Monday, December 17, 2007

Iraq: Mosul Dam catastrophe looms

Saddam's Damn Dam
by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post
November 7, 2007

The surge of U.S. troops in Baghdad is succeeding but deeper structural problems continue to plague the American presence in Iraq. The country's largest dam, 40 kilometers northwest of Mosul, near the Turkish border, spectacularly symbolizes this predicament.

Just after occupying Iraq in April 2003, a report found that Mosul Dam's foundation was "leaking like a sieve and ready to collapse." A more recent, still-classified report from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concludes that "The dam is judged to have an unacceptable annual failure probability." More explicitly, the corps finds the current probability of failure to be "exceptionally high." A senior aid worker calls the dam "a time bomb waiting to go off."

Mosul Dam, formerly known as Saddam Dam (Arabic: Sadd Saddam) is in danger of collapse. That's because the dam was built on unstable bedrock of gypsum that requires a constant infusion of grout to prevent the foundation from eroding and the giant earthen wall from collapsing. Over the years, engineers have pumped into the foundation more than 50,000 tons of a bentonite, cement, water, and air mixture. As the Washington Post explains, "Twenty-four clanging machines churn 24 hours a day to pump grout deep into the dam's base. And sinkholes form periodically as the gypsum dissolves beneath the structure."

Despite these efforts, the dam's condition continues to deteriorate, raising the prospect of its complete collapse. Were this to happen with a reservoir full of water, predicts Engineering News--Record, "as much as 12.5 billion cubic meters of water pooled behind the 3.2-km-long earth-filled impoundment [would go] thundering down the Tigris River Valley toward Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. The wave behind the 110-meter-high crest would take about two hours to reach the city of 1.7 million." In addition, parts of Baghdad (population 7 million) would come under 5 meters of water.

The Army Corps estimates the flood would kill a half-million people immediately, while the aftershocks, such as power outage and drought, would kill many more. (Not coincidentally, Iraq was the site of Noah's Ark.) It would likely be the largest human-induced single loss of life in history.

more...

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Independence for Scotland - how would it work?

A Scottish divorce... who gets the kids?
6/12/07
BBC

It's the divorce settlement from hell. With no pre-nuptial agreement in place, exactly how would Scotland withdraw from the UK, asks Chris Bowlby.

With the Scottish National Party in power in the Edinburgh devolved parliament, talk of independence is back on the agenda. Some remain sceptical that Scottish voters would back such a plan, but the SNP believes it will happen within a decade. From carving up the family property to whose head appears on Scottish stamps, how might it work?


DIVIDING UP THE FAMILY PROPERTY
Oil matters hugely to Scottish nationalists, and most experts assume that, with the North Sea oil fields in Scottish waters, Scotland would get up to 95% of UK oil reserves, and nearer half of the gas. Natural resources would stay where they lie, but all other property is usually divided in these circumstances - as it was when the Czech Republic and Slovakia split in 1992 - according to population share.

That would mean Scotland laying claim to 8 or 9% of all the UK's assets, but valuable shared institutions - such as the security services - are physically sited almost exclusively in England. Most of the UK's wealth can't simply be carted off north of the border so a compensation deal would need to be thrashed out.

Moveable property would need allocating. The Czechs and Slovaks haggled over everything from state airline aircraft to works of art to the contents of every Czechoslovak embassy abroad. What would be Scotland's share of, say, the prestigious British embassy buildings and furnishings in Paris or Washington? And the BBC?

more...

Monday, November 12, 2007

'Che never met God'

The libertian blog Samizdata quotes a funny story from the Times about what happened when Che Guevara's children celebrated their father's anniversary in Iran:

A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between "the left and revolutionary Islam" at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America's "earth-devouring ambitions" were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a "truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union".

Che's daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. "My father never mentioned God," she said, to the consternation of the audience. "He never met God." During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. "By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence," the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.

After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the "supreme guide" of Guevara, was also a man of God. "The Soviet Union is gone," he affirmed. "The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words."

Don't say you haven't been warned, comrade, when you flirt with "revolutionary Islam" as if it were a mild form of liberation theology. ...

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The Israel Lobby in U.S. Strategy

Essential reading:

The Israel Lobby in U.S. Strategy
By George Friedman
Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report
04/09/07

U.S. President George W. Bush made an appearance in Iraq's restive Anbar province on Sept. 3 -- in part to tout the success of the military surge there ahead of the presentation in Washington of the Petraeus report. For the next month or two, the battle over Iraq will be waged in Washington -- and one country will come up over and over again, from any number of directions: Israel. Israel will be invoked as an ally in the war on terrorism -- the reason the United States is in the war in the first place. Some will say that Israel maneuvered the United States into Iraq to serve its own purposes. Some will say it orchestrated 9/11 for its own ends. Others will say that, had the United States supported Israel more resolutely, there would not have been a 9/11.

There is probably no relationship on which people have more diverging views than on that between the United States and Israel. Therefore, since it is going to be invoked in the coming weeks -- and Bush is taking a fairly irrelevant pause at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Australia -- this is an opportune time to consider the geopolitics of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Let's begin with some obvious political points. There is a relatively small Jewish community in the United States, though its political influence is magnified by its strategic location in critical states such as New York and the fact that it is more actively involved in politics than some other ethnic groups.

The Jewish community, as tends to be the case with groups, is deeply divided on many issues. It tends to be united on one issue -- Israel -- but not with the same intensity as in the past, nor with even a semblance of agreement on the specifics. The American Jewish community is as divided as the Israeli Jewish community, with a large segment of people who don't much care thrown in. At the same time, this community donates large sums of money to American and Israeli organizations, including groups that lobby on behalf of Israeli issues in Washington. These lobbying entities lean toward the right wing of Israel's political spectrum, in large part because the Israeli right has tended to govern in the past generation and these groups tend to follow the dominant Israeli strand. It also is because American Jews who contribute to Israel lobby organizations lean right in both Israeli and American politics.

The Israel lobby, which has a great deal of money and experience, is extremely influential in Washington. For decades now, it has done a good job of ensuring that Israeli interests are attended to in Washington, and certainly on some issues it has skewed U.S. policy on the Middle East. There are Jews who practice being shocked at this assertion, but they must not be taken seriously. They know better, which is why they donate money. Others pretend to be shocked at the idea of a lobbyist influencing U.S. policy on the Middle East, but they also need not be taken seriously, because they are trying to influence Washington as well, though they are not as successful. Obviously there is an influential Israel lobby in Washington.

There are, however, two important questions. The first is whether this is in any way unique. Is a strong Israel lobby an unprecedented intrusion into foreign policy? The key question, though, is whether Israeli interests diverge from U.S. interests to the extent that the Israel lobby is taking U.S. foreign policy in directions it wouldn't go otherwise, in directions that counter the U.S. national interest.

Begin with the first question. Prior to both World wars there was extensive debate on whether the United States should intervene in the war. In both cases, the British government lobbied extensively for U.S. intervention on behalf of the United Kingdom. The British made two arguments. The first was that the United States shared a heritage with England -- code for the idea that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants should stand with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The second was that there was a fundamental political affinity between British and U.S. democracy and that it was in the U.S. interest to protect British democracy from German authoritarianism.

Many Americans, including President Franklin Roosevelt, believed both arguments. The British lobby was quite powerful. There was a German lobby as well, but it lacked the numbers, the money and the traditions to draw on.

From a geopolitical point of view, both arguments were weak. The United States and the United Kingdom not only were separate countries, they had fought some bitter wars over the question. As for political institutions, geopolitics, as a method, is fairly insensitive to the moral claims of regimes. It works on the basis of interest. On that basis, an intervention on behalf of the United Kingdom in both wars made sense because it provided a relatively low-cost way of preventing Germany from dominating Europe and challenging American sea power. In the end, it wasn't the lobbying interest, massive though it was, but geopolitical necessity that drove U.S. intervention.

The second question, then, is: Has the Israel lobby caused the United States to act in ways that contravene U.S. interests? For example, by getting the United States to support Israel, did it turn the Arab world against the Americans? Did it support Israeli repression of Palestinians, and thereby generate an Islamist radicalism that led to 9/11? Did it manipulate U.S. policy on Iraq so that the United States invaded Iraq on behalf of Israel? These allegations have all been made. If true, they are very serious charges.

It is important to remember that U.S.-Israeli ties were not extraordinarily close prior to 1967. President Harry Truman recognized Israel, but the United States had not provided major military aid and support. Israel, always in need of an outside supply of weapons, first depended on the Soviet Union, which shipped weapons to Israel via Czechoslovakia. When the Soviets realized that Israeli socialists were anti-Soviet as well, they dropped Israel. Israel's next patron was France. France was fighting to hold on to Algeria and maintain its influence in Lebanon and Syria, both former French protectorates. The French saw Israel as a natural ally. It was France that really created the Israeli air force and provided the first technology for Israeli nuclear weapons.

The United States was actively hostile to Israel during this period. In 1956, following Gamal Abdul Nasser's seizure of power in Egypt, Cairo nationalized the Suez Canal. Without the canal, the British Empire was finished, and ultimately the French were as well. The United Kingdom and France worked secretly with Israel, and Israel invaded the Sinai. Then, in order to protect the Suez Canal from an Israeli-Egyptian war, a Franco-British force parachuted in to seize the canal. President Dwight Eisenhower forced the British and French to withdraw -- as well as the Israelis. U.S.-Israeli relations remained chilly for quite a while.

The break point with France came in 1967. The Israelis, under pressure from Egypt, decided to invade Egypt, Jordan and Syria -- ignoring French President Charles de Gaulle's demand that they not do so. As a result, France broke its alignment with Israel. This was the critical moment in U.S.-Israeli relations. Israel needed a source of weaponry as its national security needs vastly outstripped its industrial base. It was at this point that the Israel lobby in the United States became critical. Israel wanted a relationship with the United States and the Israel lobby brought tremendous pressure to bear, picturing Israel as a heroic, embattled democracy, surrounded by bloodthirsty neighbors, badly needing U.S. help. President Lyndon B. Johnson, bogged down in Vietnam and wanting to shore up his base, saw a popular cause in Israel and tilted toward it.

But there were critical strategic issues as well. Syria and Iraq had both shifted into the pro-Soviet camp, as had Egypt. Some have argued that, had the United States not supported Israel, this would not have happened. This, however, runs in the face of history. It was the United States that forced the Israelis out of the Sinai in 1956, but the Egyptians moved into the Soviet camp anyway. The argument that it was uncritical support for Israel that caused anti-Americanism in the Arab world doesn't hold water. The Egyptians became anti-American in spite of an essentially anti-Israeli position in 1956. By 1957 Egypt was a Soviet ally.

The Americans ultimately tilted toward Israel because of this, not the other way around. Egypt was not only providing the Soviets with naval and air bases, but also was running covert operations in the Arabian Peninsula to bring down the conservative sheikhdoms there, including Saudi Arabia's. The Soviets were seen as using Egypt as a base of operations against the United States. Syria was seen as another dangerous radical power, along with Iraq. The defense of the Arabian Peninsula from radical, pro-Soviet Arab movements, as well as the defense of Jordan, became a central interest of the United States.

Israel was seen as contributing by threatening the security of both Egypt and Syria. The Saudi fear of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was palpable. Riyadh saw the Soviet-inspired liberation movements as threatening Saudi Arabia's survival. Israel was engaged in a covert war against the PLO and related groups, and that was exactly what the Saudis wanted from the late 1960s until the early 1980s. Israel's covert capability against the PLO, coupled with its overt military power against Egypt and Syria, was very much in the American interest and that of its Arab allies. It was a low-cost solution to some very difficult strategic problems at a time when the United States was either in Vietnam or recovering from the war.

The occupation of the Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights in 1967 was not in the U.S. interest. The United States wanted Israel to carry out its mission against Soviet-backed paramilitaries and tie down Egypt and Syria, but the occupation was not seen as part of that mission. The Israelis initially expected to convert their occupation of the territories into a peace treaty, but that only happened, much later, with Egypt. At the Khartoum summit in 1967, the Arabs delivered the famous three noes: No negotiation. No recognition. No peace. Israel became an occupying power. It has never found its balance.

The claim has been made that if the United States forced the Israelis out of the West Bank and Gaza, then it would receive credit and peace would follow. There are three problems with that theory. First, the Israelis did not occupy these areas prior to 1967 and there was no peace. Second, groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah have said that a withdrawal would not end the state of war with Israel. And therefore, third, the withdrawal would create friction with Israel without any clear payoff from the Arabs.

It must be remembered that Egypt and Jordan have both signed peace treaties with Israel and seem not to care one whit about the Palestinians. The Saudis have never risked a thing for the Palestinians, nor have the Iranians. The Syrians have, but they are far more interested in investing in Beirut hotels than in invading Israel. No Arab state is interested in the Palestinians, except for those that are actively hostile. There is Arab and Islamic public opinion and nonstate organizations, but none would be satisfied with Israeli withdrawal. They want Israel destroyed. Even if the United States withdrew all support for Israel, however, Israel would not be destroyed. The radical Arabs do not want withdrawal; they want destruction. And the moderate Arabs don't care about the Palestinians beyond rhetoric.

Now we get to the heart of the matter. If the United States broke ties with Israel, would the U.S. geopolitical position be improved? In other words, if it broke with Israel, would Iran or al Qaeda come to view the United States in a different way? Critics of the Israel lobby argue that, except for U.S. support for Israel, the United States would have better relations in the Muslim world, and would not be targeted by al Qaeda or threatened by Iran. In other words, except for the Israel lobby's influence, the United States would be much more secure.

Al Qaeda does not see Israel by itself as its central problem. Its goal is the resurrection of the caliphate -- and it sees U.S. support for Muslim regimes as the central problem. If the United States abandoned Israel, al Qaeda would still confront U.S. support for countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. For al Qaeda, Israel is an important issue, but for the United States to soothe al Qaeda, it would have to abandon not only Israel, but its non-Islamist allies in the Middle East.

As for Iran, the Iranian rhetoric, as we have said, has never been matched by action. During the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian military purchased weapons and parts from the Israelis. It was more delighted than anyone when Israel destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. Iran's problem with the United States is its presence in Iraq, its naval presence in the Persian Gulf and its support for the Kurds. If Israel disappeared from the face of the Earth, Iran's problems would remain the same.

It has been said that the Israelis inspired the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There is no doubt that Israel was pleased when, after 9/11, the United States saw itself as an anti-Islamist power. Let us remind our more creative readers, however, that benefiting from something does not mean you caused it. However, it has never been clear that the Israelis were all that enthusiastic about invading Iraq. Neoconservative Jews like Paul Wolfowitz were enthusiastic, as were non-Jews like Dick Cheney. But the Israeli view of a U.S. invasion of Iraq was at most mixed, and to some extent dubious. The Israelis liked the Iran-Iraq balance of power and were close allies of Turkey, which certainly opposed the invasion. The claim that Israel supported the invasion comes from those who mistake neoconservatives, many of whom are Jews who support Israel, with Israeli foreign policy, which was much more nuanced than the neoconservatives. The Israelis were not at all clear about what the Americans were doing in Iraq, but they were in no position to complain.

Israeli-U.S. relations have gone through three phases. From 1948 to 1967, the United States supported Israel's right to exist but was not its patron. In the 1967-1991 period, the Israelis were a key American asset in the Cold War. From 1991 to the present, the relationship has remained close but it is not pivotal to either country. Washington cannot help Israel with Hezbollah or Hamas. The Israelis cannot help the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan. If the relationship were severed, it would have remarkably little impact on either country -- though keeping the relationship is more valuable than severing it.

To sum up: There is a powerful Jewish, pro-Israel lobby in Washington, though it was not very successful in the first 20 years or so of Israel's history. When U.S. policy toward Israel swung in 1967 it had far more to do with geopolitical interests than with lobbying. The United States needed help with Egypt and Syria and Israel could provide it. Lobbying appeared to be the key, but it wasn't; geopolitical necessity was. Egypt was anti-American even when the United States was anti-Israeli. Al Qaeda would be anti-American even if the United States were anti-Israel. Rhetoric aside, Iran has never taken direct action against Israel and has much more important things on its plate.

Portraying the Israel lobby as super-powerful behooves two groups: Critics of U.S. Middle Eastern policy and the Israel lobby itself. Critics get to say the U.S. relationship with Israel is the result of manipulation and corruption. Thus, they get to avoid discussing the actual history of Israel, the United States and the Middle East. The lobby benefits from having robust power because one of its jobs is to raise funds -- and the image of a killer lobby opens a lot more pocketbooks than does the idea that both Israel and the United States are simply pursuing their geopolitical interests and that things would go on pretty much the same even without slick lobbying.

The great irony is that the critics of U.S. policy and the Israel lobby both want to believe in the same myth -- that great powers can be manipulated to harm themselves by crafty politicians. The British didn't get the United States into the world wars, and the Israelis aren't maneuvering the Americans into being pro-Israel. Beyond its ability to exert itself on small things, the Israel lobby is powerful in influencing Washington to do what it is going to do anyway. What happens next in Iraq is not up to the Israel lobby -- though it and the Saudi Embassy have a different story.

Monday, October 22, 2007

72 virgins?

The lure of the 72 virgins supposedly awaiting Islamic matyrs should not be underestimated when we try to fathom the causes of these murderous cults. Anyone who doubts the extreme sexual frustration prevalent in Arab society might want to read Infidel, or The Islamist.

Yet what if they were not to receive the full quote of pliant women at all, but instead a packet of Sunmaid?

Virgins? What virgins?
Ibn Warraq
Saturday January 12, 2002
The Guardian

In August, 2001, the American television channel CBS aired an interview with a Hamas activist Muhammad Abu Wardeh, who recruited terrorists for suicide bombings in Israel. Abu Wardeh was quoted as saying: "I described to him how God would compensate the martyr for sacrificing his life for his land. If you become a martyr, God will give you 70 virgins, 70 wives and everlasting happiness." Wardeh was in fact shortchanging his recruits since the rewards in Paradise for martyrs was 72 virgins. But I am running ahead of things .

Since September 11, news stories have repeated the story of suicide bombers and their heavenly rewards, and equally Muslim scholars and Western apologists of Islam have repeated that suicide is forbidden in Islam. Suicide (qatlu nafsi-hi) is not referred to in the Koran but is indeed forbidden in the Traditions (Hadith in Arabic), which are the collected sayings and doings attributed to the Prophet and traced back to him through a series of putatively trustworthy witnesses. They include what was done in his presence that he did not forbid, and even the authoritative sayings and doings of his companions.
But the Hamas spokesman correctly uses the word martyr (shahid) and not suicide bomber, since those who blow themselves up almost daily in Israel and those who died on September 11 were dying in the noblest of all causes, Jihad, which is an incumbent religious duty, established in the Koran and in the Traditions as a divine institution, and enjoined for the purpose of advancing Islam. While suicide is forbidden, martyrdom is everywhere praised, welcomed, and urged: "By the Being in Whose Hand is my life, I love that I should be killed in the way of Allah; then I should be brought back to life and be killed again in His way..."; "The Prophet said, 'Nobody who enters Paradise will ever like to return to this world even if he were offered everything, except the martyr who will desire to return to this world and be killed 10 times for the sake of the great honour that has been bestowed upon him'." [Sahih Muslim, chapters 781, 782, The Merit of Jihad and the Merit of Martyrdom.]

What of the rewards in paradise? The Islamic paradise is described in great sensual detail in the Koran and the Traditions; for instance, Koran sura 56 verses 12 -40 ; sura 55 verses 54-56 ; sura 76 verses 12-22. I shall quote the celebrated Penguin translation by NJ Dawood of sura 56 verses 12- 39: "They shall recline on jewelled couches face to face, and there shall wait on them immortal youths with bowls and ewers and a cup of purest wine (that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason); with fruits of their own choice and flesh of fowls that they relish. And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris, chaste as hidden pearls: a guerdon for their deeds... We created the houris and made them virgins, loving companions for those on the right hand..."

One should note that most translations, even those by Muslims themselves such as A Yusuf Ali, and the British Muslim Marmaduke Pickthall, translate the Arabic (plural) word Abkarun as virgins, as do well-known lexicons such the one by John Penrice. I emphasise this fact since many pudic and embarrassed Muslims claim there has been a mistranslation, that "virgins" should be replaced by "angels". In sura 55 verses 72-74, Dawood translates the Arabic word " hur " as "virgins", and the context makes clear that virgin is the appropriate translation: "Dark-eyed virgins sheltered in their tents (which of your Lord's blessings would you deny?) whom neither man nor jinnee will have touched before." The word hur occurs four times in the Koran and is usually translated as a "maiden with dark eyes".

Two points need to be noted. First, there is no mention anywhere in the Koran of the actual number of virgins available in paradise, and second, the dark-eyed damsels are available for all Muslims, not just martyrs. It is in the Islamic Traditions that we find the 72 virgins in heaven specified: in a Hadith (Islamic Tradition) collected by Al-Tirmidhi (died 892 CE [common era*]) in the Book of Sunan (volume IV, chapters on The Features of Paradise as described by the Messenger of Allah [Prophet Muhammad], chapter 21, About the Smallest Reward for the People of Paradise, (Hadith 2687). The same hadith is also quoted by Ibn Kathir (died 1373 CE ) in his Koranic commentary (Tafsir) of Surah Al-Rahman (55), verse 72: "The Prophet Muhammad was heard saying: 'The smallest reward for the people of paradise is an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine, and ruby, as wide as the distance from Al-Jabiyyah [a Damascus suburb] to Sana'a [Yemen]'."

Modern apologists of Islam try to downplay the evident materialism and sexual implications of such descriptions, but, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam says, even orthodox Muslim theologians such as al Ghazali (died 1111 CE) and Al-Ash'ari (died 935 CE) have "admitted sensual pleasures into paradise". The sensual pleasures are graphically elaborated by Al-Suyuti (died 1505 ), Koranic commentator and polymath. He wrote: "Each time we sleep with a houri we find her virgin. Besides, the penis of the Elected never softens. The erection is eternal; the sensation that you feel each time you make love is utterly delicious and out of this world and were you to experience it in this world you would faint. Each chosen one [ie Muslim] will marry seventy [sic] houris, besides the women he married on earth, and all will have appetising vaginas."

One of the reasons Nietzsche hated Christianity was that it "made something unclean out of sexuality", whereas Islam, many would argue, was sex-positive. One cannot imagine any of the Church fathers writing ecstatically of heavenly sex as al-Suyuti did, with the possible exception of St Augustine before his conversion. But surely to call Islam sex-positive is to insult all Muslim women, for sex is seen entirely from the male point of view; women's sexuality is admitted but seen as something to be feared, repressed, and a work of the devil.

Scholars have long pointed out that these images are clearly drawn pictures and must have been inspired by the art of painting. Muhammad, or whoever is responsible for the descriptions, may well have seen Christian miniatures or mosaics representing the gardens of paradise and has interpreted the figures of angels rather literally as those of young men and young women. A further textual influence on the imagery found in the Koran is the work of Ephrem the Syrian [306-373 CE], Hymns on Paradise, written in Syriac, an Aramaic dialect and the language of Eastern Christianity, and a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew and Arabic.

This naturally leads to the most fascinating book ever written on the language of the Koran, and if proved to be correct in its main thesis, probably the most important book ever written on the Koran. Christoph Luxenberg's book, Die Syro-Aramaische Lesart des Koran, available only in German, came out just over a year ago, but has already had an enthusiastic reception, particularly among those scholars with a knowledge of several Semitic languages at Princeton, Yale, Berlin, Potsdam, Erlangen, Aix-en-Provence, and the Oriental Institute in Beirut.

Luxenberg tries to show that many obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic. We cannot go into the technical details of his methodology but it allows Luxenberg, to the probable horror of all Muslim males dreaming of sexual bliss in the Muslim hereafter, to conjure away the wide-eyed houris promised to the faithful in suras XLIV.54; LII.20, LV.72, and LVI.22. Luxenberg 's new analysis, leaning on the Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, yields "white raisins" of "crystal clarity" rather than doe-eyed, and ever willing virgins - the houris. Luxenberg claims that the context makes it clear that it is food and drink that is being offered, and not unsullied maidens or houris.

In Syriac, the word hur is a feminine plural adjective meaning white, with the word "raisin" understood implicitly. Similarly, the immortal, pearl-like ephebes or youths of suras such as LXXVI.19 are really a misreading of a Syriac expression meaning chilled raisins (or drinks) that the just will have the pleasure of tasting in contrast to the boiling drinks promised the unfaithful and damned.

As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next.

· Common era is an alternative to Christian era as a method of historical dating

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Israel v Arabs - the 49th most deadly conflict since WW2

Arab-Israeli Fatalities Rank 49th
by Gunnar Heinsohn and Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
October 8, 2007

The Arab-Israeli conflict is often said, not just by extremists, to be the world's most dangerous conflict – and, accordingly, Israel is judged the world's most belligerent country.

For example, British prime minister Tony Blair told the U.S. Congress in July 2003 that "Terrorism will not be defeated without peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Here it is that the poison is incubated. Here it is that the extremist is able to confuse in the mind of a frighteningly large number of people the case for a Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel." This viewpoint leads many Europeans, among others, to see Israel as the most menacing country on earth.

But is this true? It flies in the face of the well-known pattern that liberal democracies do not aggress; plus, it assumes, wrongly, that the Arab-Israeli conflict is among the most costly in terms of lives lost.

To place the Arab-Israeli fatalities in their proper context, one of the two co-authors, Gunnar Heinsohn, has compiled statistics to rank conflicts since 1950 by the number of human deaths incurred. Note how far down the list is the entry in bold type.

Conflicts since 1950 with over 10,000 Fatalities*

1 40,000,000 Red China, 1949-76 (outright killing, manmade famine, Gulag)
2 10,000,000 Soviet Bloc: late Stalinism, 1950-53; post-Stalinism, to 1987 (mostly Gulag)
3 4,000,000 Ethiopia, 1962-92: Communists, artificial hunger, genocides
4 3,800,000 Zaire (Congo-Kinshasa): 1967-68; 1977-78; 1992-95; 1998-present
5 2,800,000 Korean war, 1950-53
6 1,900,000 Sudan, 1955-72; 1983-2006 (civil wars, genocides)
7 1,870,000 Cambodia: Khmer Rouge 1975-79; civil war 1978-91
8 1,800,000 Vietnam War, 1954-75
9 1,800,000 Afghanistan: Soviet and internecine killings, Taliban 1980-2001
10 1,250,000 West Pakistan massacres in East Pakistan (Bangladesh 1971)
11 1,100,000 Nigeria, 1966-79 (Biafra); 1993-present
12 1,100,000 Mozambique, 1964-70 (30,000) + after retreat of Portugal 1976-92
13 1,000,000 Iran-Iraq-War, 1980-88
14 900,000 Rwanda genocide, 1994
15 875,000 Algeria: against France 1954-62 (675,000); between Islamists and the government 1991-2006 (200,000)
16 850,000 Uganda, 1971-79; 1981-85; 1994-present
17 650,000 Indonesia: Marxists 1965-66 (450,000); East Timor, Papua, Aceh etc, 1969-present (200,000)
18 580,000 Angola: war against Portugal 1961-72 (80,000); after Portugal's retreat (1972-2002)
19 500,000 Brazil against its Indians, up to 1999
20 430,000 Vietnam, after the war ended in 1975 (own people; boat refugees)
21 400,000 Indochina: against France, 1945-54
22 400,000 Burundi, 1959-present (Tutsi/Hutu)
23 400,000 Somalia, 1991-present
24 400,000 North Korea up to 2006 (own people)
25 300,000 Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, 1980s-1990s
26 300,000 Iraq, 1970-2003 (Saddam against minorities)
27 240,000 Columbia, 1946-58; 1964-present
28 200,000 Yugoslavia, Tito regime, 1944-80
29 200,000 Guatemala, 1960-96
30 190,000 Laos, 1975-90
31 175,000 Serbia against Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, 1991-1999
32 150,000 Romania, 1949-99 (own people)
33 150,000 Liberia, 1989-97
34 140,000 Russia against Chechnya, 1994-present
35 150,000 Lebanon civil war, 1975-90
36 140,000 Kuwait War, 1990-91
37 130,000 Philippines: 1946-54 (10,000); 1972-present (120,000)
38 130,000 Burma/Myanmar, 1948-present
39 100,000 North Yemen, 1962-70
40 100,000 Sierra Leone, 1991-present
41 100,000 Albania, 1945-91 (own people)
42 80,000 Iran, 1978-79 (revolution)
43 75,000 Iraq, 2003-present (domestic)
44 75,000 El Salvador, 1975-92
45 70,000 Eritrea against Ethiopia, 1998-2000
46 68,000 Sri Lanka, 1997-present
47 60,000 Zimbabwe, 1966-79; 1980-present
48 60,000 Nicaragua, 1972-91 (Marxists/natives etc,)
49 51,000 Arab-Israeli conflict 1950-present
50 50,000 North Vietnam, 1954-75 (own people)
51 50,000 Tajikistan, 1992-96 (secularists against Islamists)
52 50,000 Equatorial Guinea, 1969-79
53 50,000 Peru, 1980-2000
54 50,000 Guinea, 1958-84
55 40,000 Chad, 1982-90
56 30,000 Bulgaria, 1948-89 (own people)
57 30,000 Rhodesia, 1972-79
58 30,000 Argentina, 1976-83 (own people)
59 27,000 Hungary, 1948-89 (own people)
60 26,000 Kashmir independence, 1989-present
61 25,000 Jordan government vs. Palestinians, 1970-71 (Black September)
62 22,000 Poland, 1948-89 (own people)
63 20,000 Syria, 1982 (against Islamists in Hama)
64 20,000 Chinese-Vietnamese war, 1979
65 19,000 Morocco: war against France, 1953-56 (3,000) and in Western Sahara, 1975-present (16,000)
66 18,000 Congo Republic, 1997-99
67 10,000 South Yemen, 1986 (civil war)

*All figures rounded. Sources: Brzezinski, Z., Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century, 1993; Courtois, S., Le Livre Noir du Communism, 1997; Heinsohn, G., Lexikon der Völkermorde, 1999, 2nd ed.; Heinsohn, G., Söhne und Weltmacht, 2006, 8th ed.; Rummel. R., Death by Government, 1994; Small, M. and Singer, J.D., Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816-1980, 1982; White, M., "Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century," 2003.

This grisly inventory finds the total number of deaths in conflicts since 1950 numbering about 85,000,000. Of that sum, the deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1950 include 32,000 deaths due to Arab state attacks and 19,000 due to Palestinian attacks, or 51,000 in all. Arabs make up roughly 35,000 of these dead and Jewish Israelis make up 16,000.
These figures mean that deaths Arab-Israeli fighting since 1950 amount to just 0.06 percent of the total number of deaths in all conflicts in that period. More graphically, only 1 out of about 1,700 persons killed in conflicts since 1950 has died due to Arab-Israeli fighting.

(Adding the 11,000 killed in the Israeli war of independence, 1947-49, made up of 5,000 Arabs and 6,000 Israeli Jews, does not significantly alter these figures.)

In a different perspective, some 11,000,000 Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, or 0.3 percent, died during the sixty years of fighting Israel, or just 1 out of every 315 Muslim fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent of the 11 million who perished were killed by fellow Muslims.

Comments: (1) Despite the relative non-lethality of the Arab-Israeli conflict, its renown, notoriety, complexity, and diplomatic centrality will probably give it continued out-sized importance in the global imagination. And Israel's reputation will continue to pay the price. (2) Still, it helps to point out the 1-in-1,700 statistic as a corrective, in the hope that one day, this reality will register, permitting the Arab-Israeli conflict to subside to its rightful, lesser place in world politics.

Monday, October 08, 2007

The Oxford Research Group and Metro

This was the front page story in the excrable Metro, a big circulation free London paper. I've blogged before about their editorial excesses, in the Bigley case. This one immediately aroused my suspicions, as 'Oxford Research Group' rang a bell.

Two phrases particularly draw attention from the article, my emphasis added:

* Whatever the problems with Iran, war should be avoided at all costs
* Removing the Taliban from Afghanistan was a major boost for al-Qaeda

The first is clearly just ridiculous (what if the cost was another war that would take more lives), as for the second, I'd love someone to try to explain that one to me.

Al-Qaeda ‘winner of war on terror'
Sunday, October 7, 2007

The 'war on terror' has been a disaster and British forces should be withdrawn from Iraq immediately, a respected think-tank says. Britain's aggressive foreign policy has played into the hands of al- Qaeda and other militant groups, says the Oxford Research Group. It calls for Britain and America to withdraw from Iraq, scale back operations in Afghanistan and halt 'antagonistic practices' such as holding terror suspects without trial.

But, even if such measures were adopted, it would still take 'at least ten years to make up for the mistakes made since 9/11', the group says. 'Failure to make the necessary changes could result in the war on terror lasting decades,' it adds. The think-tank's recommendations are contained in a 148-page report, Towards Sustainable Security – Alternatives To The War On Terror.

Removing the Taliban from Afghanistan was a major boost for al-Qaeda and the invasion of Iraq has turned the country into a training ground for violent jihadists, it says. Report author Paul Rogers said: 'Every aspect of the war on terror has been counterproductive, from the loss of civilian life through to mass detentions without trial. In short, it has been a disaster.

'Whatever the problems with Iran, war should be avoided at all costs – the mistakes already made will be completely overshadowed by the consequences of a war with Iran.' Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Michael Moore MP said: 'The concept of the “war on terror” is now wholly discredited.'

Thursday, September 27, 2007

For once Nanny is right - in defence of the ban

Old news I grant you, but the smoking ban is a subject one or two members of our blog have strong opinions about.

'For once nanny is right
By Oliver Kamm
WHEN, ON the Radio 4 Today programme, David Hockney squared up to Julie Morgan, a Labour MP, he proved an invigorating denouncer of the nanny state. Against Ms Morgan’s arguments for a ban on smoking in public places, Hockney fulminated: “I think you are too bossy, chum. You are dreary.”

New Labour’s least appealing characteristic is its puritanism. Even where it expands private choice — lowering the age of consent for homosexuals — its arguments are exhortatory rather than libertarian. More usually, as on foxhunting, the Government’s instincts are to ban rather than regulate, and to regulate rather than allow people to arrive at private agreements.

Yet in this case the sanctimonious MP merits support. The bluff artist lambasting the Bossy Tendency is wrong. A smoking ban in public places is workable, as the Irish precedent shows, and principled.

Hockney speaks for the smokers’ rights group, Forest. For the group’s chairman, Lord Harris of High Cross, choice on tobacco is a lineal descendant of the “dogged persistence of economic liberals in a century-long struggle against often well-meaning collectivists in all parties”. Yet liberals recognise the problem of what economists call “externalities”: costs or benefits that accrue to someone other than the person responsible for creating them.

Pollution is an externality. Liberals often argue that property rights are a better way of coping with it than regulation. If a factory pollutes an adjoining river, then its owner will have a greater incentive to conserve resources if he has to compensate someone with a property claim to that stretch of river.

If Forest were arguing a consistent libertarian case, it would come up with a comparable scheme for compensating those who suffer from pollution caused by cigarette smoke. Forest has not done that, because it cannot. Private property rights are no solution, because it is impossibly complex to identify all who suffer the inconvenience and discomfort of a smoky atmosphere, and to draw up contracts with them to buy the right to pollute the air.

The right to pollute is not an axiom of a free society like the right to speak, worship or associate. It is the claim of a lobby group portentously appropriating high principle for self-interested ends. To adapt G. K. Chesterton’s advice to another public worthy: chuck it, Hockney.'

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History - Dalrymple on 'Why Intellectuals Like Genocide'

'Twas Andy who drew my attention to this...

Why Intellectuals Like Genocide
by Theodore Dalrymple
July 2007

Seemingly arcane historical disputes can often cast a powerful light on the state of our collective soul. It is for that reason that I like to read books on obscure subjects: they are often more illuminating than books that at first sight are more immediately relevant to our current situation. For, as Emily Dickinson put it, success in indirection lies.

In 2002, the Australian free-lance historian and journalist, Keith Windschuttle, published a book that created a controversy that has still not died down. Entitled ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,’ it sets out to destroy the idea that there had been a genocide of Tasmanian aborigines carried out by the early European settlers of the island.

For about the previous quarter century, it was more or less an historical orthodoxy that there had been such a genocide. Robert Hughes accepted the idea in his best-selling history of early Australia, The Fatal Shore. I accepted it myself, because when I first visited Australia in 1982 I read several books on the subject by professors of history at reputable universities, and rather naively supposed that their work must have been founded on painstaking and honest research, and that they had not misrepresented their original sources.

Windschuttle argued in his book that they had fabricated much of their evidence, and that, contrary to what they claimed, there had been no deliberate policy on the part of the colonial authorities or the local population either to extirpate or kill very large numbers of aborigines. He showed that the historians’ reading of the obscure source materials was either misleading or mendacious.

He sifted the material very carefully and found that there was evidence for the killing of 120 Tasmanian aborigines, either by settlers or by the military and police. Although this does not sound many, in relation to the population of Tasmanian aborigines it was a lot. It is the equivalent in the United States of upwards of 7,000,000, for there were only about 4,000 aborigines (or so it is thought) at any one time in Tasmania.

However, a similar number of settlers were killed by aborigines, and perhaps it is not so very surprising that there was conflict between people of such widely different conceptions of life as the aborigines and the early British settlers. But conflict is not genocide, which entails a plan deliberately to rid the world of a certain population. There was no genocide in Tasmania. The Tasmanian aborigines did indeed die out in the nineteenth century, but largely of disease and as a result of the loss of fertility caused by the venereal disease introduced by the settlers.

After the book was published, there were furious challenges to Windschuttle. Slurs were cast upon him: he was, for example, the Australian equivalent of the holocaust deniers. A book of essays in refutation of his point of view was published; a refutation of the refutation was also published. He appeared all round the country in debates with some of his detractors. As far as I understand it, the massed ranks of the professional historians were unable seriously to dent his argument. A few small errors (which he acknowledged) were found in his book, but not such as to undermine his thesis; in any case, they were very minor by comparison with the wholesale errors of his opponents. He had been much more scrupulous than they.

What struck me at the time about the controversy was the evident fact that a large and influential part of the Australian academy and intelligentsia actually wanted there to have been a genocide. They reacted to Windschuttle’s book like a child who has had a toy snatched from its hand by its elder sibling. You would have thought that a man who discovered that his country had not been founded, as had previously been thought and taught, on genocide would be treated as a national hero. On the contrary, he was held up to execration.

Why should this be? Here I confess that I am entering the world of the ad hominem. I will not be able to prove my assertions beyond reasonable doubt, and other interpretations are possible. However, when it comes to questions of human motivation, it is difficult altogether to avoid the ad hominem.

It is, of course, possible, that the professors and the intelligentsia were so convinced that there had been a genocide, and believed that the evidence that it had taken place so overwhelming, that any person who denied it must have been an extremely bad man. On the other hand, if the evidence was so overwhelming, they should have been able easily to produce sufficient of it in public to convince someone like me (and many others). This they have not done, and so one must conclude that, at the very least, the historical question is an open one. And if the question is still an open one, the fury directed at Windschuttle was quite disproportionate.

I think the explanation lies elsewhere. Australia is known, not without reason, as the Lucky Country. It has virtually every resource known to man. It is a liberal democracy and has been for most of its existence. No one in Australia has ever feared the midnight knock on the door. To live well there requires a good deal less effort than in most places, perhaps anywhere else. The climate in much of the country (the current drought notwithstanding) is very pleasant. Overall, it is probably the best place, certainly among the best places, on earth to live. The fact that it is lucky is not, of course, a consequence of its natural endowments alone, but of what human beings have made of those endowments. Australia is a triumphant success.

This is not to say that everyone in Australia is deliciously happy, or that Australia is a prelapsarian Garden of Eden. People who live there, like people everywhere, have their problems. They go bankrupt, divorce, neglect their children, have accidents, die prematurely, kill themselves, overeat, drink too much, get bored, suffer illnesses, and so forth, just like people everywhere else.

The fact is, however, that political reforms in Australia, whatever they might be, are very unlikely to add much to the sum of human welfare there. Australia confronts human beings with their existential responsibility to make happiness for themselves, and this is sometimes a hard responsibility to face up to. For if you are unhappy in a country like Australia, you have to consider the possibility that the problem lies with you rather than with the conditions that surround you.

This is a disagreeable thing, particularly for an intelligentsia, which is deprived by it of a providential role for itself. What does an intelligentsia do when a country is already as satisfactory in its political arrangements and social institutions as any country has ever been? Intelligentsias do not like the kind of small problems that day to day existence inevitably throws up, such as termites in the woodwork or conflict at work over desk-space: they like to get their intellectual teeth into weightier, meatier problems.

What could be a weightier problem than a prosperous, fortunate country that was founded upon genocide? Clearly, if it was so founded, an intelligentsia is urgently needed to help it emerge from the dark moral labyrinth in which it exists, hitherto blindly. For only an intelligentsia is sufficiently used to thinking in abstractions to be qualified to act as guide to the nation.

Of course, an intelligentsia needs allies, for it is rarely strong enough by itself to dominate and control a society, and oddly enough the genocide school of Tasmanian history has created allies in people who now call themselves Tasmanian aborigines. But – I hear you object – I thought you said that Tasmanian aborigines died out in the nineteenth century (the last one being called Truganini)? Yes, I reply, but that is full-blooded aborigines. Because there were sexual relations between the first settlers and aborigine women, there exist people in Tasmania with aborigine blood running in the veins. Admittedly, that blood is almost as dilute as a homeopath’s medicine, but it is enough for some purposes.

Where there has been genocide, it is only right that there should be apology and, more importantly, reparation. In the case of the aborigines, this can only be restoration of the land to them as a collectivity. Indeed, it has been suggested that half the territory of the island of Tasmania be reserved to aborigines.

These aborigines live indistinguishably from their non-aboriginal neighbours. They speak no language other than English; they do not forage in the bush for food; they have the same jobs and are under no social disability, perhaps because they are also physically indistinguishable from non-aborigines. In fact they are descended to a much greater extent from the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the alleged genocide than from the victims of it. It would therefore be difficult to think of a more obvious attempted fraud perpetrated on a political entity than the claim by Tasmanian ‘aborigines’ to ancestral lands.

Actually, Tasmanian historiography of the genocide school has parallels elsewhere. I remember when I lived for a time in Guatemala reading the most currently-celebrated account of colonial Guatemala, called La patria del criollo. In all of its eight hundred pages the role of epidemic disease in reducing the number of Indians after the arrival of the Spanish was not mentioned even once, not even in passing, though it is almost certain (that is to say as certain as it can be) that the overwhelming cause of the decrease was epidemic disease.

Why was it not mentioned? Because the author wanted to present the current, supposedly lamentable state of Guatemala to be a direct consequence of the colonial era, which was itself a time of genocide. This being the case, there was only one thing to be done: to found the state anew, to start all over again, to build a new state from a better blueprint. It is not very difficult to see what role the intelligentsia would have in constructing the new society: a very powerful, indeed directing one.

The same is true in Australia, of course. If the current state was founded on genocide then, however superficially satisfactory it might appear at first sight, it is necessary to re-found it on a sounder, more ethical basis. And the architects and subsequent owner-managers will, of course, be the intelligentsia; for only they are qualified.

Now Australia is a country that in general, until recently at any rate, has not cherished its intellectuals. It has not accorded them the respect to which they think they are naturally entitled. Indeed, until a couple of decades ago it was common practice for Australian intellectuals to flee their country and live elsewhere, so strong was the anti-intellectual atmosphere of their county. Australia was not a lucky country as far as intellectuals were concerned.

That has changed quite a lot recently, but still intellectuals in Australia are not taken as seriously by the public as they take themselves. Besides, there are now more of them, and competition for attention is therefore greater. And there is nothing much more attention-grabbing than the claim that your current happiness and good fortune is founded on a pile of bones. With a bit of luck, this claim will even turn people neurotic and increase the need for therapists.

It is hardly surprising, then, that when someone came along and challenged the version of history on which their new-found importance in society was to be based, they threw their dolly out of the pram, as the prison wardens in the prison in which I worked used to put it to describe the actions of a prisoner who had lost his temper. The dispute was not just a matter of the interpretation of the contents of old newspapers in Hobart libraries: it went to the very heart of the intelligentsia’s self-conception as society’s conscience and natural leaders.

A conflict over the veracity of footnotes was thus also a conflict also over the proper place of intellectuals in modern society. And Windschuttle was vastly more often right about the footnotes than he was wrong. This was quite unforgivable of him.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

John Gray on Thatcher and Brown

Now that JP has taken against John Gray, the contrarian in me feels compelled to post an article by him. This is an interesting piece on Thatcher and Brown. Don't agree with it all but there's some interesting observations there. Bad news for Cameron too if he's right.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Israeli neo-Nazi gang filmed attacking Jews

Israeli neo-Nazi gang filmed attacking Jews
Telegraph
09/09/07
Israel was in shock this weekend after police revealed they had broken up a gang of homegrown neo-Nazis who praised Adolf Hitler, attacked orthodox Jews and surrounded themselves with the paraphernalia of white supremacists.

Israel's neo-Nazis stoke debate on Jewishness
Sydney Morning Herald
11/09/07

Deport Nazis, keep the law
JPost.com
Sep 9, 2007

Eilat shocked as neo-Nazi graffiti, swastikas discovered on synagogue
Ha'aretz
10/09/07

Tip of the iceberg
Neo-Nazi gang small part of much wider problem of violence
Ynet News
11/09/07

Thursday, September 06, 2007

A conservative manifesto...

Peter Hitchens has set out the principles by which he believes a true conservative manifesto ought to be written. Lots to argue with, I'm sure.

Here it is:

"Britain, though one of the freest countries in the world, and one of the most stable societies, with a long history of limited government and the rule of law, is not a happy, contented or particularly peaceful home for many of its inhabitants. Yet it is also uniquely prosperous, with material wealth unmatched in its history combined with enormous, generously funded public services and welfare systems for the less well-off.

Low-level disorder and misbehaviour are a grave and dispiriting feature of the lives of many. Authority seems unable or reluctant to act against either. Yet this weakness is coupled with an increasing amount of official, bureaucratic interference with the private and even personal lives of law-observing, productive, peaceful people.

A large part of the population is concentrated into the big cities and heavily-urbanised landscape of the South East. Many find the resulting congestion uncomfortable and are made anxious and bad-tempered by permanently thronged streets and almost unrelieved heavy road traffic. The high cost of housing means that many people are living in confined spaces, closer to their neighbours and more dependent on their goodwill than before.

Into this stressful and cramped society arrive increasing numbers of young people, who have been educated and raised in ways quite different from those common in the recent past. I am not talking about new migrants, but about the rising generation, especially among the poor. Households lack fathers, and in many cases any figure of authority at all. Old family and kinship networks, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friendly neighbours who keep an eye out for you, have virtually ceased to exist. Any adult who tries to discipline or even help a child to whom he is not related can be accused of 'paedophilia' or of assault. The police, who have some powers to intervene, rarely do so and are in any case largely absent. Home life, in homes without real families, is influenced by powerful outside forces - TV, advertising, computer games, rock music, even gangs - that challenge and deny the authority of parents when they try to exert it. Inevitably, these problems are worse in the areas where the poor live.

Schools, struggling to maintain discipline without the power to enforce it, and handicapped by some of the worst teaching methods and structures imaginable, can do little to overcome this. They are under competing pressures to expel pupils who will not behave (as the teachers and the pupils want) and to keep them in school (as the state wants). What were previously national habits of mind, based on a common understanding of the lore of the tribe gained through shared history, customs and traditions have lost their power because these things have simply ceased to be taught. People under 35 now often don't know them at all. The failure to teach good reading skills is also important, since these older forms of culture were often passed on through the written word and absorbed in the imagination - where moral questions are resolved. The more immediate influences of the rock, rap, drug, video-game culture enter the mind much more immediately, and bypass (and atrophy) the imagination.

In some of these areas, these problems are in fact sharpened by the presence of large numbers of recent immigrants, many of them not English speakers. In some cases, migrant groups bring with them nothing but good education and habits of hard work which put our own young people to shame. Many employers sadly complain that our own young, festooned with 'qualifications' lack basic knowledge, common sense or the ability to concentrate - whereas migrant workers make up for their poor English by having all these good qualities.

In some migrant groups, it is not always so. But in many cases, problems with such groups arise not when they first arrive, but when the second generation, born and raised here, confront the problems which arise from our society's failure to integrate their parents properly, sometimes worse than failure, since multiculturalism seems determined to keep them separate for ever. It would be absurd to deny that much of the social decay and chaos, in fact most of it, comes from indigenous British people who have been brought up without respect for law or authority. It would be equally absurd to deny that part of that problem also comes from migrants, or the British-born children of migrants, and the ridiculous policies which have been followed in settling them here.

There are many other social problems (we could go into these), many of them arising out of the ones I’ve named specifically. Many of them seem to stem from a dependency on various forms of welfare, and a belief that government action is the main solution for the problems of society. This is coupled with a change in the nature of virtue, with a strong, well-publicised social conscience being more highly regarded than a well-developed individual conscience. The result of this is a very high level of taxation, which is generally accepted as being necessary and right by those who pay for it - despite the inefficient and unfair delivery of the services paid for by this tax.

There is also a general acceptance of powerlessness, that nothing can be changed. No alternative is offered to this form of society except some version or other of Thatcherism, which in office failed to deal with many of these problems and made several of them worse.. Political, social and moral conservatism, a spurned alternative, has been excised from the programmes of all major parties. A dominant and intolerant ideology smears anyone who approaches this position as a hopeless nostalgist, obsessed with recovering a non-existent 'golden age' or as a racial bigot, unhinged fruitcake, extreme nationalist or closet Nazi. Worse, the transfer of power to the European Union means that a large amount of supposedly British regulation and legislation, from rubbish collection and Home Information Packs to data protection and safety legislation, is in fact not British at all, but originates from the European Commission, and is beyond the power of the electorate, or of the House of Commons.

This arrangement has certainly not led to widespread contentment. People are simultaneously materially well-off and yet full of dissatisfaction and concern for the future. But nor, at present, has it led to organised or focused discontent. That is partly because of low interest rates and generous welfare provisions, plus the huge number of jobs now provided by the state. But it is also partly because the only major vehicle for discontent accepts the status quo.

The Conservative Party is not opposed to the moral revolution, is not opposed to multiculturalism or the rewriting of the rules of family life, is not opposed to the level of welfarism or public employment, largely accepts the left-liberal view of national history and penology and - perhaps above all - is wedded to this country's continuing membership of the European Union.



****************

How to address this? The proper conservative has to be modest about what can be done, how fast it can be done, and remember that there are strong limits on a lawful government. Many of these problems are so deep, and excite such strong feelings, that he must also be careful not to create passions which get out of control and which he cannot satisfy. Much of the problem lies in the consciences of individuals and will not be fixed until and unless a new John Wesley appears, who can find some way of remoralising a population that is at least as demoralised as it was in the 18th century. (One rather alarming possibility is that such a figure will appear, and he will be a Muslim, which should concentrate our minds).

But a lot of what is necessary is the removal of obstacles which prevent people from living as they would like to, and as they ought. This must, in my view, begin with the reassertion of national legal independence, the right to make and enforce our own laws for ourselves. That means an unequivocal commitment to negotiate, as swiftly as possible, an amicable departure from the European Union. In my view, the majority of the population oppose EU rule over this country in practice - that is, they are angered and frustrated by their individual encounters with it. But they often do not realise that it is the EU that is responsible. The existence of a large and obviously responsible and coherent political party which advocates EU withdrawal would make that connection. One of the main reasons for a reluctance to favour departure is that voters see the leaders of the major parties united in favour of EU membership, and assume that they know something we don't. Not since Hugh Gaitskell has any significant or credible party leader taken a position in favour of national independence. Had any done so, support for departure would be much higher than it is. Level headed, unhysterical leadership, untainted by fake Churchillian rhetoric and linked to a serious programme on other issues, could quite easily climb over this barrier. It must, in any case, if it is to achieve anything.

One possible method would be to set out a programme, on issues across the whole area where the EU decides our laws, and to pursue each issue to the European Court of Justice to demonstrate the powerlessness of a British parliament inside the EU. And to behave at all times as if we were independent, and to draw noisy attention to the barriers which prevent us from being so. This would certainly educate the public, but it might also frustrate them and use valuable time. I think it should be the keystone of the manifesto, and that it should be explained why it had to be.

The issue on which this is clearest is that of control of our own borders, our own right to decide who lives here. Nobody who claims to be serious can really argue that we should not have this right - though there can be much disagreement over how we should exercise it. There is no more fundamental or decisive security barrier against the threats we currently fear. There is no basis for a reconsideration of our immigration policy without an absolute control of our frontiers. The restoration of a British passport, and of a British citizenship giving an absolute right of entry and residence, seems to me to be a simple and clear illustration of what independence means, what you cannot have without it, and what you can have if you regain it.

That is why both these issues should be prominent. Labour has long dreaded the existence of a party that could convincingly and respectably make this case, since large numbers of its current (and former) voters feel very strongly about this matter.

For that reason, the rest of the initial manifesto should bear in mind that it is the less well-off, the people living in the abandoned cities of the industrial areas or in the marginal suburbs, who may well be the main supporters of social conservatism. The old Tory upper middle class of independent professionals, educated at traditional schools and universities, has largely ceased to exist. There are middle class conservatives, but my guess is that they are these days at least equalled in numbers by middle class liberals and left-wingers - protected by affluence from many of the social consequences of left-wing policies.

So the rest of the first programme should be aimed very clearly at helping the strivers, the responsible, the thrifty, the ones on the frontier.

That means a series of simple measures on crime. They include the immediate repeal of the laws which prevent the police from patrolling effectively on foot, especially PACE 1984, and measures -probably based on budget allocations - putting severe pressure on chief constables to put their officers on such patrols by day and night. Longer term measures, like the breaking up of unwieldy large forces into smaller, truly local ones, would have to wait until a reform of local government in general, central to a revival of proper civic life, but necessarily a second-rank issue.

The prison regime should also be reformed, and once again based on the old principle of 'due punishment of responsible persons', so that punishment, in the form of arduous labour, deprivation of luxuries and comforts etc, could once again take place in prison, with facilities such as TV sets and pool tables available only as a reward for long-term good behaviour. The legal position of prison officers would have to be altered, so that their authority, and ability to exercise it, is restored. Remission and early release should once again be dependent entirely on good behaviour, and never automatic.

Penal policy on drugs should concentrate on possession, not on supply. Possession should be dealt with by a caution for a first offence, and three months imprisonment for a second. Effectively enforced, such a law should sharply reduce drug use and the criminal activities linked with it.

Schools should all have their ability to discipline pupils restored. How far could we go in this? Personally I think corporal punishment would be hard to restore in the existing climate, but an absolute power of expulsion, probably to special schools with the power to detain unruly pupils at evenings and weekends, might be an effective alternative. In all such measures, we should seek for ingenuity and subtlety rather than crudity. A good example of this is Norman Tebbit's measures to control the trades unions. Rather than threats of prison, or stripping away privileges, the laws used a sort of judo. The unions' legal immunities were guaranteed - provided they introduced strike ballots and fair elections for their leaders, controlled unofficial strikes and ceased secondary pickets.

As for the schools themselves, education reform should concentrate on ensuring a good basic education for the children of those who cannot afford private fees or postcode selection - and should be presented as such. This means the return of selection by merit on the German model, and the establishment, for the moment only in areas now blighted by bad comprehensives, of a first generation of new grammar schools whose aim is unequivocally to benefit the poor. This would obviously require serious reforms of the feeder primary schools, and would necessarily the construction of new technical and vocational schools of high standard, for those who did not qualify for an academic secondary education.

No pledges, in my view, should be made for tax cuts at this stage. A society so heavily dependent on welfare needs to be weaned off it, and reformed so that it actually desires to come off it.

And gosh, is that the time? I have got almost nowhere and spent much of the day doing it. Imagine what it would be like getting even this modest programme through a sharply-divided Parliament in, say, four years. I hope for your interested criticisms and contributions."

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Junk Medicine : Heroin addiction isn't an illness

Dr Theodore Dalrymple tears into 'Doctors, lies and the addiction bureaucracy':

"For the past 14 years, I have worked as a doctor in a large general hospital in a deprived area of Britain, and in the even larger prison next door.

In that time, I have seen heroin addiction rise from an infrequently encountered problem to a mass phenomenon.

It has now become so widespread that the city council has politely asked residents not to put used needles and syringes in the weekly rubbish collections.

No stairwell in any housing estate is complete without the discarded paraphernalia of drug abuse."

[...]

"I had briefly run a drug-addiction clinic in a famous university town, at a time when I accepted what I now know to be myths about heroin addiction.

But as more addicts came to my attention – I see up to 20 new cases a day in prison – I began to think about it more. The medical perspective, that these people were ill and in need of treatment, seemed less and less convincing.

I discovered that most addicted prisoners stopped taking heroin in jail, even when it was available. They came into the prison starving and miserable, and went out relatively healthy.

But within a few months, many were back in their former condition, and when brought once more before the courts, some would beg to be imprisoned.

When, soon after their return, I asked them whether they intended to give up taking heroin, some would reply: "I'll have to, I've got no choice."

Asked why, they would offer replies such as: "Because my girlfriend's just had a baby and she won't let me see it unless I do."

This answer was a strange one if these addicts truly thought of themselves as ill and in need of treatment. #

Instead, they clearly believed a purpose in life was enough to enable them to abstain. This is not how pneumonia, for instance, is cured.

No one would say: "I must stop having pleuritic pain each time I breathe deeply because I have just had a baby." Yet the medical services allow addicts to focus exclusively on the physiological aspects of addiction, which in practice means the prescription of a drug such as methadone.

There is a strenuous, almost outraged, rejection of the idea that addiction is, at bottom, a moral problem, or even that it raises any moral questions at all.

Of course, addiction to heroin and other opiates has serious medical consequences. I often saw addicts with deep vein thromboses or multiple abscesses; they would have TB; they would be malnourished and infected with Hepatitis B or C, or both, and HIV.

It would be difficult to obtain blood from the veins in their arms or legs because they had injected so often.

But medical consequences do not make a disease. Many mountaineers get frostbite, but mountaineering is not a disease.

To conceive of heroin addiction as such seems to me to miss the fundamental point: it is a moral or spiritual condition that will never yield to medical treatment."

Full article here.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Hitchens on Anglo-French relations

The wonderfully grumpy Peter Hitchens has a bone to pick with all of the French bashers out there.

"French Military Victories

I am so irritated by the stupid supposed joke on Google, where a search for 'French Military Victories' produces the response "Your search did not match any documents" and asks 'Did you mean 'French military defeats'?' Oh, ha ha. How unimprovably witty and trenchant. And, since the origin of the jape is almost certainly American, how very ignorant and stupid.

The single most important French military victory in history was of course at Yorktown (accompanied by the related naval battle of the Chesapeake), where the Comte de Rochambeau on land (aided by the Marquis de La Fayette) and the Comte de Grasse by sea defeated British forces and so secured victory for the American colonists, changing the history of the entire world forever. The United States would not even exist if these victories had not happened. Do Americans really not know this stuff any more?

My irritation is partly because I rather like France, and about which American neo-conservatives are especially absurd. For some reason 'right-wing' people are supposed to abominate France and foreigners in general. I have never really understood this. Since the moment I first set foot in France in 1965 ( via the old 'Golden Arrow' that then still ran between London and Paris, steam-hauled by an enormous black locomotive with a surprisingly effeminate whistle, from Calais to Amiens) I have looked on it as a place from which Britain can learn a great deal about the arts of life.

And there are of course plenty of other French military victories, from Valmy, Jena, Marengo, Friedland, and Austerlitz to the clashes that drove the Austrians out of Italy and the great battles on the Marne which stopped the Germans in 1914. And partly because, just at the moment, I am deep into a book 'That Sweet Enemy', which describes the curious relation between two of the world's longest-enduring nations.

The book, wittily and enjoyably written by an English historian and his French wife (Robert and Isabelle Tombs) has the charm of a lot of oblique history. Seen from a slightly different angle, events which you thought you knew about suddenly look different and often more interesting.

It is as if, after growing used to what you thought was a superb view of an ancient and fascinating city from a northerly hilltop, you one day travelled to the opposite side, and saw it for the first time from the south. It is the same place, but lit up and arranged in a way which makes you realise you had missed half the point before."

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Yazidi 'devil worshippers' massacred in Iraq

It's not like these Yazidi guys have any more respect for women than Muslims, but I've had some sympathy for them since reading this a few months ago:

Massacre fuels northern Iraq tensions
24 April 2007
BBC

... and now there's this:

Iraq bombs: 250 die in worst terror attack
Telegraph
15/08/2007

Al-Qa'eda has been blamed for the deaths of 250 Iraqis in a co-ordinated bomb attack - the worst terrorist atrocity the country has witnessed since the downfall of Saddam Hussein four years ago. Five fuel tankers were driven by suicide bombers into two crowded villages belonging to Kurdish members of the Yazidi religious sect before they were detonated almost simultaneously.

What occurs to me is that since the Yazidi were the victims of suicide bombers, they must have done something truly awful to inspire the oppressed yet brave al-Qaedans to resort to this weapon of the powerless. My suspicion immediately falls on Yazidi foreign policy, and I hereby call on them to change it (whatever it is), and to withdraw from Kashmir and wherever else they are oppressing Muslims. After all, we're all al-Qaeda now.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Michel Houllebecq's "Platform"

Just read Michel Houllebecq's brilliant "Platform". Brilliant on love, sex and the tourist industry, and Islam comes in for the odd swipe, as in this taste:

"The paradise promised by the Prophet," the banker tells Michel, "already existed here on earth. There were places on earth where young, available, lascivious girls danced for the pleasure of men, where one could become drunk on nectar and listen to celestial music; there were about twenty of them within five hundred meters of our hotel. These places were easily accessible. To gain admission, there was absolutely no need to fulfill the seven duties of a Muslim nor to engage in holy war; all you had to do was pay a couple of dollars ... Already, young Arabs dreamed of nothing but consumer products and sex. They might try to pretend otherwise, but secretly, they wanted to be part of the American system. The violence of some of them was no more than a sign of impotent jealousy, and thankfully, more and more of them were turning their backs on Islam."

Monday, July 23, 2007

Alan Johnston - what if the Israelis had done it?

All over now of course, but 'hear hear' nonetheless. I wondered if anyone else was thinking this.

BTW, have there been any interviews with AJ since, asking him how his opinions have changed, if at all? Personally my money is on Stockholm Syndrome, though I'm not sure if that applies where you're already bosom buddies with them before they nab you.

What if Israelis had abducted BBC man?
By Charles Moore
Telegraph Comment
03/06/2007

Watching the horrible video of Alan Johnston of the BBC broadcasting Palestinian propaganda under orders from his kidnappers, I found myself asking what it would have been like had he been kidnapped by Israelis, and made to do the same thing the other way round. The first point is that it would never happen. There are no Israeli organisations - governmental or freelance - that would contemplate such a thing. That fact is itself significant. But just suppose that some fanatical Jews had grabbed Mr Johnston and forced him to spout their message, abusing his own country as he did so. What would the world have said?

There would have been none of the caution which has characterised the response of the BBC and of the Government since Mr Johnston was abducted on March 12. The Israeli government would immediately have been condemned for its readiness to harbour terrorists or its failure to track them down. Loud would have been the denunciations of the extremist doctrines of Zionism which had given rise to this vile act. The world isolation of Israel, if it failed to get Mr Johnston freed, would have been complete. If Mr Johnston had been forced to broadcast saying, for example, that Israel was entitled to all the territories held since the Six-Day War, and calling on the release of all Israeli soldiers held by Arab powers in return for his own release, his words would have been scorned. The cause of Israel in the world would have been irreparably damaged by thus torturing him on television. No one would have been shy of saying so.

But of course in real life it is Arabs holding Mr Johnston, and so everyone treads on tip-toe. Bridget Kendall of the BBC opined that Mr Johnston had been "asked" to say what he said in his video. Asked! If it were merely an "ask", why did he not say no?
Throughout Mr Johnston's captivity, the BBC has continually emphasised that he gave "a voice" to the Palestinian people, the implication being that he supported their cause, and should therefore be let out. One cannot imagine the equivalent being said if he had been held by Israelis.

Well, he is certainly giving a voice to the Palestinian people now. And the truth is that, although it is under horrible duress, what he says is not all that different from what the BBC says every day through the mouths of reporters who are not kidnapped and threatened, but are merely collecting their wages. The language is more lurid in the Johnston video, but the narrative is essentially the same as we have heard over the years from Orla Guerin and Jeremy Bowen and virtually the whole pack of them.

It is that everything that is wrong in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world is the result of aggression or "heavy-handedness" (have you noticed how all actions by American or Israeli troops are "heavy-handed", just as surely as all racism is "unacceptable"?) by America or Israel or Britain.

Alan Johnston, under terrorist orders, spoke of the "absolute despair" of the Palestinians and attributed it to 40 years of Israeli occupation, "supported by the West". That is how it is presented, night after night, by the BBC. The other side is almost unexamined. There is little to explain the internecine strife in the Arab world, particularly in Gaza, or the cynical motivations of Arab leaders for whom Palestinian miseries are politically convenient. You get precious little investigation of the networks and mentalities of Islamist extremism - the methods and money of Hamas or Hizbollah and comparable groups - which produce acts of pure evil like that in which Mr Johnston is involuntarily complicit. The spotlight is not shone on how the "militants" (the BBC does not even permit the word "terrorist" in the Middle East context) and the warlords maintain their corruption and rule of fear, persecuting, among others, the Palestinians. Instead it shines pitilessly on Blair and Bush and on Israel.

From the hellish to the ridiculous, the pattern is the same. Back at home, the Universities and Colleges Union has just voted for its members to "consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions". Well, they could consider how work by scientists at the Technion in Haifa has led to the production of the drug Velcade, which treats multiple myeloma. Or they could look at the professor at Ben-Gurion University who discovered a bacteria that fights malaria and river blindness by killing mosquitoes and black fly. Or they could study the co-operation between researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who have isolated the protein that triggers stress in order to try to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, and their equivalents at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

The main universities of Israel are, in fact, everything that we in the West would recognise as proper universities. They have intellectual freedom. They do not require an ethnic or religious qualification for entry. They are not controlled by the government. They have world-class standards of research, often producing discoveries which benefit all humanity. In all this, they are virtually unique in the Middle East.

The silly dons are not alone. The National Union of Journalists, of which I am proud never to have been a member, has recently passed a comparable motion, brilliantly singling out the only country in the region with a free press for pariah treatment. Unison, which is a big, serious union, is being pressed to support a boycott of Israeli goods, products of the only country in the region with a free trade union movement. The doctrine is that Israel practises "apartheid" and that it must therefore be boycotted.

All this is moral madness. It is not mad, of course, to criticise Israeli policy. In some respects, indeed, it would be mad not to. It is not mad - though I think it is mistaken - to see the presence of Israel as the main reason for the lack of peace in the region. But it is mad or, perhaps one should rather say, bad to try to raid Western culture's reserves of moral indignation and expend them on a country that is part of that culture in favour of surrounding countries that aren't. How can we have got ourselves into a situation in which we half-excuse turbaned torturers for kidnapping our fellow-citizens while trying to exclude Jewish biochemists from lecturing to our students?

Nobody yet knows the precise motivations of Mr Johnston's captors, but it is surely not a coincidence that they held him in silence until the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War approached, and only then made him speak. They wanted him to give the world their historical explanation - Israeli oppression - for their cause. Yet that war took place because President Nasser of Egypt led his country and his allies declaring "our basic aim will be to destroy Israel". He failed, abjectly, and Egypt and Jordan later gave up the aspiration. But many others maintain it to this day, now with a pseudo-religious gloss added.

We keep giving sympathetic air-time to their death cult. In a way, Mr Johnston is paying the price: his captors are high on the oxygen of his corporation's publicity. As for Israel, many sins can be laid to its charge. But it is morally serious in a way that we are not, because it has to be. Forty years after its greatest victory, it has to work out each morning how it can survive.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Dalrymple on the British economy

Dalrymple reviews the new book, 'Fantasy Island: waking up to the Incredible Economic, Political and Social Illusions of the Blair Legacy':

'The British economy has long seemed to me to resemble a rotting fish that shines by moonlight. It is true that so far the light has been somewhat stronger than the smell, at least for most of us, but all that may be about to change. I have been expecting and predicting disaster, wrongly, for a long time, and I can only hope that I continue to be wrong.

My sense of doom was deepened, however, when I read a book by two financial journalists, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, just published, called Fantasy Island (Constable). There are no prizes for guessing the name of the island referred to, even if you have not read the subtitle: Waking up to the Incredible Economic, Political and Social Illusions of the Blair Legacy.'


Full article here.

Tories and Marriage

Ian Duncan Smith's social justice commission report advocates tax cuts for married couples. Here are two very different reactions to the report.

In the Blue corner, we have Peter Hitchens calling for a return to the sanctity of marriage but scornfully dismissive of the Tories:

'Will the Tories back marriage? No, of course they won't. It's too difficult and dangerous. They would be smeared, if they did so, as haters and persecutors of 'single mothers'. This wholly false, and in fact absurd, accusation is invariably made against anyone who stands up for marriage, and is equally invariably believed by large numbers of gullible people, many of them supposedly intelligent journalists. Often this is because they are afraid of being on the receiving end of the same intolerant persecution that will be visited on the person who has dared to speak in favour of marriage. The only way to challenge it would be to have the guts to be unapologetic about it, and the Tories just aren't like that. Wait and see, if you don't believe me.'

And in the Red corner, we have Polly Toynbee, progressive and proud, equally scornful of the Tories but for very different reasons:

'Cameron says married parents are far more likely to stay together, but it doesn't need a professor of logic to spot the flaw: making cohabitees marry to collect a bonus is unlikely to sprinkle fairy dust and turn them into the same people as those who are already married. Almost everyone wants a lifelong good relationship, yet many fail. Now the small-state party that says governments can't run a whelk stall suddenly imagines the state can control the most wayward of human behaviours and superglue parents together for ever.'

Personally I think one of the posters on Hitchens might have it right when he writes 'It was Charles Murray who said that governments should never get involved in people's personal relationships. It always cocks it up. We don't have to support marriage we just have to stop supporting all other forms of family (single or otherwise). When you do that, the clear financial benefits of the stable married relationship will always come out on top. Problem solved.'

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Islamists who have changed sides - Butt and Husain

My plea to fellow Muslims: you must renounce terror
Hassan Butt
Sunday July 1, 2007
The Observer

As the bombers return to Britain, Hassan Butt, who was once a member of radical group Al-Muhajiroun, raising funds for extremists and calling for attacks on British citizens, explains why he was wrong

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

Friday's attempt to cause mass destruction in London with strategically placed car bombs is so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that it is likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4's Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: 'What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.'

He then refused to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam. I left the BJN in February 2006, but if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.

...



I know how these terrorists are inspired
By Ed Husain*
Telegraph
02/05/2007

The recent conviction of five young British Muslim men has yet again opened the debate about how Britain, famed for its plurality and tolerance, bred home-grown terrorists. And, more important, how do we heal the divisions and communal disintegration in our cities that continue to serve as an Islamist underworld in which the rhetoric of jihad and destruction goes unchallenged?

I know how these young men are inspired to wreak death and destruction because I have first-hand experience of being in one such cell. I have since seen the error of my ways.

In 1995, at college in east London, I was part of the secret cell structure of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist organisation banned in most Muslim countries and rejected by most mosques in Britain. Yet the group had a free rein on university and college campuses, where it advocated that British Muslims were a community whose allegiance lay not with Queen and country, but to a coming caliph in the Middle East.

This caliph would instruct us to act as agents of the caliphate in Britain, and open a "home front" by assisting the expansionist state. We believed that all Arab governments were not sufficiently "Islamic" and were liable to removal; entire populations would submit to the army of the caliph, or face extinction.

I was part of a generation of young British Muslim teenagers who were raised in mono-cultural ghettoes, disconnected from mainstream Britain and receptive to the message of separatism preached by Arab political asylum seekers. I was indoctrinated in my cell meetings as I studied the books written by Islamist ideologues such as Taqiuddin al-Nabhani and Syed Qutb, angry men struggling in a post-colonial Middle East to find meaning in a new world.

We brought al-Nabhani's teachings to life in my secret meetings: Britain, France, America and Russia were enemies and the army of the Islamist state would "march on Downing Street and raise the Islamist flag above Westminster". All this can easily be dismissed as extremist claptrap. But the mindset and ideology that spouts this worldview - Islamism - is entrenched in certain sections of the Muslim community in Britain.

Terrorism begins with a less extreme shade of Islamism, and in many cases Saudi-inspired Wahhabism - unless we understand the root causes of the theology of terror, we will not be able to defeat it.

I recall my Islamist days when my mind was closed to an alternative argument: there was only one way - my group's way. All others, including fellow Muslims, were wrong and heading for hell. To argue that dialogue will win over extremist Islamists is a myth; theirs is a mindset that is not receptive to alternative views, and does not recognise the sacred nature of all human life.

Wahhabism and segments of Islamism are defined by their rejection of mainstream Muslim teachings and age-old spiritual practices, literalist readings of scripture devoid of scholarly guidance, and a hell-bent commitment to confronting the West. Moderate Muslims have common cause with the West to extinguish extremism in our midst.

As long as it remains legal for extremists in Britain to plan and finance Islamist attempts to mobilise the Muslim masses in the Middle East, and prepare an army for "jihad as foreign policy", there will always be a segment of this movement that will take jihad to its logical conclusion and act immediately, without leadership.

The rhetoric of jihad introduced by Hizb ut-Tahrir in my days was the preamble to 7/7 and several other attempted attacks. By proscribing Hizb ut-Tahrir, we would send a strong message to extremists that Britain will not tolerate intolerance. Yes, we are a free country with a proud tradition of liberty, but it has always had limits.

In 1991, Omar Bakri, then leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir, called for the assassination of John Major - we ignored it. In 1997, Osama bin Laden declared a jihad against the West - we ignored it.

Today, in our midst, Hizb ut-Tahrir calls for an expansionist, violent, totalitarian Islamist state - and we continue to ignore it. There is no quick fix to the problem of home-grown terrorism, but banning Hizb ut-Tahrir would be an excellent first step, sending a strong signal to aspiring terrorists that Britain has not changed the rules of game. We no longer play that game.

* author of The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left