to all but the very biggest corporations.
It now costs tens of millions to get a crop through the regulatory systems in different countries. In fact the latest figures I’ve just seen from CropLife suggest it costs $139 million to move from discovering a new crop trait to full commercialisation, so open-source or public sector biotech really does not stand a chance.
There is a depressing irony here that the anti-biotech campaigners complain about GM crops only being marketed by big corporations when this is a situation they have done more than anyone to help bring about.
In the EU the system is at a standstill, and many GM crops have been waiting a decade or more for approval but are permanently held up by the twisted domestic politics of anti-biotech countries like France and Austria. Around the whole world the regulatory delay has increased to more than 5 and a half years now, from 3.7 years back in 2002. The bureaucratic burden is getting worse.
France, remember, long refused to accept the potato because it was an American import. As one commentator put it recently, Europe is on the verge of becoming a food museum. We well-fed consumers are blinded by romantic nostalgia for the traditional farming of the past. Because we have enough to eat, we can afford to indulge our aesthetic illusions.
But at the same time the growth of yields worldwide has stagnated for many major food crops, as research published only last month by Jonathan Foley and others in the journal Nature Communications showed. If we don’t get yield growth back on track we are indeed going to have trouble keeping up with population growth and resulting demand, and prices will rise as well as more land being converted from nature to agriculture.
To quote Norman Borlaug again: “I now say that the world has the technology — either available or well advanced in the research pipeline — to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called ‘organic’ methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.”
As Borlaug was saying, perhaps the most pernicious myth of all is that organic production is better, either for people or the environment. The idea that it is healthier has been repeatedly disproved in the scientific literature. We also know from many studies that organic is much less productive, with up to 40-50% lower yields in terms of land area. The Soil Association went to great lengths in a recent report on feeding the world with organic not to mention this productivity gap.
Nor did it mention that overall, if you take into account land displacement effects, organic is also likely worse for biodiversity. Instead they talk about an ideal world where people in the west eat less meat and fewer calories overall so that people in developing countries can have more. This is simplistic nonsense.
If you think about it, the organic movement is at its heart a rejectionist one. It doesn’t accept many modern technologies on principle. Like the Amish in Pennsylvania, who froze their technology with the horse and cart in 1850, the organic movement essentially freezes its technology in somewhere around 1950, and for no better reason.
It doesn’t even apply this idea consistently however. I was reading in a recent Soil Association magazine that it is OK to blast weeds with flamethrowers or fry them with electric currents, but benign herbicides like glyphosate are still a no-no because they are ‘artificial chemicals’.
In reality there is no reason at all why avoiding chemicals should be better for the environment – quite the opposite in fact. Recent research by Jesse Ausubel and colleagues at Rockefeller University looked at how much extra farmland Indian farmers would have had to cultivate today using the technologies of 1961 to get today’s overall yield. The answer is 65 million hectares, an area the size of France.
In China, maize farmers spared 120 million hectares, an area twice the size of France, thanks to modern technologies getting higher yields. On a global scale, between 1961 and 2010 the area farmed grew by only 12%, whilst kilocalories per person rose from 2200 to 2800. So even with three billion more people, everyone still had more to eat thanks to a production increase of 300% in the same period.
So how much land worldwide was spared in the process thanks to these dramatic yield improvements, for which chemical inputs played a crucial role? The answer is 3 billion hectares, or the equivalent of two South Americas. There would have been no Amazon rainforest left today without this improvement in yields. Nor would there be any tigers in India or orang utans in Indonesia. That is why I don’t know why so many of those opposing the use of technology in agriculture call themselves environmentalists.
So where does this opposition come from? There seems to be a widespread assumption that modern technology equals more risk. Actually there are many very natural and organic ways to face illness and early death, as the debacle with Germany’s organic beansprouts proved in 2011. This was a public health catastrophe, with the same number of deaths and injuries as were caused by Chernobyl, because E.-coli probably from animal manure infected organic beansprout seeds imported from Egypt.
In total 53 people died and 3,500 suffered serious kidney failure. And why were these consumers choosing organic? Because they thought it was safer and healthier, and they were more scared of entirely trivial risks from highly-regulated chemical pesticides and fertilisers.
If you look at the situation without prejudice, much of the debate, both in terms of anti-biotech and organic, is simply based on the naturalistic fallacy – the belief that natural is good, and artificial is bad. This is a fallacy because there are plenty of entirely natural poisons and ways to die, as the relatives of those who died from E.-coli poisoning would tell you.
For organic, the naturalistic fallacy is elevated into the central guiding principle for an entire movement. This is irrational and we owe it to the Earth and to our children to do better.
This is not to say that organic farming has nothing to offer – there are many good techniques which have been developed, such as intercropping and companion planting, which can be environmentally very effective, even it they do tend to be highly labour-intensive. Principles of agro-ecology such as recyling nutrients and promoting on-farm diversity should also be taken more seriously everywhere.
But organic is in the way of progress when it refuses to allow innovation. Again using GM as the most obvious example, many third-generation GM crops allow us not to use environmentally-damaging chemicals because the genome of the crop in question has been altered so the plant can protect itself from pests. Why is that not organic?
Organic is also in the way when it is used to take away choice from others. One of the commonest arguments against GM is that organic farmers will be ‘contaminated’ with GM pollen, and therefore no-one should be allowed to use it. So the rights of a well-heeled minority, which come down ultimately to a consumer preference based on aesthetics, trump the rights of everyone else to use improved crops which would benefit the environment.
I am all for a world of diversity, but that means one farming system cannot claim to have a monopoly of virtue and aim at excluding all other options. Why can’t we have peaceful co-existence? This is particularly the case when it shackles us to old technologies which have higher inherent risks than the new.
It seems like almost everyone has to pay homage to ‘organic’ and to question this orthodoxy is unthinkable. Well I am here to question it today.
The biggest risk of all is that we do not take advantage of all sorts of opportunities for innovation because of what is in reality little more than blind prejudice. Let me give you two examples, both regrettably involving Greenpeace.
Last year Greenpeace destroyed a GM wheat crop in Australia, for all the traditional reasons, which I am very familiar with having done it myself. This was publicly funded research carried out by the Commonwealth Scientific Research institute, but no matter. They were against it because it was GM and unnatural.
What few people have since heard is that one of the other trials being undertaken, which Greenpeace activists with their strimmers luckily did not manage to destroy, accidentally found a wheat yield increase of an extraordinary 30%. Just think. This knowledge might never have been produced at all, if Greenpeace had succeeded in destroying this innovation. As the president of the NFU Peter Kendall recently suggeseted, this is analogous to burning books in a library before anyone has been able to read them.
The second example comes from China, where Greenpeace managed to trigger a national media panic by claiming that two dozen children had been used as human guinea pigs in a trial of GM golden rice. They gave no consideration to the fact that this rice is healthier, and could save thousands of children from vitamin A deficiency-related blindness and death each year.
What happened was that the three Chinese scientists named in the Greenpeace press release were publicly hounded and have since lost their jobs, and in an autocratic country like China they are at serious personal risk. Internationally because of over-regulation golden rice has already been on the shelf for over a decade, and thanks to the activities of groups like Greenpeace it may never become available to vitamin-deficient poor people.
This to my mind is immoral and inhumane, depriving the needy of something that would help them and their children because of the aesthetic preferences of rich people far away who are in no danger from Vitamin A shortage. Greenpeace is a $100-million a year multinational, and as such it has moral responsibilities just like any other large company.
The fact that golden rice was developed in the public sector and for public benefit cuts no ice with the antis. Take Rothamsted Research, whose director Maurice Moloney is speaking tomorrow. Last year Rothamsted began a trial of an aphid-resistant GM wheat which would need no pesticides to combat this serious pest.
Because it is GM the antis were determined to destroy it. They failed because of the courage of Professor John Pickett and his team, who took to YouTube and the media to tell the important story of why their research mattered and why it should not be trashed. They gathered thousands of signatures on a petition when the antis could only manage a couple of hundred, and the attempted destruction was a damp squib.
One intruder did manage to scale the fence, however, who turned out to be the perfect stereotypical anti-GM protestor – an old Etonian aristocrat whose colourful past makes our Oxford local Marquess of Blandford look like the model of responsible citizenry.
This high-born activist scattered organic wheat seeds around the trial site in what was presumably a symbolic statement of naturalness. Professor Pickett’s team tell me they had a very low-tech solution to getting rid of it – they went round with a cordless portable hoover to clear it up.
This year, as well as repeating the wheat trial, Rothamsted is working on an omega 3 oilseed that could replace wild fish in food for farmed salmon. So this could help reduce overfishing by allowing land-based feedstocks to be used in aquaculture. Yes it’s GM, so expect the antis to oppose this one too, despite the obvious potential environmental benefits in terms of marine biodiversity.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. So my conclusion here today is very clear: the GM debate is over. It is finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe – over a decade and a half with three trillion GM meals eaten there has never been a single substantiated case of harm. You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food. More to the point, people have died from choosing organic, but no-one has died from eating GM.
Just as I did 10 years ago, Greenpeace and the Soil Association claim to be guided by consensus science, as on climate change. Yet on GM there is a rock-solid scientific consensus, backed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society, health institutes and national science academies around the world. Yet this inconvenient truth is ignored because it conflicts with their ideology.
One final example is the sad story of the GM blight-resistant potato. This was being developed by both the Sainsbury Lab and Teagasc, a publicly-funded institute in Ireland – but the Irish Green Party, whose leader often attends this very conference, was so opposed that they even took out a court case against it.
This is despite the fact that the blight-resistant potato would save farmers from doing 15 fungicide sprays per season, that pollen transfer is not an issue because potatoes are clonally propagated and that the offending gene came from a wild relative of the potato.
There would have been a nice historical resonance to having a blight-resistant potato developed in Ireland, given the million or more who died due to the potato famine in the mid 19th century. It would have been a wonderful thing for Ireland to be the country that defeated blight. But thanks to the Irish Green Party, this is not to be.
And unfortunately the antis now have the bureaucrats on their side. Wales and Scotland are officially GM free, taking medieval superstition as a strategic imperative for devolved governments supposedly guided by science.
It is unfortunately much the same in much of Africa and Asia. India has rejected Bt brinjal, even though it would reduce insecticide applications in the field, and residues on the fruit. The government in India is increasingly in thrall to backward-looking ideologues like Vandana Shiva, who idealise pre-industrial village agriculture despite the historical fact that it was an age of repeated famines and structural insecurity.
In Africa, ‘no GM’ is still the motto for many governments. Kenya for example has actually banned GM foods because of the supposed “health risks” despite the fact that they could help reduce the malnutrition that is still rampant in the country – and malnutrition is by the way a proven health risk, with no further evidence needed. In Kenya if you develop a GM crop which has better nutrition or a higher yield to help poorer farmers then you will go to jail for 10 years.
Thus desperately-needed agricultural innovation is being strangled by a suffocating avalanche of regulations which are not based on any rational scientific assessment of risk. The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food, but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food, because a vocal minority of people in rich countries want their meals to be what they consider natural.
I hope now things are changing. The wonderful Bill and Melinda Gates foundation recently gave $10 million to the John Innes Centre to begin efforts to integrate nitrogen fixing capabilities into major food crops, starting with maize. Yes, Greenpeace, this will be GM. Get over it. If we are going to reduce the global-scale problem of nitrogen pollution then having major crop plants fixing their own nitrogen is a worthy goal.
I know it is politically incorrect to say all this, but we need a a major dose of both international myth-busting and de-regulation. The plant scientists I know hold their heads in their hands when I talk about this with them because governments and so many people have got their sense of risk so utterly wrong, and are foreclosing a vitally necessary technology.
Norman Borlaug is dead now, but I think we honour his memory and his vision when we refuse to give in to politically correct orthodoxies when we know they are incorrect. The stakes are high. If we continue to get this wrong, the life prospects of billions of people will be harmed.
So I challenge all of you today to question your beliefs in this area and to see whether they stand up to rational examination. Always ask for evidence, as the campaigning group Sense About Science advises, and make sure you go beyond the self-referential reports of campaigning NGOs.
But most important of all, farmers should be free to choose what kind of technologies they want to adopt. If you think the old ways are the best, that’s fine. You have that right.
What you don’t have the right to do is to stand in the way of others who hope and strive for ways of doing things differently, and hopefully better. Farmers who understand the pressures of a growing population and a warming world. Who understand that yields per hectare are the most important environmental metric. And who understand that technology never stops developing, and that even the fridge and the humble potato were new and scary once.
So my message to the anti-GM lobby, from the ranks of the British aristocrats and celebrity chefs to the US foodies to the peasant groups of India is this. You are entitled to your views. But you must know by now that they are not supported by science. We are coming to a crunch point, and for the sake of both people and the planet, now is the time for you to get out of the way and let the rest of us get on with feeding the world sustainably.
Thank you.
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