The Left-Islamist Alliance

Another important topic without an Impdec place of its own is the Left-Islamist alliance, perhaps most obvious to British eyes in the courting by Ken Livingstone of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to the outrage of (amongst others) some of the gay community.

The motivation for beginning this thread was a quite brilliant article in the last Sunday Times by an ex-Greenham Common protestor. She was reflecting on her erstwhile feminist chums marching cheek-by-jowl with Islamic fundamentalists who hate everything they used to stand for. Go read the whole article, you cannot fail to be moved.

Wimmin at War
by Sarah Baxter
Sunday Times
13/8/06

It is 25 years since the Greenham Common protests began. Sarah Baxter was there, but now asks why feminist ideals have become twisted into support for groups like Hezbollah

The peace movement ... has gone on to find new friends in today’s Stop the War movement. Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched last weekend alongside banners proclaiming “We are all Hezbollah now” and Muslim extremists chanting “Oh Jew, the army of Muhammad will return.” For Linda Grant, the novelist, who says that “feminism” is the one “ism” she has not given up on, it was a shocking sight: “What you’re seeing is an alliance of what used to be the far left with various Muslim groups and that poses real problems. Saturday’s march was not a peace march in the way that the Ban the Bomb marches were. Seeing young and old white women holding Hezbollah placards showed that it’s a very different anti-war movement to Greenham. Part of it feels the wrong side is winning.”

As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews. On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of “I am woman, hear me roar”, there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush — “the world’s number one terrorist” as the marchers would have it.

Women are perfectly entitled to oppose the war in Iraq or to feel that Israel is brutally overreacting to Hezbollah’s provocation. But where is the parallel, equally vital debate about how to combat Islamic fundamentalism? And why don’t more peace-loving feminists regard it as a threat? Kira Cochrane, 29, is the new editor of The Guardian women’s page, the bible of the Greenham years, where so many women writers made their names by staking out positions on the peace movement. She has noticed that today’s feminists are inclined to keep quiet about the march of radical Islam. “There’s a great fear of tackling the subject because of cultural relativism. People are scared of being called racist,” Cochrane observes.

...

Looking back I think I was wrong about Reagan and too sympathetic towards the Soviet Union. There were plenty of fellow travellers in the peace movement who were cheering on the Soviet Union under their breath. I can remember making a lot of silly excuses about it myself. But the fear of mutual assured destruction was genuine enough. As long as it worked, Mad was a plausible strategy. Were it to fail, the results would be catastrophic. As President Dwight Eisenhower said after the testing of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s: “Atomic war will destroy civilisation.” If war came, “you might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself”.

The situation today is very different. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, Bernard Lewis, the noted scholar of Islam, pointed out that Iran’s messianic rulers are not constrained by such fears. According to their theology, the day of judgment will be glorious. “At the end of time there will be general destruction anyway,” Lewis writes. “What matters will be the final destination of the dead — hell for the infidels and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, Mad is not a constraint, it is an inducement.” Hassan Nasrallah, the Shi’ite cleric who leads Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, regularly issues bloodcurdling threats against the Jews. “If they (the Jews all gather in Israel,” he has said, “it will save us the trouble of going after them on a worldwide basis.”

For some on the left such words are merely understandable hyperbole, provoked by decades of Israeli ill-treatment of the Palestinians, but I prefer to take Islamic fundamentalists at their word when they spout insults about Jews being the descendants of “pigs and apes” and launch their chillingly apocalyptic tirades. Why? Because they not only talk centuries-old nonsense about the place of women in society, but they also purposely oppress the female sex whenever they are given the chance. As regards their treatment of women, there is no discernible difference between their acts and their words.

In my own life I have been lucky enough not to experience a great deal of sexism. The 1980s and 1990s were decades of progress for western career women and working mothers. But I felt how it was to be invisible when I interviewed Hamas militants and clerics many years ago in Gaza. They were very courteous and helpful and I tried to be respectful by covering my hair with a black scarf. But they never looked me in the eye or addressed me directly. I would ask the questions; they would answer the male photographer who accompanied me.

Phyllis Chesler, 65, the writer and a founder feminist in the 1960s, has experienced some of the more disturbing aspects of Muslim patriarchy at first hand. In the summer of 1961 Chesler married Ali, her western-educated college sweetheart, and went to live with him in Afghanistan. Nothing had prepared her for the restrictions and humiliations which Muslim women endured there, nor the gradual personality change that her husband underwent. The worst of it, she discovered, was “nothing unique happened to me”. It was the way of the world. “The Afghanistan I knew was a prison, a police state, a feudal monarchy, a theocracy rank with fear and paranoia,” Chesler recalls in The Death of Feminism, published last year. “

Afghanistan had never been colonised. My Afghan relatives were very proud of this fact. ‘Not even the British could occupy us’, they told me, not once but many times. “I was ultimately forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism, tyranny and misogyny were entirely of their own making and not attributable to colonialism or imperialism. It is what they themselves would say.” Six months later, travelling on false papers obtained by a sympathetic German-born friend, Chesler secretly fled the country. The ardent feminism that she embraced on her return to America was forged in Afghanistan, she told me last week. She has not recanted her support for women’s rights, she insists, but she has seen the views of others morph in alarming new directions.

“The compassion for people of colour has been translated into feminists standing with terrorists who are terrorising their own women,” she says. In the week when a massive bomb plot against civilians was uncovered in Britain, Chesler’s critique of women’s complacency in her book is prophetic. “The Islamists who are beheading Jews and American civilians, stoning Muslim women to death, jailing Muslim dissidents and bombing civilians on every continent are now moving among us both in the East and in the West,” she writes. “I fear that the ‘peace and love’ crowd in the West refuses to understand how Islamism endangers our values and our lives, beginning with our commitment to women’s rights and human rights.” Women’s studies programmes should have been the first to sound the alarm, she points out: “They did not.”

Chesler has fallen out with many old friends in the women’s movement. They have in effect excommunicated her for writing in right-wing publications in America, but she has found it impossible to get published on the left. There are whispers that she has become paranoid, mad, bonkers, a charge frequently levelled against the handful of women writers who are brave enough to tackle the same theme. In Britain there is the polemicist Julie Burchill, who has written incisively about the desire of terrorists to commit acts “not so that innocents may have the right to live freely on the West Bank, but so that they might have the right to throw acid in the face of innocent, unveiled women”. Well, the outrageous Julie has always been bonkers, hasn’t she.

Then there is “mad” Melanie Phillips, the Cassandra of our age, banging on that “if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around”. Of course she would say that, wouldn’t she. She’s Jewish, and anyway didn’t you know that she is crazy enough to believe in two-parent families? In America the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin died last year virtually unmourned by women on the left in part, as her friend Christopher Hitchens remembered, because “she wasn’t neutral against a jihadist threat that wanted, and wants, to enslave and torture females. “That she could be denounced as a ‘conservative’,” he concluded, “says much about the left to which she used to belong.”

... I am surprised by the persistence of the ideological blind spot that has led women who are so quick to condemn the failings of the West to make transparent excuses for the behaviour of some of the world’s most anti-feminist regimes. Recently Kate Hudson, chairwoman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, wrote a breathtaking apologia for the Iranian nuclear energy programme, which took at face value Ahmadinejad’s claims to be developing it for “strictly peaceful” purposes. (Since when, by the way, has CND regarded Britain’s nuclear power plants so benignly?) Never mind the preposterous dancing with enriched uranium around the doves of peace nor the missiles marked “Tel Aviv” paraded in the streets.

...

It is certainly plausible, as Pettitt [Greenham Common pioneer] claims, that Bush’s actions have “accelerated the radicalisation of the Islamic world tremendously”, although this popular view conveniently downplays the growing Islamic fundamentalist movement before the September 11 attacks and the huge psychological boost that it received from Al-Qaeda’s strike on America. Let us assume that what Pettitt says is true. I can remember when the women’s movement was told that its persistent demands for equality were leading to a “backlash”. Susan Faludi wrote a feminist bestseller of that name, based on the premise that men were fighting back tooth and nail in the gender wars.

I have just got the book down from my shelves. It says on the back cover: “The backlash against women is real. This is the book we need to understand it, to struggle through the battle fatigue and to keep going.” There was no question of slinking away out of fear that men were being emboldened to find new ways of oppressing women. The Middle East is engaged in a titanic struggle between modernity and theocracy. Whatever one’s views about the Iraq war or the conflict in Lebanon, it deserves more than slogans about “We are all Hezbollah now” and fury against Bush and Blair. I don’t agree with Chesler that we are witnessing the death of feminism, but for now it is MIA: missing in action.

War on Terror (aka War on Islamofascism)

Thought we should have a thread to discuss the War on Terror, or as Bush recently called it, At War with Islamic Fascists.

This was the front page lead in today's Telegraph, contained some positive and some contradictory views.

Example of positive:
Seventy three per cent agreed that "the West is in a global war against Islamic terrorists who threaten our way of life". When asked whether Britain should change its foreign policy in response to terrorism only 12 per cent said it should be more conciliatory, compared with 53 per cent who thought it should become more "aggressive" and 24 per who wanted no change.

Example of contradictory:
A majority of British people wants the Government to adopt an even more "aggressive" foreign policy to combat international terrorism, according to an opinion poll conducted after the arrests of 24 terrorism suspects last week. However - by a margin of more than five to one - the public wants Tony Blair to split from President George W Bush and either go it alone in the "war on terror", or work more closely with Europe.

Ditch US in terror war, say 80pc of Britons
Telegraph
17/08/2006

Rwanda

As the discussions surrounding a UN force for Lebanon take place, the notorious failings of another UN mission is worth recalling. Kofi Annan does not come out well, and neither do the US, UK or France.

Film reveals grim Rwanda images that haunt general
Telegraph
11/08/2006

If Gen Romeo Dallaire finds clothing dropped in the street, he fights the urge to check whether the rags conceal a corpse. His searing experience as the commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda, which failed to halt the genocide in 1994 when 800,000 people were slaughtered, has left him tormented.

...

Gen Dallaire, 60, suffered a breakdown at the end of his service in Rwanda, tormented by the "red, fearful, bewildered eyes" of the victims of massacres he witnessed day after day. He has made several suicide attempts, injuring himself with razor blades, and was discharged from the Canadian army six years ago on medical grounds.

...

Gen Dallaire's UN superiors repeatedly ignored warnings of disaster. Three months before Rwanda's Hutu extremist regime started the genocide of the minority Tutsi tribe - and the murder of any Hutus who opposed the killing - an informant told him exactly what was going to happen. He disclosed the locations of four arms caches in Kigali, each stacked with weapons for use in the genocide. Gen Dallaire proposed to seize the caches but Kofi Annan, who was then the head of UN peacekeeping, vetoed the operation.

When the massacres began, Gen Dallaire was ordered not to use force to protect civilians. His soldiers were to "fire only if fired upon".

Only 2,500 troops were under his command. Of these, 1,100 were undisciplined Bangladeshis who often shirked patrols by sabotaging their own vehicles. Another 450 were Belgians but they withdrew when 10 of their number were murdered on the first day of the killing. Gen Dallaire told his superiors that a well-trained force of 4,000 could halt the genocide. Instead, the Security Council reduced his contingent still further, leaving him with only 450 soldiers at the height of the massacres.

America offered 50 armoured cars but demanded £6 million payment in advance. Britain offered 50 obsolete lorries and also wanted to be paid first. France supplied a plane-load of weapons to the genocidal regime shortly before the killing began.

Bad Debts

This is an interesting entry on the Adam Smith Institute Blog regarding the rise in bad debts.

HSBC personal Finance services division reported a 36% increase in bad debts which has taken the shine off record profits. 36%?! Wow. If bad debts continue to rise like that the terms on which money is borrowed will change drastically. As the blog concludes 'I try to avoid paying for boy racers when I take out auto insurance, and I think I'd rather like to avoid paying for bad debtors when I do my banking.'

Tax Cuts = Higher Tax Revenues

This is very counter intuitive - US tax cuts have delivered higher tax revenues, with the rich paying a higher share of the total tax share. This year the US Treasury saw an 11 percent gain in tax revenues. As a consequence the US deficit is set to halve by 2009. Not only that, some of the American states have recorded growth rates just behind China and ahead of India.

The real news, and where the policy credit belongs, is with the 2003 tax cuts. They've succeeded even beyond Art Laffer's dreams, if that's possible. In the nine quarters preceding that cut on dividend and capital gains rates and in marginal income-tax rates, economic growth averaged an annual 1.1%. In the 12 quarters--three full years--since the tax cut passed, growth has averaged a remarkable 4%.

[...]

This growth in turn has produced a record flood of tax revenues, just as the most ebullient supply-siders predicted. In the first nine months of fiscal 2006, tax revenues have climbed by $206 billion, or nearly 13%. As the Congressional Budget Office recently noted, "That increase represents the second-highest rate of growth for that nine-month period in the past 25 years"--exceeded only by the year before. For all of fiscal 2005, revenues rose by $274 billion, or 15%. We should add that CBO itself failed to anticipate this revenue boom, as the nearby table shows. Maybe its economists should rethink their models.

[...]

Remember the folks who said the tax cuts would "blow a hole in the deficit?" Well, revenues as a share of the economy are now expected to rise this year to 18.3%, slightly above the modern historical average of 18.2%. The remaining budget deficit of a little under $300 billion will be about 2.3% of GDP, which is smaller than in 17 of the previous 25 years. Throw in the surpluses rolling into the states, and the overall U.S. "fiscal deficit" is now economically trivial.

It's worth remembering that the U.S. tax cuts of 2003 where much-derided and Bush was mocked for his economic stupidity. Who's laughing now?

Freedland and Baddiel interviewed on Hardtalk

Great interview with Freedland and Baddiel on the BBC's Hardtalk, discussing Jewishness and Britishness with their usual intelligence and humour.

BBC Hard Talk
In a Hardtalk Extra interview broadcast on Friday 7th October, Gavin Esler talks to Jonathan Freedland and David Baddiel. One is a leading journalist, the other a well-known comedian, recently turned writer. Both are Jewish and have recently published books which seek to assess the issues - past and present - of being both Jewish and British.

Israel at war in Gaza and Lebanon - Pipes was right

Very interesting interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today Program where Isaac Herzog, a member of Ehud Olmert's government, suggests that their (defining) policy of unilateral disengagement may be a mistake.

This would represent one huge "I told you so" for Daniel Pipes who has repeatedly critised the policy of unilateral withdrawal from both Lebanon and Gaza, and the links between the two.

I have blogged about this elsewhere, but one of my previous comments is worth re-posting, as the empirical evidence says unequivocally that Pipes was right:

-----------

And a contrary view. Credit to Pipes, he makes a concrete, falsifiable prediction as to the consequences of Sharon's Gaza pullout, which we can keep an eye on to see if he is proved right or wrong.

"Today Gaza, Tomorrow Jerusalem"
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
August 9, 2005

Are Israel's critics correct? Does the "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza cause the Palestinian Arabs' anti-Semitism, their suicide factories, and their terrorism? And is it true these horrors will end only when Israeli civilians and troops leave the territories?

The answer is coming soon. Starting August 15, the Israeli government will evict about 8,000 Israelis from Gaza and turn their land over to the Palestinian Authority. In addition to being a unique event in modern history (no other democracy has forcibly uprooted thousands of its own citizens of one religion from their lawful homes), it also offers a rare, live, social-science experiment.

We stand at an interpretive divide. If Israel's critics are right, the Gaza withdrawal will improve Palestinian attitudes toward Israel, leading to an end of incitement and a steep drop in attempted violence, followed by a renewal of negotiations and a full settlement. Logic requires, after all, that if "occupation" is the problem, ending it, even partially, will lead to a solution.

But I forecast a very different outcome. Given that about 80% of Palestinian Arabs continue to reject Israel's very existence, signs of Israeli weakness, such as the forthcoming Gaza withdrawal, will instead inspire heightened Palestinian irredentism. Absorbing their new gift without gratitude, Palestinian Arabs will focus on those territories Israelis have not evacuated. (This is what happened after Israeli forces fled Lebanon.) The retreat will inspire not comity but a new rejectionist exhilaration, a greater frenzy of anti-Zionist anger, and a surge in anti-Israel violence.

Palestinian Arabs themselves are openly saying as much. A top Hamas figure in Gaza, Ahmed al-Bahar says "Israel has never been in such a state of retreat and weakness as it is today following more than four years of the intifada. Hamas's heroic attacks exposed the weakness and volatility of the impotent Zionist security establishment. The withdrawal marks the end of the Zionist dream and is a sign of the moral and psychological decline of the Jewish state. We believe that the resistance is the only way to pressure the Jews."

Happy Birthday George

On the occasion of G.W.'s 60th birthday (and a couple of days after July 4th) here is a rather nice piece in praise of America:

What's So Great About America?
By Dinesh D'Souza

The newcomer who sees America for the first time typically experiences emotions that alternate between wonder and delight. Here is a country where everything works: The roads are paper-smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up the telephone you get a dial tone. You can even buy things from the store and then take them back if you change your mind. For the Third World visitor, the American supermarket is a marvel to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, 50 different types of cereal, multiple flavors of ice cream, countless unappreciated inventions like quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, roll-on deodorant, disposable diapers.

The immigrant cannot help noticing that America is a country where the poor live comparatively well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s, when CBS television broadcast an anti-Reagan documentary, “People Like Us,” which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with the intention of embarrassing the Reagan administration. But it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans had television sets and cars. They arrived at the same conclusion that I witnessed in a friend of mine from Bombay who has been trying unsuccessfully to move to the United States for nearly a decade. I asked him, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”

Read on...

Found it via: instapundit

Survey of World's Muslims Yields Dismaying Results - Pipes

Survey of World's Muslims Yields Dismaying Results
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
June 27, 2006

How do Muslims worldwide think?

To find out, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press carried out a large-scale attitudinal survey this spring. Titled The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other, it interviewed Muslims in two batches of countries: six of them with long-standing, majority-Muslim populations (Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey) and four of them in Western Europe with new, minority Muslim populations (France, Germany, Britain, and Spain).

The survey, which also looks at Western views of Muslims, yielded some dismaying but not altogether surprising results. Its themes can be grouped under three rubrics.

A proclivity to conspiracy theories: In not one Muslim population polled does a majority believe that Arabs carried out the attacks of September 11, 2001, on America. The proportions range from a mere 15% in Pakistan holding Arabs responsible, to 48% among French Muslims. Confirming recent negative trends in Turkey, the number of Turks who point the finger at Arabs has declined to 16% today from 46% in 2002. In other words, in every one of these 10 Muslim communities, a majority views September 11 as a hoax perpetrated by the American government, Israel, or some other agency.

Likewise, Muslims are widely prejudiced against Jews, ranging from 28% unfavorable ratings among French Muslims to 98% in Jordan (which, despite the monarchy's moderation, has a majority Palestinian Arab population). Further, Muslims in certain countries (especially Egypt and Jordan) see Jews conspiratorially, as being responsible for bad relations between Muslims and Westerners.

Conspiracy theories also pertain to larger topics. Asked, "What is most responsible for Muslim nations' lack of prosperity?" between 14% (in Pakistan) and 43% (in Jordan) blame the policies of America and other Western states, as opposed to indigenous problems, such as a lack of democracy or education, or the presence of corruption or radical Islam.

This conspiracism points to a widespread unwillingness in the umma to deal with realities, preferring the safer bromides of plots, schemes, and intrigues. It also exposes major problems adjusting to modernity.

Support for terrorism: All the Muslim populations polled display a solid majority of support for Osama bin Laden. Asked whether they have confidence in him, Muslims replied positively, ranging between 8% (in Turkey) and 72% (in Nigeria). Likewise, suicide bombing is popular. Muslims who call it justified range from 13% (in Germany) to 69% (in Nigeria). These appalling numbers suggest that terrorism by Muslims has deep roots and will remain a danger for years to come.

British and Nigerian Muslims are most alienated: Britain stands out as a paradoxical country. Non-Muslims there have strikingly more favorable views of Islam and Muslims than elsewhere in the West; for example, only 32% of the British sample view Muslims as violent, significantly less than their counterparts in France (41%), Germany (52%), or Spain (60%). In the Muhammad cartoon dispute, Britons showed more sympathy for the Muslim outlook than did other Europeans. More broadly, Britons blame Muslims less for the poor state of Western-Muslim relations.

But British Muslims return the favor with the most malign anti-Western attitudes found in Europe. Many more of them regard Westerners as violent, greedy, immoral, and arrogant than do their counterparts in France, Germany, and Spain. In addition, whether asked about their attitudes toward Jews, responsibility for September 11, or the place of women in Western societies, their views are notably more extreme.

The situation in Britain reflects the "Londonistan" phenomenon, whereby Britons preemptively cringe and Muslims respond to this weakness with aggression.

Nigerian Muslims generally have the most belligerent views on such issues as the state of Western-Muslim relations, the supposed immorality and arrogance of Westerners, and support for Mr. bin Laden and suicide terrorism. This extremism results, no doubt, from the violent state of Christian-Muslim relations in Nigeria.

Ironically, most Muslim alienation is found in those countries where Muslims are either the most or the least accommodated, suggesting that a middle path is best - where Muslims do not win special privileges, as in Britain, nor are they in an advanced state of hostility, as in Nigeria.

Overall, the Pew survey sends an undeniable message of crisis from one end to the other of the Muslim world

Empire Discussion with Niall Ferguson

Great discussion here on the rights and wrongs of Empire (in general, and the British in particular). Ferguson is my hero, this Colley woman is ok, then a whinging old Marxist and a couple of trendy lefties to get your right-thinking hackles up! About 30 mins and well worth it!

Radio 4's Start the Week - Empire Discussion

This week Andrew Marr presents a special edition of Start the Week. To mark the end of Radio 4's This Sceptred Isle: Empire series, some of this country's best-known historians will be examining how Britain and other countries around the world have been changed by their experience of empire. They'll be discussing whether Britain should apologise and make reparation for its imperial past or glory in it, and asking whether the twenty-first century will see the birth of new empires. Eric Hobsbawm, Niall Ferguson, Robert Beckford, Linda Colley and Priya Gopal join Andrew Marr.

• The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred by Niall Ferguson is published by Allen Lane.


• Jesus Dub: Theology, Music and Social Change by Robert Beckford is published by Routledge.


• Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence by Priyamvada Gopal is published by Routledge. Her essay on a Moral Empire can be found in the collection she is editing with Neil Lazarus, which will be published in the autumn as a special issue of the journal New Formations, to be called, After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies.


• The Age of Extremes by Eric Hobsbawm is published by Abacus, as is Nations and Nationalism since 1780.


• The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley will be published by HarperCollins in the autumn. Captives is published by Pimlico.

Polish anti-semitism on the rise

Ghetto survivor warns of Polish 'fascism'
Telegraph
24/06/2006

As a 24-year-old banished to the Warsaw ghetto with thousands of fellow Polish Jews, Marek Edelman decided that the only way to fight the Nazis was to take up arms.More than six decades later, the last surviving leader of the ghetto's courageous but doomed uprising of 1943 said he thought similar action justified in today's Poland."If we want to save Poland, my advice would be to take up the knife and hit them where it hurts," Mr Edelman, 87, said in his flat in the central city of Lodz.

His anger is directed at the conservative government, which was elected eight months ago, and two nationalist and radical Right-wing parties that were recently invited to prop it up: the League of Polish Families (LPR) and Self-Defence, whose leader has praised Hitler's economic policies.

Poland's entry to the European Union two years ago has generally been hailed as a success. But it has brought with it heavy doses of illiberalism that are embarrassing the champions of EU expansion. The nation of 40 million is in danger of becoming a hothouse of extremism and Catholic nationalism. Ten days ago the European Parliament condemned "a rise in racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic and homophobic intolerance" and urged the government to tone down its rhetoric or risk sanctions. Drawing parallels with the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Mr Edelman said: "If this coalition continues to shape the country, I truly believe that our freedom is threatened. Persecution starts with small things: first language, then beatings, then murder."

This week a report alleged that the deputy chief of state television had published a neo-Nazi magazine calling for the expulsion of Jews from Poland. Piotr Farfal, 28, claimed that he had only "lent his name" to the magazine. Asked to confirm his identity on a photograph of him giving a Nazi salute, he said: "You can also use this gesture to greet someone."

Gay rights groups around the world protested after Wojciech Wierzejski, the deputy chief of LPR, speaking before the country's annual gay rights march, referred to gays as "deviants" who should be beaten with sticks if they marched without a permit.

But the main focus of detractors' wrath is Radio Maryja, a popular Catholic radio station that is openly anti-semitic and racist. The station was crucial to the electoral success of the Law and Justice Party, which squeezed into power on the back of public dissatisfaction with the previous Left-wing government's corruption and poor economic management. As a result, the station has acquired a huge influence on government business.

Its listeners are, like the supporters of LPR and Self-Defence, typically rural, elderly, staunch Catholics who feel betrayed by the country's free market transformation. Numbering up to four million, they pay for the station through donations and in return lap up not only the morning doses of prayers, recipes and household tips but also the evening political broadcasts and phone-ins in which government figures regularly take part.

In March Mr Edelman wrote an angry letter to the prime minister after a broadcast in which a regular Radio Maryja commentator said that Poland was "being outflanked by Judeans" who, with their "greasy palms", were "trying to extort money from our government". "I wanted to point out that the government is lending support to the most reactionary currents of xenophobia and anti-semitism," said Mr Edelman, a retired heart surgeon. "Radio Maryja should be closed down."

The government rejects the charges, talking of a Left-wing smear campaign. All Polish Youth, the youth wing of LPR, says it is only by making Poland a Catholic state that its future will be secured. "We do not want to become like Holland with its free drugs and gay marriage," said Konrad Bonislawski, 23, a senior member. "Since joining the European Union we have seen attempts to destroy our Catholic values."

One of the government's most controversial moves has been to announce the reintroduction to schools of lessons in patriotism, in which pupils will celebrate their heritage through history lessons and singing the national anthem. The initiative prompted schoolchildren to form the Pupils' Initiative and to storm the education ministry this month, demanding the sacking of Roman Giertych, the education minister and the leader of LPR.

"You can't teach patriotism," said Karolina Szczepaniak, 18, who attends a convent school in Warsaw. "The government is trying to force on us its religious ideas, its homophobia, its racism, as it tries to turn Poland into a Catholic state. "Look at all the cases where fundamentalists impose their ideas on states and you see how dangerous it can be."

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JP Note: according to the stats here, the Jewish population of Poland is 25,000, ie 0.065% of the population

The public feels patronised, bullied and betrayed

Here's a good piece on Labour in the Guardian.

The public feels patronised, bullied and betrayed
Jenni Russell

The saddest and most puzzling aspect of this rift is that the party adopted the top-down creed of technocratic managerialism just as business was realising the limitations of that approach. These days, successful workplaces are all about delegation and trust. Already the Conservatives have seen what potentially rich territory this is. They are talking of the need to trust people again.

There are signs of hope. Some young Labour ministers think and talk like human beings and would like a new approach. If Labour is to win the next election, it's vital that this more open, less defensive generation of politicians are allowed to start thinking about how they can construct a better relationship between them and us.

An Englishman's home isn't his Castle

A new property law enables the council to confiscate your home if it has been empty for over six months.

It's an old saying, a trope or a truism if you prefer, that "An Englishman's home is his castle". Whatever happens outside in the streets, whatever idiocies the current political pygmies have decided to inflict upon the populace, the possession and enjoyment of one's own property was safe, guarded by both law and custom. Certainly there were eminent domain purchases, broadly in line with American practice but as of the first of this month the government no longer even has to pay.

Yes, you did read that correctly, your paid off, unmortgaged, fully owned property can be taken away from you without your even being paid for it.

The law is here: The Housing (Empty Dwelling Management Orders) (Prescribed Exceptions and Requirements) (England) Order 2006. Something of a mouthful, I know, but what this and the preceding pieces of legislation actually state is that if you leave a property uninhabited for 6 months then the local council can take it from you and rent it to whomever it likes. There are a few exceptions, such as vacation homes and so on, but at a stroke the entire basis of property law has changed. Instead of it being yours to do with as you wish it is yours as long, and only as long, as you do as the government wishes.

The set up is that if you have left the property empty then the local council must make reasonable efforts to contact you to let out the house or apartment. If you still decide that you don't want to, then they will do it for you. Worse, far worse, is if their "reasonable efforts" don't actually find you, then they'll do it without actually telling you. These orders allowing them to do this will last 7 years, and can be extended. Yes, this will even be possible in the case of a death: the inheritors have 6 months (not from probate, but from the granting of representation: and there are many only even mildly complicated estates that can take more than 6 months to run the executor's course) to dispose of the property or conceivably have it compulsorarily rented out from underneath them.

That local council can charge you a management fee for this service that you obviously don't want and should then pass on to you whatever is left of the rent they have been charging your new unwanted tenant. Your new tenants will not, of course, be quite from the top drawer of society, for like anywhere else in the world, that's not the social stratum from whom the inhabitants of "social" housing are drawn. Yet you will be responsible for the costs of ensuring that said housing is maintained to the highest standards, whether or not they actually pay any rent; indeed, you won't actually be able to evict them if they should trash the place for, of course, you are not the manager or agent for the property; that is the local council.

Here's the full article.

A Natural History of Jewish Intelligence

The Lessons of Jewish Genes
by Steven Pinker
The New Republic
17/6/06

My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe who owned a small necktie factory on the outskirts of Montreal. While visiting them one weekend, I found my grandfather on the factory floor, cutting shapes out of irregular stacks of cloth with a fabric saw. He explained that by carving up the remnants that were left over when the neckties had been cut out and stitching them together in places that didn't show, he could get a few extra ties out of each sheet of cloth. I asked him why he was doing this himself rather than leaving it to his employees. He shrugged, tapped his forehead, and said, "Goyishe kop," a term of condescension that literally means "gentile head."

He wasn't exactly serious, but he wasn't exactly not serious either. Jews have long had an ambivalent attitude toward their own intelligence, and toward their reputation for intelligence. There is an ethnic pride at the prevalence of Jews in occupations that reward brainpower. A droll e-mail called "New Words to Add to Your Jewish Vocabulary" includes "jewbiliation, N: pride in finding out that one's favorite celebrity is Jewish" and "meinstein, N: My son, the genius." Many Jews subscribe to a folk theory that attributes Jewish intelligence to what would have to be the weirdest example of sexual selection in the living world: that for generations in the shtetl, the brightest yeshiva boy was betrothed to the daughter of the richest man, thereby favoring the genes, if such genes there are, for Talmudic pilpul.

But pride has always been haunted by fear that public acknowledge of Jewish achievement could fuel the perception of "Jewish domination" of institutions. And any characterization of Jews in biological terms smacks of Nazi pseudoscience about "the Jewish race." A team of scientists from the University of Utah recently strode into this minefield with their article "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence," which was published online in the Journal of Biosocial Science a year ago, and was soon publicized in The New York Times, The Economist, and on the cover of New York magazine.

The Utah researchers Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending (henceforth CH&H) proposed that Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic advantage in intelligence, and that the advantage arose from natural selection for success in middleman occupations (moneylending, selling, and estate management) during the first millennium of their existence in northern Europe, from about 800 C.E. to 1600 C.E. Since rapid selection of a single trait often brings along deleterious by-products, this evolutionary history also bequeathed the genetic diseases known to be common among Ashkenazim, such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher's.

The CH&H study quickly became a target of harsh denunciation and morbid fascination. It raises two questions. How good is the evidence for this audacious hypothesis? And what, if any, are the political and moral implications?

The Positive Case For Globalisation

An excellent article in the Times on the positive benefits of Globalisation and why it is important to defend it against a rising tide of criticsm. And the Author? Mr Gordon Brown. If he keeps this up I might even vote for him!

The whole article is worth reading but I wanted to pull out these quotes:

'“Economic patriotism” across Europe, with country after country blocking cross-border acquisitions, is antithetical to both the spirit and the rules of an open single market. Protectionist calls from parts of the United States, which would seek to halt necessary change, also send out the wrong message, implying that globalisation is a threat, not the opportunity it should be.

The rising tide of populism in Latin America and continuing protectionism in Asia are direct assaults on the very idea of globalisation itself. Everywhere, instead of barriers coming down, they appear to be going up.'

'Ironically, even globalisation’s beneficiaries — the millions who are seeing cuts in consumer goods prices, lower inflation and lower interest rates, and higher economic growth and employment — are acting as if they are victims. With even winners thinking like losers — and the popular focus on lost manufacturing, lost service jobs off-shored, lost jobs to newcomers moving into their communities — the argument is being run by the hardest hit producers, forgetting the benefits to consumers.

But it is not the side-effects or the inevitable strains of globalisation that they have put under attack. Under assault are the very foundations of globalisation — the free movement of capital, goods and services, and labour — that would be destroyed by this three-pronged attack from protectionism, economic patriotism and anti-immigrant sentiment.

The world is being given a wake-up call about the dangers of retreating back into the kind of beggar-thy-neighbour, heads-in-the-sand protectionism that set nation against nation in the 1930s.

So our first task, indeed our responsibility as economic leaders, is to demonstrate to an insecure and uncertain public that either defending a status quo that cannot endure, or retreating into protectionism is a false prospectus.'

Civilian deaths in Gaza

It's hard to write about this without sounding like a complete apologist for any action carried about Israel. Just for the record, I'm not defending the shelling of picnicing families. However, just read this (via biased-bbc), which made think that the story was at the very least worth keeping an eye on. (Worth reading for the surprising - to me, anyway - revelation that the Palestinian boy shown cowering behind his father, was not, after all, killed by Israeli bullets.) Good post on moral equivalence from HP too.

In God We Trust (a bit less)

Tipped off to this by the fun-loving National Secular Society:

Although the US is far more devout than Europe (a point frequently made by M. Steyn) a new study suggests that Americans too are beginning to stand in the corner losing their religion. According to the authors of the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), the number of respondants claiming no religious affiliation has risen from 8% to 14%.

I realise it probably looks like I'm making some kind of 'aha! they're as godless as us!' point - but I'm not. It's one survey and the numbers aren't exactly massive. Just thought it was mildly interesting. Anyway, you can read more about it here, if you're so inclined.

Zarqawi is dead

Al-Zarqawi killed in US Air-raid.

Hamas leader's three sisters live secretly in Israel as full citizens

Hamas leader's three sisters live secretly in Israel as full citizens
Telegraph
02/06/2006

Israel regards Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian Hamas prime minister, as an enemy of state. But three of his sisters enjoy full Israeli citizenship, having moved 30 years ago to the desert town of Tel Sheva. Some of their offspring have even served in the Israeli army, the force responsible for decades of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, an occupation that the Islamist movement, Hamas, was founded to fight.

Recycled politics

How many of the Conservative policies that Labour abolished are they now bringing back?

1. The Governments Education Bill is effectively the Conservatives 1987 Grant Maintained Schools scheme.

2. The Government banned the Conservative internal market reforms in the NHS, massively increased spending on something else and then decided they were wrong to ban the Tory policies in the first place. Now they are pushing forward with internal market reforms to the NHS.

3. And finally we have a new scheme that is similiar in principle to the Conservatives assisted places scheme.

Here's the Adam Smith Institue Blog report on the new scheme:

'Telegraph education correspondent Julie Henry reports that up to 2,000 children in local-authority care in Britain could be offered places in private boarding schools.

Despite the £2.5bn a year that is spent looking after some 60,000 children in care, only 6% of them end up gaining five or more good GCSEs – the standard target in secondary schools. More than a third of them get no GCSE exams at all. They are also three times more likely to get involved in crime than other children. So access to private education could be a great boon for them.

Trials of the idea could start next year. There is, of course, a bit of self-interest for the local councils too. To keep a child in a children’s home costs four times the fees in posh schools like Eton or Winchester.

But what struck me as remarkable is that here we are – eight years later – bringing back a version of the ‘assisted places’ scheme that Tony Blair’s government abolished as soon as it came into office. The scheme offended Old Labour backbenchers, who wanted to make life as difficult as possible for the private schools. So despite the fact that it had given thousands of poor but bright kids access to the very best schooling in the country, it had to go.

So let us hope that this new idea takes root and grows. But why stop at 2,000? Why not give all children state-paid access to the school of their choice? The state does not have to provide an entire service – education, health, food, footwear, clothes – to make sure that everyone has access to it. All it has to do is pay – specifically, for those who could not otherwise afford these things. That gives equal access of the kind Old Labour wants: but without the nationalized industry provision that we all know is a disaster.'

Who knows maybe this is an example of Labour Ideology being best served by Conservative policies. If that's the case it would appear the Government has wasted a lot of money and effort over the last nine years. (Incidently, no book quite defines the right as Marx's Communist manifesto does the left but I reckon Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' and its theory of the Market's 'invisible hand'comes closest).

Christian children sold as slaves by Islamist leader

Reunited: boys saved from slavers
The Sunday Times
May 21, 2006

A SENIOR member of an Islamic organisation linked to Al-Qaeda is funding his activities through the kidnapping of Christian children who are sold into slavery in Pakistan. The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12. They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade.

Khan was exposed in a sting organised by American and Pakistani missionaries who decided to save 20 such boys and return them to their homes. ... The undercover missionaries have demanded the prosecution of Khan and an investigation into his work for the JUD, which claims to have created a “pure Islamic environment” at Muridke.

Hafez Muhamed Sayeed, [JUD's] leader, was accused of inciting riots in Pakistan this year with speeches denouncing western “depravity” after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

----------------------------

The rescue in detail:

Rescued – the Pakistan children seized by Islamist slave traders
The Sunday Times
May 21, 2006

Chavez and the foolishness of the Left - Buruma

Thank you, my foolish friends in the West
The Sunday Times
May 14, 2006
Ian Buruma

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is only the latest dictator-in-waiting to bask in adulation from western 'progressives', says Ian Buruma

When the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape to the US in 1980, after years of persecution by the Cuban government for being openly homosexual and a dissident, he said: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”

One of the most vexing things for artists and intellectuals who live under the compulsion to applaud dictators is the spectacle of colleagues from more open societies applauding of their own free will. It adds a peculiarly nasty insult to injury. Stalin was applauded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Mao was visited by a constant stream of worshippers from the West, some of whose names can still produce winces of disgust in China. Castro has basked for years in the adulation of such literary stars as Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Even Pol Pot found favour among several well-known journalists and academics.

Last year a number of journalists, writers and showbiz figures, including Harold Pinter, Nadine Gordimer, Harry Belafonte and Tariq Ali, signed a letter claiming that in Cuba “there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959 . . .”

Arenas was arrested in 1973 for “ideological deviation”. He was tortured and locked up in prison cells filled with floodwater and excrement, and threatened with death if he didn’t renounce his own writing. Imagine what it must be like to be treated like this and then read about your fellow writers in the West standing up for your oppressors.

...

Worse causes have been served by western enthusiasts than the Bolivarist revolution, and worse leaders have been applauded than Chavez. One only needs recall the abject audiences at the court of Saddam Hussein by George Galloway, among others, who flattered the murderous dictator while claiming to represent “the voice of the voiceless”. Even now, such publications as the New Left Review advocate support for a global anti-imperialist movement that would include North Korea, surely the most oppressive regime on earth.

The common element of radical Third Worldism is an obsession with American power, as though the US were so intrinsically evil that any enemy of the US must be our friend, from Mao to Kim Jong-il, from Fidel Castro to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And if our “friends” shower us with flattery, asking us to attend conferences and sit on advisory boards, so much the better.

Criticism of American policies and economic practices are necessary and often just, but why do leftists continue to discredit their critical stance by applauding strongmen who oppress and murder their own critics? Is it simply a reverse application of that famous American cold war dictum: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”? Or is it the fatal attraction to power often felt by writers and artists who feel marginal and impotent in capitalist democracies? The danger of Chavism is not a revival of communism, even though Castro is among its main boosters. Nor should anti-Americanism be our main concern. The US can take care of itself. What needs to be resisted, not just in Latin America, is the new form of populist authoritarianism.

That Chavez is applauded by many people, especially the poor, is not necessarily a sign of democracy; many revolutionary leaders are popular, at least in the beginning of their rule, before their promises have ended in misery and bloodshed.

The left has a proud tradition of defending political freedoms, at home and abroad. But this tradition is in danger of being lost when western intellectuals indulge in power worship. Applause for autocrats undermines the morale of people who insist on fighting for their freedoms Leftists were largely sympathetic, and rightly so, to critics of Berlusconi and Thaksin, even though neither was a dictator. Both did, of course, support American foreign policy. But when democracy is endangered, the left should be equally hard on rulers who oppose the US. Failure to do so encourages authoritarianism everywhere, including in the West itself, where the frivolous behaviour of a dogmatic left has already allowed neoconservatives to steal all the best lines.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali leaves Europe to live in the USA

Europe loses a powerful & important voice in the debate on Islam:

Hirsi Ali to leave Netherlands for job with US think tank

Holland's shameful treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Civil Liberties critics are 'out of touch' says Blair

Fascinating email exchange between Henry Porter and the Prime Minister. Tony Blair attacks his critics and pledges to go much further. He states that he 'would widen the police powers to seize the cash of suspected drug dealers, the cars they drive round in, and require them to prove they came by them, lawfully.' and promises to 'generally harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country.'

Here's debate in full: Britain's Liberties - The Great Debate

'The White Flight to the Right'

Interesting article on the alleged increase of suppport for the BNP amongst traditional working class Labour voters. The piece also suggests how confused and redundant the old notions of Left and Right have become when both Respect and the BNP are claiming to be the traditional voices of socialism.

'The White Flight to the Right'
Michael Collins

Rebuilding a Democratic Left

Interesting piece on Nick Cohen's blog. He has worked with Norman Geras to produce a manifesto for Progressive Politics. A renewal of political debate and values is much needed and welcome. Although personally, I think they are wrong to so narrowly define it as of the left. The best values are universal and beyond party politics.

The race betweeen culture and structure

V. interesting speech by John McWhorter that I happened to find on the American Enterprise Institue for Public Policy Research website. (You know, just a little light reading.)

Although it's specifically about black America it's well worth a look as it raises questions (and possible methodologies) that may apply beyond the scope of McWhorter's discussion.

Winning the Race

Beyond the Crisis in Black America
By John McWhorter

One of the main sources of the stalemate on the race question in America today is that among so many, it is considered a mark of enlightenment to understand that poor black Americans are incapable of playing a significant part in changing their own lives.

Instead, it is thought that external factors--mainly the economy and racism--have determined the fate of poor black Americans and always will. The fancy way of putting this is that black people’s problems are structural, i.e. due to flaws in societal structures. Adherents of the Structural notion are concentrated especially in academia: mastering its tenets is generally thought, in fact, to be a badge of mature insight and moral sophistication.

What especially alarms the Structural crowd is those who lack this purported sophistication, and venture to propose that the black community’s problems are due, at least in significant part, to entrenched behaviors that are not connected to the state of the GNP, how whites feel about blacks, or how level the playing field is. That is, the Structural crowd blanches at the thought that anyone supposes that poor black America’s problems are cultural rather than structural.

They are aware that the Cultural analysis is the more immediately intuitive one, most likely of the man on the street. Therefore, they see all expressions of the Cultural analysis as red meat to the untutored masses, threatening to undo their decades-long attempt to usher the public into what they suppose is precious wisdom only comprehensible via careful tutelage.

This is why Bill Cosby’s grouchy call for poor blacks to take responsibility for themselves was received with such fury by so many in the black punditocracy, even inspiring a book-length disquisition by the University of Pennsylvania’s Michael Eric Dyson. Cosby was exemplifying precisely what the Structural crowd consider backwards and unkind--and heaven forbid, in a very public forum where Joe Barstool could hear it.

This is why so often black people appear to be closed to simple differences of opinion on race. To Structural adherents, the Cultural idea is not just a different viewpoint, but a punitive, abusive one, accusing people of responsibility for problems imposed upon them by The Man. To point to culture in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, then, is to assail a struggling black person who already has enough on his plate because of the eternal, grinding depredations of the Structure.

Indeed, the Structural analysis is commonly expressed amidst indignation, name-calling, and rhetorical language. These are signs that the analysis is based not on sober engagement with the full range of relevant facts and a constant commitment to learning new things and assessing them logically, but on emotion. A purported analysis of race and society that is based on emotion has little chance of corresponding more than approximately to reality, and in my research, I have found it impossible to avoid the conclusion so many others have reached: that the Structural analysis has a grain of truth in it and then some, but that in 2006, poor black America’s main problems are cultural.

Read on.

Iran's Killing Fields

Ever seen a picture of a woman being buried up to her neck prior to being stoned? Well there's one here. You also see the Amnesty ad (slogan: "In Iran, stoning a person to death is not against the law. Using the wrong stone is.") where they show guidelines as to the right size of stone to use (it's the Goldilocks principle).

Tehran’s Killing Fields
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 27, 2005

Women sentenced to death by stoning are buried in the ground up to their necks. Iranian law regulates the size of the stones used by the executioner crowd; stones cannot be big enough to kill the sentenced woman too quickly, as the purpose of this barbaric ritual is to inflict as much pain as possible before death. On the other hand, stones cannot be too small, as each blow must be dramatically painful.

In a particularly gruesome execution carried out in 1993 in the city of Arak, a woman was to be stoned to death in front of her husband and two young children. After the stoning began, the woman was able to free herself from the hole in the ground, escaping death. According to Shariah laws, in such cases the woman must be let go, as her death sentence was revoked by divine intervention. Ten minutes after the failed stoning, however, the poor woman was chased down, apprehended and summarily executed anyway, by a firing squad.

While stoning captures the imagination of Westerners as the most barbaric act committed under Shariah laws, other forms of sentencing perpetrated by the Islamic Republic are just as horrific. For example, Iran employs several types of body mutilation, from the amputation of hands, arms and legs to the macabre procedure of plucking out the eyeballs of the sentenced without the use of anesthetics. Several photos exist to document such occurrences, in dossiers kept by human rights organizations.

Report from the Rally for Freedom of Expression

A fun day out of speeches and rain. It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a demo. So long in fact, that the last time I was on a march people were still chanting ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – Out! Out! Out!’ This was somewhat different. V. civilised. No exhortations to buy the Socialist Worker.

It was a small crowd. The first couple of speeches were by Dr. Evan Harris (Lib Dem) and Peter Tatchell. Both spoke eloquently about their support for freedom of speech, though both drew the line at incitement to hatred and/or violence. (Remember Tatchell was all for prosecuting Beenie Man over his lyrics) I’ve actually got a lot of time for Tatchell. A friend said he’d written to him complaining about a particular article he’d written and he said he got a very sweet and well-reasoned reply. Both speeches were good (Tatchell more or less posted his in advance – you can read it here) and both made a point of criticising Sir Iqbal Sacranie – the general thrust being that they defend his right to criticise homosexuals and wish that he in turn would defend their right to criticise Islam. Harris also castigated Charles Clarke for his letter to Imams in which he made party political capital out of the defeat of the Religious Hatred Bill. Throughout the afternoon there was frequent reference to the MoToons, Religious Hatred Bill, ‘glorification of terrorism’, Jerry Springer and Bezhti.

There was a moment of excitement when one of the organisers told the crowd that a man had been questioned by the police for holding a banner with one of the MoToons on it. A friend of said man made a short speech and held the offending banner aloft passing it round the crowd with a cry of ‘They can’t arrest all of us.’ The banner was duly passed round. I should point out that there had been a controversial 11th hour request for rallyers to not display the cartoons which caused an inevitable bunching up of panties (read the comments). In the end I think the support for the MoToon when it was passed around showed that the rally had not become the ‘anti-cartoon’ protest that some had feared. There was also an uncomfortable moment when an effigy of Blair with a swastika round his neck attracted the attention of stewards but I was too far away to see exactly what was going on (or indeed the text accompanying the effigy). But in any event, the effigy was held up for a while.

While we’re on the subject of banners, most were rather po-faced quotations but there were some more imaginative homemade ones:

“Infidel Bloggers Alliance”
A picture of Zoidberg from Futurama under the heading “Toons for Freedom of Expression”
Danish flags with “Londoners stand with you”
Tatchell carried a rather fetching “Love Muslims – Hate Religious Tyrants”
“Toonophobia”
“He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy.”
And my favourite: “Free to offend – please don’t behead me!”

There was also a nice moment of traditional British silliness when a man dressed as a bullfighter ran around with a Danish flag shouting “Fight the fundamentalist bull” to the sound of hearty applause.

More speeches followed and despite the rain the crowd remained solid. (Police estimate 250, organisers 600 – personally I think the police may be nearer the mark.) Other speakers included Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society - unsurprisingly he was focussed on blasphemy laws, Religious Hatred, and the (by now de riguer) Motoons, Springer opera and Bezhti play.

The next speaker was an Iraqi, identified only as Ali. He described life under Saddam and told of a man who got 7 years, just for dreaming of a coup. He said that not only did they not have freedom of speech, they did not have freedom to dream. He supported the invasion and expressed his support for the democratic voices in Iraq who want freedom of expression and warned of an ongoing battle against theocracy and totalitarianism. He told us he was a practising Muslim, but denounced the idea of a prophet who would ask you to kill in his name. He also had a neat joke about freedom of thought giving female suicide bombers the right to ask for 72 men when they get to paradise. (Maybe you had to be there. But it got a big laugh.)

The most surprising speech was by Labi Siffre. He’s actually quite the activist, so it shouldn’t have been that surprising, but till today I only knew him for recording ‘It Must be Love (later a big hit for Madness) and also the main sample in Eminem’s ‘My Name Is’. Anyway, he made a great speech, the theme of which was ‘not all beliefs are worthy of respect’ and included the line ‘I reject the argument that “because I am sincere, I must be right”’.

The most hardcore speech came from Dr. Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance. He was the first (and only) speaker to mention Nick Griffin, Abu Hamza and David Irving, names that did not exactly provoke any rousing cheers. (I did spot one guy wearing a sandwich board about Irving, but I couldn’t read all of it from where I was. May have been a bit nutty.) Nonetheless, his general point was very well received, namely that many people displayed ‘a selective attitude to free speech’ and were rather ‘defending a range of permissible expressions’.

There were a couple more speeches but those were the highlights. Very peaceful. Low key policing (though L. was pretty sure they were photographing the crowd, which is a little worrying.) I have to say that the two hours flew by and that it felt really good to be there.

And when it was all over my youngest son got to say ‘hello’ to a policeman and try on his helmet.

Moussaoui al-Qaeda trial - FBI in dock for criminal ineptitude

Be afraid... be very afraid....

Al-Qaeda trial lands FBI in dock for criminal ineptitude
The Times
March 25, 2006

THEY filed into court three weeks ago — the grieving families, the press, the curious public, the jury — expecting to see the Bush Administration lay out in devastating detail why Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in the US for his connection to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, should be put to death.

What they have witnessed is a dark tragicomedy, a courtroom farce with the FBI and the Government revealed in excruciating detail as the Keystone Kops, and Moussaoui himself, hood-eyed, thickly bearded and constantly ranting, an onlooker as blunder has followed blunder.

Displaying an exceptional level of incompetence, prosecutors have managed to put the Government in the dock on charges of criminal ineptitude and cronyism, while the self-confessed al-Qaeda terrorist and disciple of Osama bin Laden they are desperate to execute sits on the sidelines, with every chance of reaching old age.

...

This week a wealth of new evidence of how the FBI bungled the Moussaoui investigation became so Pythonesque in its absurdity that even the victims’ families were roaring with laughter.

Into the witness box stepped Harry Samit, the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui. He was called by the prosecution but became the star witness of the defence.

He said that he warned his supervisors more than 70 times that Moussaoui was an al-Qaeda operative who might be plotting to hijack an airplane and fly it into a building. He said that he was regularly thwarted by two superiors, David Frasca and Michael Maltbie, from obtaining a warrant to search Moussaoui’s flat. He accused the men of being criminally negligent.

Mr Maltbie told him that getting a warrant, which could be troublesome, might harm his — Maltbie’s — career prospects. Mr Maltbie has since been promoted.

Released Iraq hostages 'refuse to help their rescuers'

I reckon they should hand Kember and the other two hostages back.

Released hostages 'refuse to help their rescuers'
Telegraph
25/03/2006

The three peace activists freed by an SAS-led coalition force after being held hostage in Iraq for four months refused to co-operate fully with an intelligence unit sent to debrief them, a security source claimed yesterday. The claim has infuriated those searching for other hostages. Neither the men nor the Canadian group that sent them to Iraq have thanked the people who saved them in any of their public statements.

...

Previous hostages have been questioned on everything from what shoes their kidnappers wore to the number of mobile phones they had. The pacifist Christian Peacemaker Teams with which the men were visiting Iraq is opposed to the coalition's presence and has accused it of illegally detaining thousands of Iraqis.

Jan Benvie, 51, an Edinburgh teacher who is due to go to Iraq with the organisation this summer, said: "We make clear that if we are kidnapped we do not want there to be force or any form of violence used to release us."

Although the CPTs has welcomed the men's release, it has not thanked the rescuers in any of its statements. It blamed the kidnapping on the presence of foreign troops in the country, which was "responsible for so much pain and suffering in Iraq today".

Palestinian-Israeli War: Where It Came From, and How to End It - Pipes

Superb article from Pipes, some excerpts below:

The Palestinian-Israeli War: Where It Came From, and How to End It
Daniel Pipes
The Commonwealth
March 2006

What went wrong with Oslo?

There was an assumption that the Palestinians would follow the leadership: If Yasser Arafat signed a document, others in the Palestinian leadership – the Palestinian body-politic more broadly – would likewise accept Israel's existence. Trouble was, first, that the leadership didn't really accept Israel. Look at areas where the leadership had control – television stations, political rhetoric, schoolbooks; while they were on the one hand shaking hands and making deals with Israelis, they on the other hand continued the message that Israel must be destroyed. Symbolic of this would be the maps. Every map produced showed a Palestine instead of an Israel, not alongside it.

Second mistake was to believe that governments or authorities can deliver their populations. If one looks at not just the Palestinian-Israeli accord but the Egyptian and Jordanian accords as well, we see a population – Egyptian, Jordanian or Palestinian – fairly passive and inclined to allow its leadership to take steps on its behalf. Once an agreement has been signed with Israel, the population becomes far more engaged, far more fervently anti-Zionist. It's as though the populations were saying to the leadership, You have our proxy – but when the leadership signed an agreement with Israel, that proxy was taken back.

I lived in Egypt in the 1970s. Before the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Egyptians were not that engaged in this problem. After it, they became far more engaged. Songs like "I Hate Israel" became blockbuster hits. Giving money to organizations that would engage in activities – violent and otherwise – against Israel became far more common.

The net result of the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 was to produce a population of Palestinians that was more vehemently anti-Israel than before. The hope of destroying Israel acquired more traction, seen in words and in actions, in text and in maps. The muted Palestinian mood of 1993 turned into the enraged ambition of 2000. A population not so confident about its prospects – the Iraqis had just lost their war, the Soviet Union had collapsed, the Palestinians were in a precarious situation; they wanted to destroy Israel, but they could see no means of achieving it. By the year 2000, due to the diplomacy, to Israeli concessions, one found a Palestinian population that was truly inspired, that saw within its grasp the destruction of Israel.

What we might do better in the future

To look to the future requires us to acknowledge the faulty presumptions that underlay Oslo. First, that the Palestinians did in fact accept Israel; and second, that the elites could take a softer line and have this accepted more broadly. We must resolve not to make the same mistakes. Instead – and this is my key point – we must make popular Palestinian acceptance of Israel's existence the primary goal. We must work, in other words, for what is now assumed.

The consensus view is that Palestinians have accepted Israel. That lies in the future. Survey research consistently shows that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of Palestinians, both within the Palestinian Authority and elsewhere, have come to the conclusion that Israel's there and permanent. Interestingly, 15 to 20 percent of Israeli Jews believe that Palestinians have accepted Israel. Americans, when asked if the Palestinians have accepted Israel, about 20 percent say that Arafat sought a small state living alongside Israel. How might this be resolved?

I'm a historian, so I look at the historical record – how conflicts have been resolved in the 20th century. Over and over again, international conflicts are resolved not through mediation and compromise and good will, but through one side coming to the conclusion that it can no longer achieve its goals. The Germans lost in World War I, but they lost without being convinced that they had. They turned to Hitler and tried a second time. In the Second World War, the Allies made clear to the Germans that they had lost. The Korean War ended 50 years ago, but neither the North nor the South came to the conclusion that they could not prevail, and as a result, it could start up again at any time. The Arabs and Israelis fought time after time, yet neither side came to the conclusion it had lost. Iraq and Iran fought for eight years; neither side came to the conclusion it had lost.

....


Q: The notion of political correctness aside, is it not incumbent to be doubly careful in terms of the rhetoric used? Is it not possible that even Muslims who might agree with a great deal of what you're saying feel targeted and identified by some of the things you're saying – and that, perhaps, you tend to drive away some of the people who perhaps you need to support this moderation?

A: It's not for me to say whether my words are driving people away or not. But it is far more difficult to deal with the situation we have now, where there are pious statements made that No, there's no discrimination, there's no special attention paid to Muslims, there's no profiling – whereas in fact, everyone knows there is. That is more insidious than having a situation where one is forthright and says, Well, reluctantly, painfully, we must take these steps. It is in the interest of us all, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Let us take these steps sensibly, intelligently, politely and knowledgeably, but let's take these steps because these steps are being taken in any case.

Many of the Muslim organizations protest that Muslims are being singled out and the authorities invariably say, No, no, no. I say, Yes, yes, yes. Let's not lie.

Q: Is it possible some Palestinians will say, "We have a vested interest in building a society and economy for ourselves"?

A: Yes, some will say that here's an opportunity. But this is not a predominant reaction. Look at the response to the Israeli withdrawal – leaving behind houses, fields and agriculture infrastructure with the intent that this could be used by the Palestinians. This was destroyed within hours. There was no interest in building the economy; there was interest in stamping the Palestinian victory over the Israelis, burning synagogues, desecrating synagogues. Was that about fixing the economy and the society and the polity and the culture? No, it's about winning.

The Israelis are fooling themselves if they think that they can finesse the Palestinians into forgetting that the Palestinians want to destroy Israel. They are intent on destroying Israel, and if that means giving up their children as suicide bombers, having a lower standard of living, living under autocracy, they will take it. What they need to be convinced is: You're going to achieve nothing by it. This is where the United States and its allies can be so helpful, to send a signal that is steady and unremitting to the Palestinians: Forget it, you can't win this. Then the Palestinians might have second thoughts more quickly than they will if the outside world doesn't send that signal.

Afghan faces death penalty for Christian faith

No comments about dragging people kicking and screaming into the 15th century, please. After all, they're not gonna torture the guy, so fair dos.

Afghan faces death penalty for Christian faith
Times Online
March 20, 2006

An Afghan who has renounced his Islamic faith for Christianity faces the death penalty under Afghan law in a throwback to the brutal Taleban regime. Abdul Rahman, 41, is being prosecuted for an "attack on Islam", for which the punishment under Afghanistan's draft constitution, is death by hanging. The charge comes as Britain prepares to send 3,300 nominally Christian paratroopers to stabilise the troubled south of the country.

Mr Rahman converted to Christianity over 14 years ago, but his situation was bought to the attention of the authorities after he tried to gain custody of his daughters who had been living with their grandparents. His parents then denounced him as a convert and on arrest he was found to be carrying a Bible."The Attorney General is emphasising he should be hung. It is a crime to convert to Christianity from Islam. He is teasing and insulating his family by converting," Judge Alhaj Ansarullah Mawlawy Zada, who will be trying his case, told The Times.

"He was a Muslim for 25 years more than he has been a Christian. We will request him to become a Muslim again. In your country two women can marry I think that is very strange. In this country we have the perfect constitution, it is Islamic law and it is illegal to be a Christian and it should be punished," said the judge.

------------------------

Afghan's openness about his Christianity went too far
March 20, 2006
Chicago Tribune

Abdul Rahman told his family he was a Christian. He told the neighbors, bringing shame upon his home. But then he told the police, and he could no longer be ignored.Now, in a major test of Afghanistan's fledgling court system, Rahman, 42, faces the death penalty for abandoning Islam for Christianity. Prosecutors say he should die. So do his family, his jailers, even the judge. Rahman has no lawyer. Jail officials refused to let anyone see Rahman on Monday, despite permission granted by the country's justice minister."We will cut him into little pieces," said Hosnia Wafayosofi, who works at the jail. "There's no need to see him."

Sweden here we come...

Polly Toynbee looks at Sweden with envious eyes. Worth a look (though I'm not sure how much Sweden's natural resources may distort the picture.) Criticism welcome.

Blair's party is crying out for Gordon the Viking

Following the inspiration of the Swedish model will turn Brown from a great chancellor into a genuine Labour leader

Douglas Alexander, the Europe minister close to Brown, is just back from Sweden, where a close-fought election is seeing conservatives playing the same game - pretending to shadow the Social Democrats on every policy, while in reality planning ideological tax-andspending cuts with privatisations, as they did when last, briefly, in office. "Sweden," Alexander says, "has an economic and social model that proves the Conservatives entirely wrong. With a growth rate of 3.5%, and unemployment falling to near 5%, they are doing superbly in the global economy. No, I'm not saying we are heading for their higher tax rates, but they show how to prosper with strong public spending."

No, Brown will not turn Swedish in one spasm. It took the Social Democrats nearly 70 unbroken years of steady progressive government to reach this civilised state of relative equality, high living standards, excellent public services - and high happiness ratings. It needs citizens who want to travel that way. It needs trust in government, which semi-anarchic Britain and its poisonous rightwing, anti-state press forever undermines. (Yes, scandals all governments have, in Sweden too.)

In praise of Belarus...

This caught my eye, because it seemed to be, shall we say, counter-intuitive. Comments from people who actually know something about the issues would be most welcome.

Less bizarre than it seems

The landslide in Belarus reflects its demonised leader's refusal to back market fundamentalism

Mark Almond in Minsk
Tuesday March 21, 2006
The Guardian

[...] Although the west has never batted an eyelid about accepting a 97% vote obtained by a favourite such as Georgia's rose-revolutionary President Saakashvili, at first sight four-fifths voting for one candidate seems hard to credit. But if you look at the socioeconomic reality of Belarus and compare it with its ex-communist neighbours, as Belarussians do, then the result is not so bizarre.

No communist-era throwback, Belarus has an evolving market economy. But the market is orientated towards serving the needs of the bulk of the population, not a tiny class of nouveaux riches and their western advisers and money launderers. Unlike in Georgia or Ukraine, officials are not getting richer as ordinary folk get poorer. The absence of endemic corruption among civil servants and police is one reason why the wave of so-called "coloured revolutions" stopped before Minsk. [...]

Full article

Sorbonne needs a lesson in economics

I'm sure everybody is aware of the riots in france over the proposed changes to employment laws. In Friday's Telegraph Jeff Randall made a well reasoned arguement for why the French students reaction is misguided. Although I know it's not fashionable to celebrate Thatcher's achievements I believe by her deregulation of business and through her battles with the Unions we are in some ways all her beneficiaries.


Sorbonne needs a lesson in basic A-level economics

Jeff Randall

The Telegraph

'Political Numskulls'

Niall Ferguson in the Sunday Telegraph critises the US congress's decision to block a company from the United Arab Emirates from aquiring the facilities in some American Ports.

The White House strongly supported the United Arab Emirates company in question and opposed Congress's decision (President Bush argued Congress was being deeply prejudiced). Ferguson makes the point that the US's economy (and by extension it's very expensive foreign policy) is extremely dependent on foreign capital. Congress's decision has sent out a very counter productive message.

Here's a sample of the article:

"The outbreak of world war in 1914 led to an immediate breakdown in international trade. Even before that, a backlash against free trade and migration had begun, as one state after another moved to raise tariffs or restrict immigration, trends that reached their disastrous nadir in the 1930s. Call it a globotomy. For it was deliberate action by the Numskulls themselves that severed the world's neural pathways.

Today the Numskulls doing the most to lobotomise the global mind are to be found (not for the first time in history) in the US Congress. Earlier this month, Senators effectively blocked a company based in the United Arab Emirates from acquiring facilities in American ports on the ground that their employees might help Islamist
terrorists.

Not content with this insult to Middle Eastern investors, the same body last week came within a hair's breadth of defaulting on the federal debt, voting by just four votes to increase the legal debt ceiling. Given that around half that debt is held abroad, this was playing with financial fire.

Never in the history of the world economy has one advanced economy been as reliant on inflows of foreign capital as the United States today. It's that international overdraft which allows Our Man to keep sucking in and consuming foreign goodies. Unfortunately, the Numskulls in Congress seem more worried about impending mid-term elections than the stability of the global economy."


And here's the Ferguson piece in full:


If avian flu doesn't get us, the political Numskulls will

Niall Ferguson
The Sunday Telegraph

Saddam's delusions

Fascinating insight into the Saddam regime, essential Iraq War reading. Also contains an accidentally funny comment about sodomy.

Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside
Foreign Affairs
May/June 2006

When it came to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Saddam attempted to convince one audience that they were gone while simultaneously convincing another that Iraq still had them. Coming clean about WMD and using full compliance with inspections to escape from sanctions would have been his best course of action for the long run. Saddam, however, found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having WMD, especially since it played so well in the Arab world.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons on Kurdish civilians in 1987, was convinced Iraq no longer possessed WMD but claims that many within Iraq's ruling circle never stopped believing that the weapons still existed. Even at the highest echelons of the regime, when it came to WMD there was always some element of doubt about the truth. According to Chemical Ali, Saddam was asked about the weapons during a meeting with members of the Revolutionary Command Council. He replied that Iraq did not have WMD but flatly rejected a suggestion that the regime remove all doubts to the contrary, going on to explain that such a declaration might encourage the Israelis to attack.

...

This constant stream of false reporting undoubtedly accounts for why many of Saddam's calculations on operational, strategic, and political issues made perfect sense to him. According to Aziz, "The people in the Military Industrial Commission were liars. They lied to you, and they lied to Saddam. They were always saying that they were producing or procuring special weapons so that they could get favors out of Saddam -- money, cars, everything -- but they were liars. If they did all of this business and brought in all of these secret weapons, why didn't [the weapons] work?"

Members of the Military Industrial Commission were not the only liars. Bending the truth was particularly common among the most trusted members of Saddam's inner circle -- especially when negative news might reflect poorly on the teller's abilities or reputation. According to one former high-ranking Baath Party official, "Saddam had an idea about Iraq's conventional and potential unconventional capabilities, but never an accurate one because of the extensive lying occurring in that area. Many reports were falsified. The ministers attempted to convey a positive perspective with reports, which were forwarded to Saddam's secretary, who in turn passed them up to Saddam." In the years before Operation Iraqi Freedom, everyone around Saddam understood that his need to hear only good news was constantly growing and that it was in their best interest to feed that hunger.

A 1982 incident vividly illustrated the danger of telling Saddam what he did not want to hear. At one low point during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam asked his ministers for candid advice. With some temerity, the minister of health, Riyadh Ibrahim, suggested that Saddam temporarily step down and resume the presidency after peace was established. Saddam had him carted away immediately. The next day, pieces of the minister's chopped-up body were delivered to his wife. According to Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, the head of the Military Industrial Commission and a relative of the murdered minister, "This powerfully concentrated the attention of the other ministers, who were unanimous in their insistence that Saddam remain in power."

...

After 1991, Saddam's confidence in his military commanders steadily eroded, while his confidence in his own abilities as a military genius strengthened. Like a number of other despots in history who dabbled in military affairs, Saddam began to issue a seemingly endless stream of banal instructions. He could not resist giving detailed training guidance.

Dozens of surviving memoranda echo the style and content of a 2002 top-secret document titled "Training Guidance to the Republican Guard." These documents all hint at the kind of guidance military officers received from Saddam on a regular basis. One chapter of the "training guidance" document, called "Notes and Directions Given by Saddam Hussein to His Elite Soldiers to Cover the Tactics of War," charged officers to do the following: "Train in a way that allows you to defeat your enemy; train all units' members in swimming; train your soldiers to climb palm trees so that they may use these places for navigation and sniper shooting; and train on smart weapons."

...

These failures of discipline elicited a harsh response from the regime. Punishments of errant militiamen included having one's hands amputated for theft, being tossed off a tower for sodomy, being whipped a hundred times for sexual harassment, having one's tongue cut out for lying, and being stoned for various other infractions. It was only a matter of time before military failure also became punishable as a criminal offense.

...

For many months after the fall of Baghdad, a number of senior Iraqi officials in coalition custody continued to believe it possible that Iraq still possessed a WMD capability hidden away somewhere (although they adamantly insisted that they had no direct knowledge of WMD programs). Coalition interviewers discovered that this belief was based on the fact that Iraq had possessed and used WMD in the past and might need them again; on the plausibility of secret, compartmentalized WMD programs existing given how the Iraqi regime worked; and on the fact that so many Western governments believed such programs existed.

Jericho jail assault

Well done The Guardian, for managing to begin an editorial with a story of Palestinian deceit and ending it with a ringing "it's all Israel's fault".

The walls of Jericho
The Guardian
Leader
March 15, 2006

Bloggers of the World Unite!

Rupert Murdoch heralds a 'second great age of discovery' and says that power is 'moving from the old elite to bloggers'.

Internet means end for media barons, says Murdoch

The Guardian

"Far from mourning its passing, he evangelised about a digital future that would put that power in the hands of those already launching a blog every second, sharing photos and music online and downloading television programmes on demand. "A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it," he said. Indicating he had little desire to slow down despite his advancing years, he told the 603-year-old guild that he was looking forward, not back.

"It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy - not just companies but whole countries."

The owner of Fox News added: "Never has the flow of information and ideas, of hard news and reasoned comment, been more important. The force of our democratic beliefs is a key weapon in the war against religious fanaticism and the terrorism it breeds." "