Am creating a separate thread for this story (first blogged here), because I think this might be another Danish cartoons episode, and also because the spineless Western response to the original Rushdie fatwah was a seminal moment for the Islamist movement, (rightly?) convincing them that the West had no appetite even for self-defence.
Two stories are below: gotta love the Sun headline, as well as the accusation that Rushdie is the one with blood on his hands. These Islamist sympathizers sure have Chutzpah. Meanwhile the Telegraph headline reminds us of the hopeless addiction of the Muslim world on the (infinitely flexible, utterly unrequitable) concept of 'honour'.
Pakistan orders smoked Salman
The Sun
June 19, 2007
A SICK Pakistani politician last night said Salman Rushdie’s knighthood justified suicide bombings against British targets — as mobs burned effigies of the author. Cabinet minister Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq said the gong for The Satanic Verses writer was to blame for fuelling al-Qaeda terrorism.
He told the Islamabad parliament: “This is an occasion for the world’s 1.5billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision. “The West always wonders about the cause of terrorism. Such actions are the root cause. "If someone commits a suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Mohammed, his act is justified.”
The comments from Pakistan’s religious affairs minister came as mobs demonstrated in the eastern city of Multan. About 100 students chanted, “Kill him! Kill him!” as they carried banners and set fire to images of Rushdie. Figures of the Queen were also torched. Pakistan’s lawmakers, meanwhile, passed a resolution demanding Britain withdraw the knighthood.
Another leading Pakistan politician, Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, branded Rushdie a “blasphemer”. In Britain, the first Muslim Peer fuelled the row by accusing Rushdie, 59, of having “blood on his hands”. Labour Lord Ahmed, 48, said Verses triggered “violence around the world”.
Prize-winning Rushdie was forced into hiding for ten years when Iran issued a fatwa against him in 1989. Lord Ahmed added: “Honouring a man who has blood on his hands goes too far.”
He told BBC Radio 4: “Two weeks ago the Prime Minister was calling for building relations between the Muslim world and Britain, then suddenly this knighthood is given to a man who has not only been abusive to Muslims but also to Christians — because he used abusive language towards Jesus Christ.”
Lord Ahmed said the decision had damaged British interests abroad and community relations in the UK.He went on: “This man not only provoked violence around the world because of his writings, but there were many people who were killed around the world.” Rushdie got the knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours on Saturday. Yesterday her Majesty was at the Order of the Garter service at Windsor Castle.
-------------
Honour 'justifies' suicide attack on Rushdie
Telegraph
19/06/2007
Sir Salman Rushdie, the author, was facing fresh threats to his life yesterday following his knighthood. A senior minister in the Pakistani government said that the decision was a justification for suicide bombing, after the parliament in Islamabad condemned the honour as "blasphemous and insulting" to the world's Muslims.
As Pakistani MPs issued a demand for the award to be immediately withdrawn, the religious affairs minister, Mohammad Ejaz-ul-Haq, said: "The West always wonders about the root cause of terrorism. Such actions [giving Sir Salman a knighthood] are the root cause of it. "If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Mohammad, his act is justified." The parliament passed a unanimous resolution deploring the honour as an open insult to the feelings of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims.
Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, the minister for parliamentary affairs who tabled the motion, said that the knighthood was "a source of hurt for Muslims" and would encourage people to "commit blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammad".
Mr ul-Haq then called on Pakistan and all other Muslim states to "break off diplomatic relations with Britain" if the knighthood was not withdrawn. The minister was later forced to clarify his potentially highly inflammatory statement, saying that he was speaking about the wider causes of terrorism and not of Sir Salman specifically.
Pakistan's condemnation came after Iran expressed similar sentiments at the weekend and will again raise concerns for Sir Salman's safety almost 20 years after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Pakistan's religious parties ordered supporters on to the streets of two provincial cites yesterday. Effigies of both the Queen and Sir Salman were burned while some protesters chanted "Kill him! Kill him!"
Sir Salman, 59, who said he was "thrilled" to be knighted, was forced to live in hiding for nine years after Iran's late spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill him for allegedly insulting Islam's holy Prophet in The Satanic Verses. It was not until 1998, when the Iranian government said that it would not support the outstanding fatwa, that the author took the decision to return to public life.
Last night British officials were waiting nervously for further reaction to the award at a time when Pakistani society is becoming increasingly radicalised. At the Multan protest, Asim Dahr, a student leader from the group Jamiat Turaba Arabia said that Sir Salman should face Islamic justice. "This Queen has made a mockery of Muslims by giving him a title of 'sir'.
Salman Rushdie was condemned by Imam Khomeni and he issued a decree about his death. He should be handed over to the Muslims so they can try him according to Islamic laws." Robert Brinkley, Britain's High Commissioner to Pakistan, said: "It is simply untrue to suggest that this in any way is an insult to Islam or the Prophet Mohammed, and we have enormous respect for Islam as a religion and for its intellectual and cultural achievements."
However, the Muslim peer, Labour's Lord Ahmed, told BBC Radio 4's PM that he was "appalled" to hear of a knighthood for "a man who has not only been abusive to Muslims, but also to Christians".
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Sunday, June 17, 2007
The greater threat to Israel
Peter Hitchens reports from Israel.
Which of these is the greater threat to Israel?
Could this be the way the Middle East conflict ends, not with a mushroom cloud or a peace deal but with the slow disappearance of the Jewish state? It seems a real possibility.
Israel must cope with two far deeper dangers than Iran’s amateur atom bomb, or even unending waves of suicide bombers.
Those perils come instead from maternity wards, where Arabs are slowly winning a long-distance population race with Jews – and from Israel’s own foolishly forgotten Arab people, finally beginning to pump up their political muscle.
Which of these is the greater threat to Israel?
Could this be the way the Middle East conflict ends, not with a mushroom cloud or a peace deal but with the slow disappearance of the Jewish state? It seems a real possibility.
Israel must cope with two far deeper dangers than Iran’s amateur atom bomb, or even unending waves of suicide bombers.
Those perils come instead from maternity wards, where Arabs are slowly winning a long-distance population race with Jews – and from Israel’s own foolishly forgotten Arab people, finally beginning to pump up their political muscle.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
The catastrophic decline in the quality of the British Civil Service
The British Civil Service was once a byword for efficiency as well as incorruptibility. I'm as fascinated as I am appalled by the extraordinary decline in our quality of government. Perhaps this thread can become a place where we explore what the reasons behind this may be.
Amateurs in charge of government business
Telegraph
05/06/2007
The Government's chronic inability to manage costly IT schemes effectively is well documented - indeed, it has become one of New Labour's trademarks. This morning's report from the Commons Public Accounts Committee helps to explain why Whitehall gets it so wrong, so often.
At the heart of the problem is a slapdash approach to the management of high-value projects that would not be tolerated in the private sector. The fact that the Government spends rather more than £500 billion of taxpayers' cash each year seems to have inculcated a cavalier approach to value for money that is costing the country dear.
The committee highlights two specific areas of weakness in the management of complex IT programmes.
First, the high turnover rate among senior civil servants means there is little continuity in the running of schemes. The MPs found that half the senior civil servants in charge of IT projects are doing such work for the first time. In an area where expertise is invaluable, it seems - quite perversely - to be positively discouraged. This "lack of relevant experience, combined with a regular turnover of post-holders, adds unnecessary risk to the management of IT-enabled change", observes the PAC.
The committee is even more exercised by the stupefying level of neglect shown by government ministers. The prudent expenditure of public funds should be a priority for all ministers of the Crown. Yet the PAC has discovered that in many of the most sensitive IT schemes, the senior officials in charge had not held a single meeting with ministers to discuss progress. This unforgivable laxity was found in 20 per cent of all "mission critical and high risk" computer systems.
In a further 28 per cent of these projects, ministers held meetings with officials fewer than four times a year. That means almost half of these multi-billion-pound projects are being invigilated in the most cursory way. The PAC rightly insists that ministers have a duty to ensure they are briefed "fully and candidly" on risks, progress and cost escalation. The failure to do so has led to such well-documented disasters as the enormous cost and time overruns in the computerisation of NHS records and the multi-billion-pound fiasco of the introduction of tax credits.
It hardly augurs well for the introduction of identity cards.
These failings expose a deeper weakness in the way government does business. There is often an air of starry-eyed naivety about Whitehall's contract negotiations with private sector companies, many of which must be laughing all the way to the bank. The same mindset was in play in the disastrous renegotiation of GPs' and dentists' contracts.
The common factor in all these cases is the sheer amateurishness of the government machine when it comes to cutting a deal. If the men from the ministry are incapable of driving a hard bargain, they should get people in who can.
-------------
Ministers lose grip on £14bn IT
Telegraph
05/06/2007
Ministers are failing to keep a grip on Government computer projects that cost the taxpayer up to £14 billion a year, a report by MPs warns today. Senior officials running many of Whitehall's most "mission critical" IT schemes have not even held a meeting with the minister responsible, the report discloses. The high turnover of civil servants running such projects, and their lack of experience, has led to damaging "discontinuity" and increased the risk of cost over runs and delays.
Today's report from the Commons public accounts select committee follows a catalogue of costly problems with Government IT projects, including new computer systems for the NHS and tax credit systems. Many have gone billions of pounds over budget and are years behind schedule. The MPs said that in one in five "mission critical and high-risk" computer schemes, senior officials had not met the minister responsible.
"For these major, high-risk undertakings to succeed, ministers need to be briefed fully and candidly at least quarterly on risks, progress and cost escalations," the report says. It found that 70 per cent of senior officials were concerned about the lack of "programme and project management skills" within their departments.
There was also a disturbing turnover of staff involved in such schemes. More than half of the senior officials in charge of IT projects were carrying out the role for the first time. "Lack of relevant experience, combined with a regular turnover of post-holders, adds unnecessary risk to the management of IT-enabled change," the report says.
-------------
Hewitt admits defeat on doctors' job fiasco
Telegraph
17/05/2007
Amateurs in charge of government business
Telegraph
05/06/2007
The Government's chronic inability to manage costly IT schemes effectively is well documented - indeed, it has become one of New Labour's trademarks. This morning's report from the Commons Public Accounts Committee helps to explain why Whitehall gets it so wrong, so often.
At the heart of the problem is a slapdash approach to the management of high-value projects that would not be tolerated in the private sector. The fact that the Government spends rather more than £500 billion of taxpayers' cash each year seems to have inculcated a cavalier approach to value for money that is costing the country dear.
The committee highlights two specific areas of weakness in the management of complex IT programmes.
First, the high turnover rate among senior civil servants means there is little continuity in the running of schemes. The MPs found that half the senior civil servants in charge of IT projects are doing such work for the first time. In an area where expertise is invaluable, it seems - quite perversely - to be positively discouraged. This "lack of relevant experience, combined with a regular turnover of post-holders, adds unnecessary risk to the management of IT-enabled change", observes the PAC.
The committee is even more exercised by the stupefying level of neglect shown by government ministers. The prudent expenditure of public funds should be a priority for all ministers of the Crown. Yet the PAC has discovered that in many of the most sensitive IT schemes, the senior officials in charge had not held a single meeting with ministers to discuss progress. This unforgivable laxity was found in 20 per cent of all "mission critical and high risk" computer systems.
In a further 28 per cent of these projects, ministers held meetings with officials fewer than four times a year. That means almost half of these multi-billion-pound projects are being invigilated in the most cursory way. The PAC rightly insists that ministers have a duty to ensure they are briefed "fully and candidly" on risks, progress and cost escalation. The failure to do so has led to such well-documented disasters as the enormous cost and time overruns in the computerisation of NHS records and the multi-billion-pound fiasco of the introduction of tax credits.
It hardly augurs well for the introduction of identity cards.
These failings expose a deeper weakness in the way government does business. There is often an air of starry-eyed naivety about Whitehall's contract negotiations with private sector companies, many of which must be laughing all the way to the bank. The same mindset was in play in the disastrous renegotiation of GPs' and dentists' contracts.
The common factor in all these cases is the sheer amateurishness of the government machine when it comes to cutting a deal. If the men from the ministry are incapable of driving a hard bargain, they should get people in who can.
-------------
Ministers lose grip on £14bn IT
Telegraph
05/06/2007
Ministers are failing to keep a grip on Government computer projects that cost the taxpayer up to £14 billion a year, a report by MPs warns today. Senior officials running many of Whitehall's most "mission critical" IT schemes have not even held a meeting with the minister responsible, the report discloses. The high turnover of civil servants running such projects, and their lack of experience, has led to damaging "discontinuity" and increased the risk of cost over runs and delays.
Today's report from the Commons public accounts select committee follows a catalogue of costly problems with Government IT projects, including new computer systems for the NHS and tax credit systems. Many have gone billions of pounds over budget and are years behind schedule. The MPs said that in one in five "mission critical and high-risk" computer schemes, senior officials had not met the minister responsible.
"For these major, high-risk undertakings to succeed, ministers need to be briefed fully and candidly at least quarterly on risks, progress and cost escalations," the report says. It found that 70 per cent of senior officials were concerned about the lack of "programme and project management skills" within their departments.
There was also a disturbing turnover of staff involved in such schemes. More than half of the senior officials in charge of IT projects were carrying out the role for the first time. "Lack of relevant experience, combined with a regular turnover of post-holders, adds unnecessary risk to the management of IT-enabled change," the report says.
-------------
Hewitt admits defeat on doctors' job fiasco
Telegraph
17/05/2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
The slow fade of Fidel's Cuba
Excellent piece on Cuba in Prospect magazine. Journalist Bella Thomas, who has experienced Cuba first hand, presents a sober, unsentimental look at the country quite at odds with the romantic myth popularised by many westerners.
'This does not mean that those still in Cuba are acquiescent or happy. They are far poorer than their eastern European counterparts were in 1989: the average wage, at $20 a month, can barely feed a single person for a couple of weeks. You cannot spend any length of time in Havana without noticing the lack of food for the majority of Cubans. The mother of a friend, an old lady who lived in one tiny rotting room in a former brothel with her son, gets by selling matchboxes to her neighbours, having stolen them from the factory where she worked. Another acquaintance keeps pigs on her balcony and sells pork to a few locals. The luckier ones sell cigars or taxi rides to foreigners. An elite work in hotels.'
[...]
'Healthcare and education are supposed to be the redeeming graces of the regime, but this is questionable. There are a large number of doctors, but, according to most Cubans I know, many have left the country and the health system is in a ragged state—apart from those hospitals reserved for foreigners—and people often have to pay a bribe to get treated. Michael Moore, the American film director, who has recently been praising the system should take note of the real life stories beneath the statistics. I went into a couple of hospitals for locals on my latest visit. In the first, my friend told me not to say a word in case my accent was noticed, as foreigners are not allowed in these places. I was appalled by the hygiene and amazed at the antiquity of the building and some of the equipment. I was told that the vast majority of Cuban hospitals, apart from two in Havana, were built before the revolution. Which revolution, I wondered; this one seemed to date from the 1900s.
On another occasion, I saw a man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck hurrying along the boulevard of Vedado, in west Havana. We struck up a conversation. He was on his way to the hospital around the corner. I asked him if he would take me there. He was charming and intelligent, and had that ease of communication that many Cubans possess: he wasn't at all taken aback by an unknown woman in dark glasses asking to accompany him to work. The doctor told me that I shouldn't be too shocked; the hospital was being "refurbished." The building certainly was in a state of filth and decrepitude. This was not a place one would want to be ill in.'
[...]
'I also took the risk of visiting a dissident who had been imprisoned in 1997 for five years for writing a ten-page document criticising the lack of a liberalisation programme. (Even so, he considers himself a socialist.) His house was supposed to be watched, and I decided to go for an early breakfast, judging that this might be a moment when the "neighbours" were otherwise engaged.
Unlike some dissidents, who can be rather hysterical, he was methodical and grave. We sat in his kitchen and discussed the state of the prisons, which he described in some detail. He also spoke of the healthcare system and echoed the view that the propaganda about it has been absurdly successful. Turning to the issue of regime change, he claimed that totalitarian governments can rarely be challenged from below. "In fact it has never happened before," he said forcefully. "When Stalin died, when Mao died, nothing happened. It takes movement from above, as with Gorbachev in Russia, or from outside, as with the exodus in east Germany, for change to emerge." There is no sign of either in Cuba so far.
When I told the same man that Ken Livingstone was preparing to organise a celebration in London for the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution in 2009, he asked how was it that such people turned a blind eye to the difficulties in these places? He shrugged and, with a measure of forced self-discipline, said, "Well, you are a democracy, I suppose," before changing the subject.
When I returned to London, I watched an edition of Newsnight in which the reporter claimed to be immensely impressed—after four days on the island—by the state of Cuban healthcare. I wondered where this man had been. Had he been to hospitals other than the ones his minders had taken him to? Why was it that Fidel Castro was treated by a Spanish doctor? "There's all kinds of things we could learn from this place," the reporter said, after his drive around Havana in an open-top 1950s Chevrolet, with a Cuban bolero playing in the background.
'This does not mean that those still in Cuba are acquiescent or happy. They are far poorer than their eastern European counterparts were in 1989: the average wage, at $20 a month, can barely feed a single person for a couple of weeks. You cannot spend any length of time in Havana without noticing the lack of food for the majority of Cubans. The mother of a friend, an old lady who lived in one tiny rotting room in a former brothel with her son, gets by selling matchboxes to her neighbours, having stolen them from the factory where she worked. Another acquaintance keeps pigs on her balcony and sells pork to a few locals. The luckier ones sell cigars or taxi rides to foreigners. An elite work in hotels.'
[...]
'Healthcare and education are supposed to be the redeeming graces of the regime, but this is questionable. There are a large number of doctors, but, according to most Cubans I know, many have left the country and the health system is in a ragged state—apart from those hospitals reserved for foreigners—and people often have to pay a bribe to get treated. Michael Moore, the American film director, who has recently been praising the system should take note of the real life stories beneath the statistics. I went into a couple of hospitals for locals on my latest visit. In the first, my friend told me not to say a word in case my accent was noticed, as foreigners are not allowed in these places. I was appalled by the hygiene and amazed at the antiquity of the building and some of the equipment. I was told that the vast majority of Cuban hospitals, apart from two in Havana, were built before the revolution. Which revolution, I wondered; this one seemed to date from the 1900s.
On another occasion, I saw a man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck hurrying along the boulevard of Vedado, in west Havana. We struck up a conversation. He was on his way to the hospital around the corner. I asked him if he would take me there. He was charming and intelligent, and had that ease of communication that many Cubans possess: he wasn't at all taken aback by an unknown woman in dark glasses asking to accompany him to work. The doctor told me that I shouldn't be too shocked; the hospital was being "refurbished." The building certainly was in a state of filth and decrepitude. This was not a place one would want to be ill in.'
[...]
'I also took the risk of visiting a dissident who had been imprisoned in 1997 for five years for writing a ten-page document criticising the lack of a liberalisation programme. (Even so, he considers himself a socialist.) His house was supposed to be watched, and I decided to go for an early breakfast, judging that this might be a moment when the "neighbours" were otherwise engaged.
Unlike some dissidents, who can be rather hysterical, he was methodical and grave. We sat in his kitchen and discussed the state of the prisons, which he described in some detail. He also spoke of the healthcare system and echoed the view that the propaganda about it has been absurdly successful. Turning to the issue of regime change, he claimed that totalitarian governments can rarely be challenged from below. "In fact it has never happened before," he said forcefully. "When Stalin died, when Mao died, nothing happened. It takes movement from above, as with Gorbachev in Russia, or from outside, as with the exodus in east Germany, for change to emerge." There is no sign of either in Cuba so far.
When I told the same man that Ken Livingstone was preparing to organise a celebration in London for the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution in 2009, he asked how was it that such people turned a blind eye to the difficulties in these places? He shrugged and, with a measure of forced self-discipline, said, "Well, you are a democracy, I suppose," before changing the subject.
When I returned to London, I watched an edition of Newsnight in which the reporter claimed to be immensely impressed—after four days on the island—by the state of Cuban healthcare. I wondered where this man had been. Had he been to hospitals other than the ones his minders had taken him to? Why was it that Fidel Castro was treated by a Spanish doctor? "There's all kinds of things we could learn from this place," the reporter said, after his drive around Havana in an open-top 1950s Chevrolet, with a Cuban bolero playing in the background.
Monday, June 04, 2007
40th anniversary of the Six Day War
It's the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War.
How 1967 defined the Middle East
Jeremy Bowen
BBC Middle East editor
4/6/07
The Jewish state was only 19 years old and the youngest survivors of the Holocaust were barely in their 20s. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser's radio station Voice of the Arabs fed their anxieties by broadcasting bloodcurdling threats.
Its chief announcer, Ahmed Said, had the best known voice in the Arab world in the 1960s after Nasser himself and the legendary diva, Umm Kulthum.
Said was famous for lines like this: "We have nothing for Israel except war - comprehensive war... marching against its gangs, destroying and putting an end to the whole Zionist existence... every one of the 100 million Arabs has been living for the past 19 years on one hope - to live to die on the day that Israel is liquidated."
No wonder many Israelis and their friends and relations abroad were scared stiff.
How 1967 defined the Middle East
Jeremy Bowen
BBC Middle East editor
4/6/07
The Jewish state was only 19 years old and the youngest survivors of the Holocaust were barely in their 20s. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser's radio station Voice of the Arabs fed their anxieties by broadcasting bloodcurdling threats.
Its chief announcer, Ahmed Said, had the best known voice in the Arab world in the 1960s after Nasser himself and the legendary diva, Umm Kulthum.
Said was famous for lines like this: "We have nothing for Israel except war - comprehensive war... marching against its gangs, destroying and putting an end to the whole Zionist existence... every one of the 100 million Arabs has been living for the past 19 years on one hope - to live to die on the day that Israel is liquidated."
No wonder many Israelis and their friends and relations abroad were scared stiff.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Dalrymple on Honeyford - the man who predicted the race riots
Those of you whose political memories extend back to the 80's may remember the Honeyford Affair, triggered by this article:
Education and Race - an Alternative View
Ray Honeyford
The Salisbury Review
1984
My current fave author, Theodore Dalrymple, has written about the affair with his usual brilliance:
The Man Who Predicted the Race Riots
Theodore Dalrymple
City Journal Spring 2002
As ever, you should read the whole article, but one aspect of is relevant to the principle of 'locality' in education, as discussed elsewhere on impdec:
Though [Honeyford] failed to gain admission to a selective grammar school himself, he bitterly regrets the passing of these quintessentially meritocratic institutions, which allowed so many poor but talented children a chance to join the mainstream and even to excel in Britain’s open society. (This fact alone suggests his large-mindedness: how many people can resist erecting a general principle out of their personal disappointments?) Such schools, which ideologues condemned as elitist, might have helped prevent the strife that convulses Bradford today by creating a common culture and an interracial elite. They would have drawn (by and large, though not of course with 100 percent accuracy) the most intelligent children from diverse areas, allowing lasting friendships to form across the races among people likely to grow up to be the most prominent citizens of their respective groups.
Instead, today the schools draw children of every level of ability, but from a single geographical area only. If that area is white only, then the school will be white only; if Muslim, the school will be Muslim. Different ethnic and cultural groups—their differences preserved in educational aspic—live in geographical proximity but without any real contact. It does not require a Nostradamus to predict the consequences.
Education and Race - an Alternative View
Ray Honeyford
The Salisbury Review
1984
My current fave author, Theodore Dalrymple, has written about the affair with his usual brilliance:
The Man Who Predicted the Race Riots
Theodore Dalrymple
City Journal Spring 2002
As ever, you should read the whole article, but one aspect of is relevant to the principle of 'locality' in education, as discussed elsewhere on impdec:
Though [Honeyford] failed to gain admission to a selective grammar school himself, he bitterly regrets the passing of these quintessentially meritocratic institutions, which allowed so many poor but talented children a chance to join the mainstream and even to excel in Britain’s open society. (This fact alone suggests his large-mindedness: how many people can resist erecting a general principle out of their personal disappointments?) Such schools, which ideologues condemned as elitist, might have helped prevent the strife that convulses Bradford today by creating a common culture and an interracial elite. They would have drawn (by and large, though not of course with 100 percent accuracy) the most intelligent children from diverse areas, allowing lasting friendships to form across the races among people likely to grow up to be the most prominent citizens of their respective groups.
Instead, today the schools draw children of every level of ability, but from a single geographical area only. If that area is white only, then the school will be white only; if Muslim, the school will be Muslim. Different ethnic and cultural groups—their differences preserved in educational aspic—live in geographical proximity but without any real contact. It does not require a Nostradamus to predict the consequences.
Friday, May 18, 2007
MP's exempt themselves from Freedom of Information Act
A more contemptuous decision is hard to imagine.
MP's exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act
Times Online
May 18, 2007
A move to exempt Parliament from freedom of information law has been approved by MPs after attempts to block it in the Commons failed.
MPs brushed aside accusations that they were creating one law for themselves and another for those they govern as they voted through the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill.
MP's exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act
Times Online
May 18, 2007
A move to exempt Parliament from freedom of information law has been approved by MPs after attempts to block it in the Commons failed.
MPs brushed aside accusations that they were creating one law for themselves and another for those they govern as they voted through the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Scruton - The Nation-State and Democracy
Fascinating piece, encompassing history, philosophy and politics, about what it takes to make a nation. Thanks to Andy for digging this up (some time ago).
The Nation-State and Democracy
By Roger Scruton
The American Spectator
14/2/07
A country like Iraq is not, never has been, and never will be a nation-state. This is not merely because it contains communities that identify themselves in terms of their religious and ethnic allegiance; it is also because for these communities their place of settlement has never been a *country*, a place defined as *ours*, where *our* way of doing things prevails, and which must be defended at all costs if *our* way of life and web of affections is to survive. Country has always taken second place to religion, family, or tribe.
Iraq was carved out of the Ottoman Empire by Western diplomats who imagined, like Woodrow Wilson, that nation-states lie concealed beneath every empire, that national boundaries are already inscribed in the affections of the people, held in place by lines of force that have the same historical fixity as those which created the nation-states of Europe. This piece of wishful thinking is very far from the truth. Even if Iraq were to divide today into three regions, Sunni Arab, Shiite, and Kurd, these would not succeed in becoming nation-states. Authority would still be attributed to family, tribe, and creed above that of country, and in emergencies the people of the resulting territories would still unite behind those old ideas of identity, and not behind the "law of the land."
The Nation-State and Democracy
By Roger Scruton
The American Spectator
14/2/07
A country like Iraq is not, never has been, and never will be a nation-state. This is not merely because it contains communities that identify themselves in terms of their religious and ethnic allegiance; it is also because for these communities their place of settlement has never been a *country*, a place defined as *ours*, where *our* way of doing things prevails, and which must be defended at all costs if *our* way of life and web of affections is to survive. Country has always taken second place to religion, family, or tribe.
Iraq was carved out of the Ottoman Empire by Western diplomats who imagined, like Woodrow Wilson, that nation-states lie concealed beneath every empire, that national boundaries are already inscribed in the affections of the people, held in place by lines of force that have the same historical fixity as those which created the nation-states of Europe. This piece of wishful thinking is very far from the truth. Even if Iraq were to divide today into three regions, Sunni Arab, Shiite, and Kurd, these would not succeed in becoming nation-states. Authority would still be attributed to family, tribe, and creed above that of country, and in emergencies the people of the resulting territories would still unite behind those old ideas of identity, and not behind the "law of the land."
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Quotes
I thought it might be interesting to start a new thread on great quotes. They don't need to be on any specific subject, they can be famous or obscure, fact or fiction, serious or funny (or both serious and funny) whatever you like.
Here's my one to start:
'Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.'
George Orwell
Here's my one to start:
'Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.'
George Orwell
Leave the Middle East to sort itself out - Edward Luttwak
I heard a certain Edward Luttwak on the radio this morning.
Radio 4 Today Program
03/05/07
0857 Edward Luttwak of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington thinks that we pay too much attention to the Middle East region.
Listen | Permalink
It's rare you hear someone talking on a familiar topic in such a new, thought-provoking, and frankly funny manner. All of these characteristics can be seen in this piece, where he covers the ground in the radio interview and more. He is a man who can come up with, and defend, comments like: "It is not hard to defeat Arab countries, but it is mostly useless."
The middle of nowhere
Prospect Magazine 2007
Edward Luttwak
Western analysts are forever bleating about the strategic importance of the middle east. But despite its oil, this backward region is less relevant than ever, and it would be better for everyone if the rest of the world learned to ignore it.
...
We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world's population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia's 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia's annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.
Saudi Arabia has a good excuse, for it was a land of oasis hand-farmers and Bedouin pastoralists who cannot be expected to become captains of industry in a mere 50 years. Much more striking is the oil parasitism of once much more accomplished Iran. It exports only 2.5m barrels a day as compared to Saudi Arabia's 8m, yet oil still accounts for 80 per cent of Iran's exports because its agriculture and industry have become so unproductive.
The middle east was once the world's most advanced region, but these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting of resentment. According to the UN's 2004 Arab human development report, the region boasts the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa) at just 63 per cent. Its dependence on oil means that manufactured goods account for just 17 per cent of exports, compared to a global average of 78 per cent. Moreover, despite its oil wealth, the entire middle east generated under 4 per cent of global GDP in 2006—less than Germany.
Unless compelled by immediate danger, we should therefore focus on the old and new lands of creation in Europe and America, in India and east Asia—places where hard-working populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past.
His comments in the same article on Iran echo those of Peter Hitchens in recent threads:
Now the Mussolini syndrome is at work over Iran. All the symptoms are present, including tabulated lists of Iran's warships, despite the fact that most are over 30 years old; of combat aircraft, many of which (F-4s, Mirages, F-5s, F-14s) have not flown in years for lack of spare parts; and of divisions and brigades that are so only in name. There are awed descriptions of the Pasdaran revolutionary guards, inevitably described as "elite," who do indeed strut around as if they have won many a war, but who have actually fought only one—against Iraq, which they lost. As for Iran's claim to have defeated Israel by Hizbullah proxy in last year's affray, the publicity was excellent but the substance went the other way, with roughly 25 per cent of the best-trained men dead, which explains the tomb-like silence and immobility of the once rumbustious Hizbullah ever since the ceasefire.
Then there is the new light cavalry of Iranian terrorism that is invoked to frighten us if all else fails. The usual middle east experts now explain that if we annoy the ayatollahs, they will unleash terrorists who will devastate our lives, even though 30 years of "death to America" invocations and vast sums spent on maintaining a special international terrorism department have produced only one major bombing in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, and two in the most permissive environment of Buenos Aires, in 1992 and 1994, along with some assassinations of exiles in Europe.
It is true enough that if Iran's nuclear installations are bombed in some overnight raid, there is likely to be some retaliation, but we live in fortunate times in which we have only the irritant of terrorism instead of world wars to worry about—and Iran's added contribution is not likely to leave much of an impression. There may be good reasons for not attacking Iran's nuclear sites—including the very slow and uncertain progress of its uranium enrichment effort—but its ability to strike back is not one of them. Even the seemingly fragile tanker traffic down the Gulf and through the straits of Hormuz is not as vulnerable as it seems—Iran and Iraq have both tried to attack it many times without much success, and this time the US navy stands ready to destroy any airstrip or jetty from which attacks are launched.
As for the claim that the "Iranians" are united in patriotic support for the nuclear programme, no such nationality even exists. Out of Iran's population of 70m or so, 51 per cent are ethnically Persian, 24 per cent are Turks ("Azeris" is the regime's term), with other minorities comprising the remaining quarter. Many of Iran's 16-17m Turks are in revolt against Persian cultural imperialism; its 5-6m Kurds have started a serious insurgency; the Arab minority detonates bombs in Ahvaz; and Baluch tribesmen attack gendarmes and revolutionary guards. If some 40 per cent of the British population were engaged in separatist struggles of varying intensity, nobody would claim that it was firmly united around the London government. On top of this, many of the Persian majority oppose the theocratic regime, either because they have become post-Islamic in reaction to its many prohibitions, or because they are Sufis, whom the regime now persecutes almost as much as the small Baha'i minority. So let us have no more reports from Tehran stressing the country's national unity. Persian nationalism is a minority position in a country where half the population is not even Persian. In our times, multinational states either decentralise or break up more or less violently; Iran is not decentralising, so its future seems highly predictable, while in the present not much cohesion under attack is to be expected.
He's an interesting guy, this Luttwak, certainly not afraid to break taboos. And he *loathes* humanitarian agencies:
Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace
If you had a U.N. Works and Relief Administration in Europe in the history of Europe, there would be no Europe. There would be great, giant camps for displaced Visigoth, mis-Burgundians, Gallo-Romans, uprooted Gallo-Romans. There would be camps perpetuating refugee nations for ever and ever, in which resentment and hatred are preserved like fresh flowers.
So if you intervene in the realm of conflict with good intentions, the outcome is invariably negative. When you go to a battlefield and you see humanitarians, shoot them. They are the ones who are going to perpetuate that conflict. They are the ones who are going to do the thing that all of us witnessed, in Goma after the Rwandan War. Instead of the natural dispersal of the Hutus around Africa, the arrival of these competing NGOs - well-meaning welfare, distributing food - kept the Hutus there under the control of the murderous inter-Rwandan people so that they would start ranging back into Rwanda again.
War is the realm of conflict. If you go in with good intentions, you will disturb the solution of conflict. Anybody who gives money to an NGO that provides help to the victims of war is perpetuating war in one way or the other. For one thing, when you feed people in that environment, the men with the guns get fed first. Somalia was perpetuated. If you want to give money to people, you can give it to my World Foundation against Monotheism, but never give it to any humanitarian organization. They are the ones who do the greatest harm.
Give War a Chance
The most disinterested of all interventions in war—and the most destructive—are humanitarian relief activities. The largest and most protracted is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It was built on the model of its predecessor, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), which operated displaced–persons’ camps in Europe immediately after World War II. The UNRWA was established immediately after the 1948–49 Arab–Israeli war to feed, shelter, educate, and provide health services for Arab refugees who had fled Israeli zones in the former territory of Palestine.
By keeping refugees alive in spartan conditions that encouraged their rapid emigration or local resettlement, the UNRRA’s camps in Europe had assuaged postwar resentments and helped disperse revanchist concentrations of national groups. But UNRWA camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip provided on the whole a higher standard of living than most Arab villagers had previously enjoyed, with a more varied diet, organized schooling, superior medical care, and no backbreaking labor in stony fields. They had, therefore, the opposite effect, becoming desirable homes rather than eagerly abandoned transit camps. With the encouragement of several Arab countries, the UNRWA turned escaping civilians into lifelong refugees who gave birth to refugee children, who have in turn had refugee children of their own.
During its half–century of operation, the UNRWA has thus perpetuated a Palestinian refugee nation, preserving its resentments in as fresh a condition as they were in 1948 and keeping the first bloom of revanchist emotion intact. By its very existence, the UNRWA dissuades integration into local society and inhibits emigration. The concentration of Palestinians in the camps, moreover, has facilitated the voluntary or forced enlistment of refugee youths by armed organizations that fight both Israel and each other. The UNRWA has contributed to a half–century of Arab–Israeli violence and still retards the advent of peace.
If each European war had been attended by its own postwar unRwa, today’s Europe would be filled with giant camps for millions of descendants of uprooted Gallo–Romans, abandoned Vandals, defeated Burgundians, and misplaced Visigoths—not to speak of more recent refugee nations such as post–1945 Sudeten Germans (three million of whom were expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1945). Such a Europe would have remained a mosaic of warring tribes, undigested and unreconciled in their separate feeding camps. It might have assuaged consciences to help each one at each remove, but it would have led to permanent instability and violence.
The UNRWA has counterparts elsewhere, such as the Cambodian camps along the Thai border, which incidentally provided safe havens for the mass–murdering Khmer Rouge. But because the United Nations is limited by stingy national contributions, these camps’ sabotage of peace is at least localized.
That is not true of the proliferating, feverishly competitive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that now aid war refugees. Like any other institution, these NGOs are interested in perpetuating themselves, which means that their first priority is to attract charitable contributions by being seen to be active in high–visibility situations. Only the most dramatic natural disasters attract any significant mass–media attention, and then only briefly; soon after an earthquake or flood, the cameras depart. War refugees, by contrast, can win sustained press coverage if kept concentrated in reasonably accessible camps. Regular warfare among well–developed countries is rare and offers few opportunities for such NGOs, so they focus their efforts on aiding refugees in the poorest parts of the world. This ensures that the food, shelter, and health care offered—although abysmal by Western standards—exceeds what is locally available to non–refugees. The consequences are entirely predictable. Among many examples, the huge refugee camps along the Democratic Republic of Congo’s border with Rwanda stand out. They sustain a Hutu nation that would otherwise have been dispersed, making the consolidation of Rwanda impossible and providing a base for radicals to launch more Tutsi–killing raids across the border. Humanitarian intervention has worsened the chances of a stable, long–term resolution of the tensions in Rwanda.
To keep refugee nations intact and preserve their resentments forever is bad enough, but inserting material aid into ongoing conflicts is even worse. Many NGOs that operate in an odor of sanctity routinely supply active combatants. Defenseless, they cannot exclude armed warriors from their feeding stations, clinics, and shelters. Since refugees are presumptively on the losing side, the warriors among them are usually in retreat. By intervening to help, NGOs systematically impede the progress of their enemies toward a decisive victory that could end the war. Sometimes NGOs, impartial to a fault, even help both sides, thus preventing mutual exhaustion and a resulting settlement. And in some extreme cases, such as Somalia, NGOs even pay protection money to local war bands, which use those funds to buy arms. Those NGOs are therefore helping prolong the warfare whose consequences they ostensibly seek to mitigate.
Radio 4 Today Program
03/05/07
0857 Edward Luttwak of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington thinks that we pay too much attention to the Middle East region.
Listen | Permalink
It's rare you hear someone talking on a familiar topic in such a new, thought-provoking, and frankly funny manner. All of these characteristics can be seen in this piece, where he covers the ground in the radio interview and more. He is a man who can come up with, and defend, comments like: "It is not hard to defeat Arab countries, but it is mostly useless."
The middle of nowhere
Prospect Magazine 2007
Edward Luttwak
Western analysts are forever bleating about the strategic importance of the middle east. But despite its oil, this backward region is less relevant than ever, and it would be better for everyone if the rest of the world learned to ignore it.
...
We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world's population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia's 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia's annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.
Saudi Arabia has a good excuse, for it was a land of oasis hand-farmers and Bedouin pastoralists who cannot be expected to become captains of industry in a mere 50 years. Much more striking is the oil parasitism of once much more accomplished Iran. It exports only 2.5m barrels a day as compared to Saudi Arabia's 8m, yet oil still accounts for 80 per cent of Iran's exports because its agriculture and industry have become so unproductive.
The middle east was once the world's most advanced region, but these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting of resentment. According to the UN's 2004 Arab human development report, the region boasts the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa) at just 63 per cent. Its dependence on oil means that manufactured goods account for just 17 per cent of exports, compared to a global average of 78 per cent. Moreover, despite its oil wealth, the entire middle east generated under 4 per cent of global GDP in 2006—less than Germany.
Unless compelled by immediate danger, we should therefore focus on the old and new lands of creation in Europe and America, in India and east Asia—places where hard-working populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past.
His comments in the same article on Iran echo those of Peter Hitchens in recent threads:
Now the Mussolini syndrome is at work over Iran. All the symptoms are present, including tabulated lists of Iran's warships, despite the fact that most are over 30 years old; of combat aircraft, many of which (F-4s, Mirages, F-5s, F-14s) have not flown in years for lack of spare parts; and of divisions and brigades that are so only in name. There are awed descriptions of the Pasdaran revolutionary guards, inevitably described as "elite," who do indeed strut around as if they have won many a war, but who have actually fought only one—against Iraq, which they lost. As for Iran's claim to have defeated Israel by Hizbullah proxy in last year's affray, the publicity was excellent but the substance went the other way, with roughly 25 per cent of the best-trained men dead, which explains the tomb-like silence and immobility of the once rumbustious Hizbullah ever since the ceasefire.
Then there is the new light cavalry of Iranian terrorism that is invoked to frighten us if all else fails. The usual middle east experts now explain that if we annoy the ayatollahs, they will unleash terrorists who will devastate our lives, even though 30 years of "death to America" invocations and vast sums spent on maintaining a special international terrorism department have produced only one major bombing in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, and two in the most permissive environment of Buenos Aires, in 1992 and 1994, along with some assassinations of exiles in Europe.
It is true enough that if Iran's nuclear installations are bombed in some overnight raid, there is likely to be some retaliation, but we live in fortunate times in which we have only the irritant of terrorism instead of world wars to worry about—and Iran's added contribution is not likely to leave much of an impression. There may be good reasons for not attacking Iran's nuclear sites—including the very slow and uncertain progress of its uranium enrichment effort—but its ability to strike back is not one of them. Even the seemingly fragile tanker traffic down the Gulf and through the straits of Hormuz is not as vulnerable as it seems—Iran and Iraq have both tried to attack it many times without much success, and this time the US navy stands ready to destroy any airstrip or jetty from which attacks are launched.
As for the claim that the "Iranians" are united in patriotic support for the nuclear programme, no such nationality even exists. Out of Iran's population of 70m or so, 51 per cent are ethnically Persian, 24 per cent are Turks ("Azeris" is the regime's term), with other minorities comprising the remaining quarter. Many of Iran's 16-17m Turks are in revolt against Persian cultural imperialism; its 5-6m Kurds have started a serious insurgency; the Arab minority detonates bombs in Ahvaz; and Baluch tribesmen attack gendarmes and revolutionary guards. If some 40 per cent of the British population were engaged in separatist struggles of varying intensity, nobody would claim that it was firmly united around the London government. On top of this, many of the Persian majority oppose the theocratic regime, either because they have become post-Islamic in reaction to its many prohibitions, or because they are Sufis, whom the regime now persecutes almost as much as the small Baha'i minority. So let us have no more reports from Tehran stressing the country's national unity. Persian nationalism is a minority position in a country where half the population is not even Persian. In our times, multinational states either decentralise or break up more or less violently; Iran is not decentralising, so its future seems highly predictable, while in the present not much cohesion under attack is to be expected.
He's an interesting guy, this Luttwak, certainly not afraid to break taboos. And he *loathes* humanitarian agencies:
Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace
If you had a U.N. Works and Relief Administration in Europe in the history of Europe, there would be no Europe. There would be great, giant camps for displaced Visigoth, mis-Burgundians, Gallo-Romans, uprooted Gallo-Romans. There would be camps perpetuating refugee nations for ever and ever, in which resentment and hatred are preserved like fresh flowers.
So if you intervene in the realm of conflict with good intentions, the outcome is invariably negative. When you go to a battlefield and you see humanitarians, shoot them. They are the ones who are going to perpetuate that conflict. They are the ones who are going to do the thing that all of us witnessed, in Goma after the Rwandan War. Instead of the natural dispersal of the Hutus around Africa, the arrival of these competing NGOs - well-meaning welfare, distributing food - kept the Hutus there under the control of the murderous inter-Rwandan people so that they would start ranging back into Rwanda again.
War is the realm of conflict. If you go in with good intentions, you will disturb the solution of conflict. Anybody who gives money to an NGO that provides help to the victims of war is perpetuating war in one way or the other. For one thing, when you feed people in that environment, the men with the guns get fed first. Somalia was perpetuated. If you want to give money to people, you can give it to my World Foundation against Monotheism, but never give it to any humanitarian organization. They are the ones who do the greatest harm.
Give War a Chance
The most disinterested of all interventions in war—and the most destructive—are humanitarian relief activities. The largest and most protracted is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It was built on the model of its predecessor, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), which operated displaced–persons’ camps in Europe immediately after World War II. The UNRWA was established immediately after the 1948–49 Arab–Israeli war to feed, shelter, educate, and provide health services for Arab refugees who had fled Israeli zones in the former territory of Palestine.
By keeping refugees alive in spartan conditions that encouraged their rapid emigration or local resettlement, the UNRRA’s camps in Europe had assuaged postwar resentments and helped disperse revanchist concentrations of national groups. But UNRWA camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip provided on the whole a higher standard of living than most Arab villagers had previously enjoyed, with a more varied diet, organized schooling, superior medical care, and no backbreaking labor in stony fields. They had, therefore, the opposite effect, becoming desirable homes rather than eagerly abandoned transit camps. With the encouragement of several Arab countries, the UNRWA turned escaping civilians into lifelong refugees who gave birth to refugee children, who have in turn had refugee children of their own.
During its half–century of operation, the UNRWA has thus perpetuated a Palestinian refugee nation, preserving its resentments in as fresh a condition as they were in 1948 and keeping the first bloom of revanchist emotion intact. By its very existence, the UNRWA dissuades integration into local society and inhibits emigration. The concentration of Palestinians in the camps, moreover, has facilitated the voluntary or forced enlistment of refugee youths by armed organizations that fight both Israel and each other. The UNRWA has contributed to a half–century of Arab–Israeli violence and still retards the advent of peace.
If each European war had been attended by its own postwar unRwa, today’s Europe would be filled with giant camps for millions of descendants of uprooted Gallo–Romans, abandoned Vandals, defeated Burgundians, and misplaced Visigoths—not to speak of more recent refugee nations such as post–1945 Sudeten Germans (three million of whom were expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1945). Such a Europe would have remained a mosaic of warring tribes, undigested and unreconciled in their separate feeding camps. It might have assuaged consciences to help each one at each remove, but it would have led to permanent instability and violence.
The UNRWA has counterparts elsewhere, such as the Cambodian camps along the Thai border, which incidentally provided safe havens for the mass–murdering Khmer Rouge. But because the United Nations is limited by stingy national contributions, these camps’ sabotage of peace is at least localized.
That is not true of the proliferating, feverishly competitive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that now aid war refugees. Like any other institution, these NGOs are interested in perpetuating themselves, which means that their first priority is to attract charitable contributions by being seen to be active in high–visibility situations. Only the most dramatic natural disasters attract any significant mass–media attention, and then only briefly; soon after an earthquake or flood, the cameras depart. War refugees, by contrast, can win sustained press coverage if kept concentrated in reasonably accessible camps. Regular warfare among well–developed countries is rare and offers few opportunities for such NGOs, so they focus their efforts on aiding refugees in the poorest parts of the world. This ensures that the food, shelter, and health care offered—although abysmal by Western standards—exceeds what is locally available to non–refugees. The consequences are entirely predictable. Among many examples, the huge refugee camps along the Democratic Republic of Congo’s border with Rwanda stand out. They sustain a Hutu nation that would otherwise have been dispersed, making the consolidation of Rwanda impossible and providing a base for radicals to launch more Tutsi–killing raids across the border. Humanitarian intervention has worsened the chances of a stable, long–term resolution of the tensions in Rwanda.
To keep refugee nations intact and preserve their resentments forever is bad enough, but inserting material aid into ongoing conflicts is even worse. Many NGOs that operate in an odor of sanctity routinely supply active combatants. Defenseless, they cannot exclude armed warriors from their feeding stations, clinics, and shelters. Since refugees are presumptively on the losing side, the warriors among them are usually in retreat. By intervening to help, NGOs systematically impede the progress of their enemies toward a decisive victory that could end the war. Sometimes NGOs, impartial to a fault, even help both sides, thus preventing mutual exhaustion and a resulting settlement. And in some extreme cases, such as Somalia, NGOs even pay protection money to local war bands, which use those funds to buy arms. Those NGOs are therefore helping prolong the warfare whose consequences they ostensibly seek to mitigate.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Nick Cohen's What's Left - A Review
Here is an interesting review of What's Left by Nick Cohen. The piece is by a writer called Anthony Daniels, who I believe also writes under the pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, a fact that will I imagine be greeted with anticipation by some bloggers and dread by others.
Here's the review in full (another New Criterion article I'm afraid so no link available):
Finding his way
By Anthony Daniels | Volume 25, March 2007
Nick Cohen What’s Left?:
How Liberals Lost Their Way
Fourth Estate, 400 pages, £12.99
The author of this book, a respected columnist on Britain’s venerable Sunday newspaper of liberal outlook, The Observer, was born into a family in which it was assumed, as a settled matter beyond reasonable doubt, that all intelligent, cultivated, and decent people were on, and of, the Left, and that there was no serious intellectual or moral case to be made for any type of conservatism. Conservatives were not merely wrong but bad, at best motivated by a fear of change and at worst by their own narrowly material interests (the Left at that time had no material interests, at least in its own estimation). Conservatives might sometimes win elections, of course, but that was no reason to take anything they said seriously.
There comes a time, however, in many a leftist’s life when he looks around him and realizes that, all his tireless support for reform notwithstanding, many aspects of the modern world, some of them brought about by the very reform that he has so assiduously supported, do not entirely please him—and what is more, that some of his erstwhile companions in the struggle now disgust him. The world then becomes for him more ambiguous in its meaning. Mr. Cohen is on the cusp of such a change of worldview.
Changes in outlook generally have provoking causes, though there may be an underlying quasi-biological tendency in the ageing process towards conservatism. In Mr. Cohen’s case, his change of outlook was provoked by Iraq and the response of the Left to Saddam Hussein. In its opposition to the war, the Left has contrived to minimize the horrors of Saddam in order to maximize the evils of Bush and Blair: if the war was bad, then it followed that Saddam was not as bad as all that. According to Mr. Cohen, the Left had fallen for the old illusion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, irrespective of what he is actually like. And this reasoning led Mr. Cohen to doubt whether the Left’s commitment to such desiderata as basic human rights was as strong or principled as he had hitherto supposed to it be. It was more like posturing than like real commitment.
It is, of course, perfectly possible to doubt the wisdom of the enterprise in Iraq without resort to the expedient of whitewashing Iraqi Baathism and its murderous leaders, or to the repulsively grovelling apologetics of George Galloway. One has only to read the words of Elie Kedourie, which are the fruit of deep knowledge, long and discouraging experience, and brilliant intelligence, to realize the difficulties in the way of reform in the Middle East:
It is enough for practical men to fend off present evils and secure existing interests. They must not cumber themselves with historical dogmas, or chase illusions in that maze of double talk which western political vocabulary has extended over the whole world. The very attempt to modernise middle eastern society, to make it western or “democratic” must bring about evils, which may be greater than the benefits.
Professor Kedourie, born an Iraqi Jew, knew whereof he spoke.
Mr. Cohen’s main complaint against his erstwhile companions on the Left is that they have failed to take seriously the universality of Enlightenment values such as freedom of expression and freedom from oppression by arbitrary power. Instead, whenever they saw a foreign enemy of their own country whom they could usefully co-opt as an ally in their disputes with their own domestic enemies, they resorted to nihilistic relativism and multiculturalism, thus explaining away the vileness of their new ally’s atrocities as being the expression of his sacrosanct cultural tradition.
However, it does not follow from a belief in the universality of Enlightenment values that they can, and therefore should, be imposed by force. No doubt it is desirable that people should be kind, but you cannot force or even cajole them into being kind. While philosophical enlightenment can no doubt be encouraged, it cannot be imposed: it is sought and achieved. And not everybody seeks it, let alone achieves it. There is no logical necessity for opponents of the Iraq war to be apologists for Saddam.
The question of Iraq looms so large in Mr. Cohen’s reflections because the Left, to which he once belonged and to which he retains a sentimental attachment, clearly feeling that there must be something worth saving from the ruins, has comprehensively lost the economic argument that was once its very raison d’être, and is now reduced to the work of cultural destruction and the balkanization of society into little communities of ideological monomaniacs—the feminists, homosexual and animal liberationists, and so forth. The Left lost its soul when it lost the economic argument.
As it happens, I write this in my study where I have before me books of erotica smuggled in the late 1950s to my late mother from Paris by her cousin who lived there, and which I have inherited. Published by the Olympia and Obelisk Presses, and an organization called Les Hautes Etudes, they include Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer, the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, and Count Palmiro Vicaron’s Book of Limericks, none of which was obtainable in the England of that time. Personally, I don’t think England was much the loser by that.
More interesting by far than the contents of these books are the newspapers in which my cousin covered them, a method of concealment so ludicrous that it surely would have alerted any customs officer who was not actually of subnormal intelligence to the nature of their contents. A page from the Guardian for 30 November 1959, covering a compendium of 1,700 salacious limericks (complete with scholarly apparatus), reports from the Labour Party Conference of that year. Mrs. Barbara Castle, later to be an important government minister, said, “We [the state as one day to be ruled by the Labour Party] don’t want to take over industries merely in order to make them more efficient, but to make them responsible to us all.” (“We” here having changed its meaning to the whole population of the country). And Aneurin Bevan said “I insist that we will never be able to get the economic resources of this nation fully expanded unless we have a planned economy, in which the nation itself can determine its own priorities.”
These were the core beliefs and commonplaces of the Left until the advent of Mrs. Thatcher and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. So complete has been the defeat of socialism, however, that anyone who now avowed a belief in the superior efficiency of state-run industry would be more a candidate for the lunatic asylum (supposing that any remained open) than for high political office. All that the Left can nowadays propose on the domestic front is social policy so destructive that it allegedly necessitates a vast state apparatus to repair the damage it does. For this reason, the accusation of promoting only its material interests can now be more properly leveled at the Left than at conservatives, or at least at those conservatives who believe that conservatism is more than a matter of the lowest possible taxes.
Hell hath no fury like the former colleagues of a journalist who has changed his mind, and Mr. Cohen has not been altogether praised by them for what seems to them not so much a volte face as outright treachery. His book is not particularly well-written, nor does he present a structured argument: if he had, it would have been quite a lot shorter and more incisive. But it shows real thought, that of a man grappling with doctrines and presuppositions that until recently he took for granted.
He has very little to say about the domestic policy prescriptions of the modern Left, of which multiculturalism is among the most destructive. It was once the honorable goal of the Left, at least in Britain, to spread higher culture to the working class, and also to immigrants, so that every person capable by inclination and natural endowment of enjoying, participating in, or contributing to that higher culture would do so. More recently, however, the Left has devoted its energies to denying that there is any higher or lower, better or worse in cultural matters. Not coincidentally, this betrayal allows leftist intellectuals to preen themselves on the broadness of their minds while they maintain their membership of a social elite. They rarely educate their own children as if their theoretical pronouncements were true. Clearly, there is an analogy here with their betrayal of Enlightenment values in foreign affairs.
This betrayal is not new, though Mr. Cohen appears to believe that it is. It was one thing to oppose the Vietnam War because you thought it was futile and ethically worse than not fighting it (not necessarily true, but at least an honest opinion); quite another because you thought that Uncle Ho was a good man who was leading his people to freedom and prosperity, something that you could believe only by employing all the human mind’s capacity for special pleading and self-deception.
I will be interested to follow Mr. Cohen’s subsequent career. Will he reject his childhood altogether and become truly conservative? He is still young enough to do so.'
Here's the review in full (another New Criterion article I'm afraid so no link available):
Finding his way
By Anthony Daniels | Volume 25, March 2007
Nick Cohen What’s Left?:
How Liberals Lost Their Way
Fourth Estate, 400 pages, £12.99
The author of this book, a respected columnist on Britain’s venerable Sunday newspaper of liberal outlook, The Observer, was born into a family in which it was assumed, as a settled matter beyond reasonable doubt, that all intelligent, cultivated, and decent people were on, and of, the Left, and that there was no serious intellectual or moral case to be made for any type of conservatism. Conservatives were not merely wrong but bad, at best motivated by a fear of change and at worst by their own narrowly material interests (the Left at that time had no material interests, at least in its own estimation). Conservatives might sometimes win elections, of course, but that was no reason to take anything they said seriously.
There comes a time, however, in many a leftist’s life when he looks around him and realizes that, all his tireless support for reform notwithstanding, many aspects of the modern world, some of them brought about by the very reform that he has so assiduously supported, do not entirely please him—and what is more, that some of his erstwhile companions in the struggle now disgust him. The world then becomes for him more ambiguous in its meaning. Mr. Cohen is on the cusp of such a change of worldview.
Changes in outlook generally have provoking causes, though there may be an underlying quasi-biological tendency in the ageing process towards conservatism. In Mr. Cohen’s case, his change of outlook was provoked by Iraq and the response of the Left to Saddam Hussein. In its opposition to the war, the Left has contrived to minimize the horrors of Saddam in order to maximize the evils of Bush and Blair: if the war was bad, then it followed that Saddam was not as bad as all that. According to Mr. Cohen, the Left had fallen for the old illusion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, irrespective of what he is actually like. And this reasoning led Mr. Cohen to doubt whether the Left’s commitment to such desiderata as basic human rights was as strong or principled as he had hitherto supposed to it be. It was more like posturing than like real commitment.
It is, of course, perfectly possible to doubt the wisdom of the enterprise in Iraq without resort to the expedient of whitewashing Iraqi Baathism and its murderous leaders, or to the repulsively grovelling apologetics of George Galloway. One has only to read the words of Elie Kedourie, which are the fruit of deep knowledge, long and discouraging experience, and brilliant intelligence, to realize the difficulties in the way of reform in the Middle East:
It is enough for practical men to fend off present evils and secure existing interests. They must not cumber themselves with historical dogmas, or chase illusions in that maze of double talk which western political vocabulary has extended over the whole world. The very attempt to modernise middle eastern society, to make it western or “democratic” must bring about evils, which may be greater than the benefits.
Professor Kedourie, born an Iraqi Jew, knew whereof he spoke.
Mr. Cohen’s main complaint against his erstwhile companions on the Left is that they have failed to take seriously the universality of Enlightenment values such as freedom of expression and freedom from oppression by arbitrary power. Instead, whenever they saw a foreign enemy of their own country whom they could usefully co-opt as an ally in their disputes with their own domestic enemies, they resorted to nihilistic relativism and multiculturalism, thus explaining away the vileness of their new ally’s atrocities as being the expression of his sacrosanct cultural tradition.
However, it does not follow from a belief in the universality of Enlightenment values that they can, and therefore should, be imposed by force. No doubt it is desirable that people should be kind, but you cannot force or even cajole them into being kind. While philosophical enlightenment can no doubt be encouraged, it cannot be imposed: it is sought and achieved. And not everybody seeks it, let alone achieves it. There is no logical necessity for opponents of the Iraq war to be apologists for Saddam.
The question of Iraq looms so large in Mr. Cohen’s reflections because the Left, to which he once belonged and to which he retains a sentimental attachment, clearly feeling that there must be something worth saving from the ruins, has comprehensively lost the economic argument that was once its very raison d’être, and is now reduced to the work of cultural destruction and the balkanization of society into little communities of ideological monomaniacs—the feminists, homosexual and animal liberationists, and so forth. The Left lost its soul when it lost the economic argument.
As it happens, I write this in my study where I have before me books of erotica smuggled in the late 1950s to my late mother from Paris by her cousin who lived there, and which I have inherited. Published by the Olympia and Obelisk Presses, and an organization called Les Hautes Etudes, they include Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer, the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, and Count Palmiro Vicaron’s Book of Limericks, none of which was obtainable in the England of that time. Personally, I don’t think England was much the loser by that.
More interesting by far than the contents of these books are the newspapers in which my cousin covered them, a method of concealment so ludicrous that it surely would have alerted any customs officer who was not actually of subnormal intelligence to the nature of their contents. A page from the Guardian for 30 November 1959, covering a compendium of 1,700 salacious limericks (complete with scholarly apparatus), reports from the Labour Party Conference of that year. Mrs. Barbara Castle, later to be an important government minister, said, “We [the state as one day to be ruled by the Labour Party] don’t want to take over industries merely in order to make them more efficient, but to make them responsible to us all.” (“We” here having changed its meaning to the whole population of the country). And Aneurin Bevan said “I insist that we will never be able to get the economic resources of this nation fully expanded unless we have a planned economy, in which the nation itself can determine its own priorities.”
These were the core beliefs and commonplaces of the Left until the advent of Mrs. Thatcher and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. So complete has been the defeat of socialism, however, that anyone who now avowed a belief in the superior efficiency of state-run industry would be more a candidate for the lunatic asylum (supposing that any remained open) than for high political office. All that the Left can nowadays propose on the domestic front is social policy so destructive that it allegedly necessitates a vast state apparatus to repair the damage it does. For this reason, the accusation of promoting only its material interests can now be more properly leveled at the Left than at conservatives, or at least at those conservatives who believe that conservatism is more than a matter of the lowest possible taxes.
Hell hath no fury like the former colleagues of a journalist who has changed his mind, and Mr. Cohen has not been altogether praised by them for what seems to them not so much a volte face as outright treachery. His book is not particularly well-written, nor does he present a structured argument: if he had, it would have been quite a lot shorter and more incisive. But it shows real thought, that of a man grappling with doctrines and presuppositions that until recently he took for granted.
He has very little to say about the domestic policy prescriptions of the modern Left, of which multiculturalism is among the most destructive. It was once the honorable goal of the Left, at least in Britain, to spread higher culture to the working class, and also to immigrants, so that every person capable by inclination and natural endowment of enjoying, participating in, or contributing to that higher culture would do so. More recently, however, the Left has devoted its energies to denying that there is any higher or lower, better or worse in cultural matters. Not coincidentally, this betrayal allows leftist intellectuals to preen themselves on the broadness of their minds while they maintain their membership of a social elite. They rarely educate their own children as if their theoretical pronouncements were true. Clearly, there is an analogy here with their betrayal of Enlightenment values in foreign affairs.
This betrayal is not new, though Mr. Cohen appears to believe that it is. It was one thing to oppose the Vietnam War because you thought it was futile and ethically worse than not fighting it (not necessarily true, but at least an honest opinion); quite another because you thought that Uncle Ho was a good man who was leading his people to freedom and prosperity, something that you could believe only by employing all the human mind’s capacity for special pleading and self-deception.
I will be interested to follow Mr. Cohen’s subsequent career. Will he reject his childhood altogether and become truly conservative? He is still young enough to do so.'
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Iran Sanctions boost civil nuclear disaster risk
The FT thinks the chances of a nuclear distaster in Iran will increase with sanctions.
'International sanctions to starve Iran's nuclear programme have heightened the risk of a radiological disaster that could spread across the Gulf, according to a new British report.
John Large of Large and Associates, UK nuclear consultants, writes that once the Bushehr civilian reactor in southern Iran goes into operation this year, a safety failure - a radioactive leak - could threaten Gulf shipping lanes and Arab Gulf states.
"The United Nations Security Council sanctions are aimed at halting, or at least impeding, the transfer of knowledge, information and equipment relating to Iran's uranium enrichment and heavy water related undertakings," the report, commissioned by the United Arab Emirates' Centre for Strategic Studies and Research, states.
"The irony here is that perhaps the culture essential to maintaining nuclear safety for Iran's separate civil nuclear power programme will be left wanting."
Full article here
'International sanctions to starve Iran's nuclear programme have heightened the risk of a radiological disaster that could spread across the Gulf, according to a new British report.
John Large of Large and Associates, UK nuclear consultants, writes that once the Bushehr civilian reactor in southern Iran goes into operation this year, a safety failure - a radioactive leak - could threaten Gulf shipping lanes and Arab Gulf states.
"The United Nations Security Council sanctions are aimed at halting, or at least impeding, the transfer of knowledge, information and equipment relating to Iran's uranium enrichment and heavy water related undertakings," the report, commissioned by the United Arab Emirates' Centre for Strategic Studies and Research, states.
"The irony here is that perhaps the culture essential to maintaining nuclear safety for Iran's separate civil nuclear power programme will be left wanting."
Full article here
Monday, April 02, 2007
Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger interviewed by Piers Morgan
Former Mirror editor Piers Morgan (PM) interviews Alan Rusbridger (AR) Editor of the Guardian. Piers accuses Alan Rusbridger of being a bit of a hypocrite and gives him a pretty hard time. It's probably quite unfair but it makes for a very funny interview.
Here are the highlights:
PM: How is your new Berliner-sized paper actually doing?
AR: It is doing, more or less, what we expected.
PM: That's what I used to say when things went badly.
AR: Do you want to see charts?
PM: No. I always used to bamboozle my critics with charts. How did you sell last week, then [December 2006]?
AR: About 386,000.
PM: And what were you selling before the Berliner redesign?
AR: We were down in the 360s, 370s. The one mistake we made was to take out 10,000 bulks, which made the figures look worse than they were.
PM: But you did that to make the relaunch look better than it was.
AR: No, we did that at the time of the relaunch.
PM: I thought you did it a couple of months before the relaunch.
AR: Er, well, we took them out a few months before and didn't put them back for the relaunch.
PM: So I was right. You did it deliberately. It's an old trick.
AR: We did. But we didn't shove them back in; that's the point.
PM: It's not my point.
AR: We were too honest.
PM: Hmmm...I read an interview in which you said that what mattered most between a paper and its staff and the readers was trust. Do you think you have to be as trustworthy privately as you are professionally?
AR: I think you have to be trustworthy in your professional life.
PM: Not personal life?
AR: [Silence for 10 seconds] I like to make a distinction between professional and private in everything we write about.
PM: Would you answer that question? Are you a public figure?
AR: Not really, no. I am accountable to the Scott Trust [owner of the Guardian Media Group], and I make The Guardian's journalism more publicly accountable than any other editor in this country.
PM: I only ask, because I remember The Guardian treating me as a public figure when I encountered various scrapes as an editor. Do you think that your own life would stand up to much ethical scrutiny?
AR: In terms of the journalism?
PM: No, I mean privately. Do you consider that infidelity is always a private matter for public figures, for instance?
AR: I think what people do legally and consensually is private.
PM: If I asked you if you had ever taken illegal drugs, would you feel compelled to answer?
AR: No, I'd say to you to mind your own business.
PM: What's your current salary?
AR: It's, er, about £350,000.
PM: What bonus did you receive last year?
AR: About £170,000, which was a way of addressing my pension.
PM: That means that you earned £520,000 last year alone. That's more than the editor of The Sun by a long way.
AR: I'll talk to you off the record about this, but not on the record.
PM: Why? In The Guardian, you never stop banging on about fat cats. Do you think that your readers would be pleased to hear that you earned £520,000 last year? Are you worth it?
AR: That's for others to say.
PM: Wouldn't it be more Guardian-like, more socialist, to take a bit less and spread the pot around a bit? We have this quaint idea that you guys are into that "all men are equal" nonsense, but you're not really, are you? You seem a lot more "equal" than others on your paper.
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Do you ever get awkward moments when your bonus gets published? Do you wince and think, "Oh dear, Polly Toynbee's not going to like this one."
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Or is Polly raking in so much herself that she wouldn't mind?
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Are you embarrassed by it?
AR: No. I didn't ask for the money. And I do declare it, too.
PM: But if you earned £520,000 last year, then that must make you a multimillionaire.
AR: You say I'm a millionaire?
PM: You must be - unless you're giving it all away to charity...
AR: Er...
PM: What's your house worth?
AR: I don't want to talk about these aspects of my life.
PM: You think it's all private?
AR: I do really, yes.
PM: Did you think that about Peter Mandelson's house? I mean, you broke that story.
AR: I, er... it was a story about an elected politician.
PM: And you're not as accountable. You just reserve the right to expose his private life.
AR: We all make distinctions about this kind of thing. The line between private and public is a fine one, and you've taken up most of the interview with it.
PM: Well, only because you seem so embarrassed and confused about it.
AR: I'm not embarrassed about it. But nor do I feel I have to talk about it.
PM: What about your cars? Are you still driving that ridiculous G-Wiz thing around?
AR: Yes, and I love it.
PM: But I also read that you use taxis to ferry your stuff to and from work, which sort of negates the green effort, doesn't it?
AR: That story was a bit confused. I used to cycle to work sometimes, and if I was too tired at the end of the day then I would fold up the bike and get a cab home, yes. But about a year ago I was nearly killed in a nasty accident on my bike so I gave up cycling and bought the G-Wiz.
PM: Any other cars?
AR: A company Volvo estate.
PM: A big gas-guzzler.
AR: Yes.
PM: Bit of a culture clash with your G-Wiz, then?
AR: Let me think about that. The problem is that I also have a big dog, and it doesn't fit into the G-Wiz.
PM: I'm sure the environment will understand. Any others?
AR: My wife has a Corsa.
PM: Quite an expansive...
AR: Fleet...
PM: Yes, fleet.
AR: But I've got children as well.
PM: They're privately educated?
AR: Er... [pause].
PM: Is that a valid question?
AR: I don't... think so... no.
PM: And you went to Cranleigh, a top public school.
AR: I did, yes.
PM: Do you feel uncomfortable answering that question?
AR: It falls into the category of something I don't feel embarrassed about, but you get on to a slippery slope about what else you talk about, don't you?
PM: It's not really about your private life though, is it? It's just a fact. And I assume by your reluctance to answer the question that they are privately educated.
AR: [Pause] Again, I am trying to make a distinction between...
PM: You often run stories about Labour politicians sending their kids to private schools, and you are quite censorious about it. Are you worried that it makes you look a hypocrite again?
AR: No. I think there are boundaries. It goes back to this question of whether editors are public figures or not.
PM: And you don't think they are?
AR: Well, again, I've tried to draw a distinction between making my journalism accountable, but I have never tried to go around talking about my private life and therefore making myself into a public figure.
PM: You were originally a gossip columnist on The Guardian. Did you never write about anyone's private life?
AR: I can't remember writing about someone's private life.
Here are the highlights:
PM: How is your new Berliner-sized paper actually doing?
AR: It is doing, more or less, what we expected.
PM: That's what I used to say when things went badly.
AR: Do you want to see charts?
PM: No. I always used to bamboozle my critics with charts. How did you sell last week, then [December 2006]?
AR: About 386,000.
PM: And what were you selling before the Berliner redesign?
AR: We were down in the 360s, 370s. The one mistake we made was to take out 10,000 bulks, which made the figures look worse than they were.
PM: But you did that to make the relaunch look better than it was.
AR: No, we did that at the time of the relaunch.
PM: I thought you did it a couple of months before the relaunch.
AR: Er, well, we took them out a few months before and didn't put them back for the relaunch.
PM: So I was right. You did it deliberately. It's an old trick.
AR: We did. But we didn't shove them back in; that's the point.
PM: It's not my point.
AR: We were too honest.
PM: Hmmm...I read an interview in which you said that what mattered most between a paper and its staff and the readers was trust. Do you think you have to be as trustworthy privately as you are professionally?
AR: I think you have to be trustworthy in your professional life.
PM: Not personal life?
AR: [Silence for 10 seconds] I like to make a distinction between professional and private in everything we write about.
PM: Would you answer that question? Are you a public figure?
AR: Not really, no. I am accountable to the Scott Trust [owner of the Guardian Media Group], and I make The Guardian's journalism more publicly accountable than any other editor in this country.
PM: I only ask, because I remember The Guardian treating me as a public figure when I encountered various scrapes as an editor. Do you think that your own life would stand up to much ethical scrutiny?
AR: In terms of the journalism?
PM: No, I mean privately. Do you consider that infidelity is always a private matter for public figures, for instance?
AR: I think what people do legally and consensually is private.
PM: If I asked you if you had ever taken illegal drugs, would you feel compelled to answer?
AR: No, I'd say to you to mind your own business.
PM: What's your current salary?
AR: It's, er, about £350,000.
PM: What bonus did you receive last year?
AR: About £170,000, which was a way of addressing my pension.
PM: That means that you earned £520,000 last year alone. That's more than the editor of The Sun by a long way.
AR: I'll talk to you off the record about this, but not on the record.
PM: Why? In The Guardian, you never stop banging on about fat cats. Do you think that your readers would be pleased to hear that you earned £520,000 last year? Are you worth it?
AR: That's for others to say.
PM: Wouldn't it be more Guardian-like, more socialist, to take a bit less and spread the pot around a bit? We have this quaint idea that you guys are into that "all men are equal" nonsense, but you're not really, are you? You seem a lot more "equal" than others on your paper.
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Do you ever get awkward moments when your bonus gets published? Do you wince and think, "Oh dear, Polly Toynbee's not going to like this one."
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Or is Polly raking in so much herself that she wouldn't mind?
AR: Er... [silence].
PM: Are you embarrassed by it?
AR: No. I didn't ask for the money. And I do declare it, too.
PM: But if you earned £520,000 last year, then that must make you a multimillionaire.
AR: You say I'm a millionaire?
PM: You must be - unless you're giving it all away to charity...
AR: Er...
PM: What's your house worth?
AR: I don't want to talk about these aspects of my life.
PM: You think it's all private?
AR: I do really, yes.
PM: Did you think that about Peter Mandelson's house? I mean, you broke that story.
AR: I, er... it was a story about an elected politician.
PM: And you're not as accountable. You just reserve the right to expose his private life.
AR: We all make distinctions about this kind of thing. The line between private and public is a fine one, and you've taken up most of the interview with it.
PM: Well, only because you seem so embarrassed and confused about it.
AR: I'm not embarrassed about it. But nor do I feel I have to talk about it.
PM: What about your cars? Are you still driving that ridiculous G-Wiz thing around?
AR: Yes, and I love it.
PM: But I also read that you use taxis to ferry your stuff to and from work, which sort of negates the green effort, doesn't it?
AR: That story was a bit confused. I used to cycle to work sometimes, and if I was too tired at the end of the day then I would fold up the bike and get a cab home, yes. But about a year ago I was nearly killed in a nasty accident on my bike so I gave up cycling and bought the G-Wiz.
PM: Any other cars?
AR: A company Volvo estate.
PM: A big gas-guzzler.
AR: Yes.
PM: Bit of a culture clash with your G-Wiz, then?
AR: Let me think about that. The problem is that I also have a big dog, and it doesn't fit into the G-Wiz.
PM: I'm sure the environment will understand. Any others?
AR: My wife has a Corsa.
PM: Quite an expansive...
AR: Fleet...
PM: Yes, fleet.
AR: But I've got children as well.
PM: They're privately educated?
AR: Er... [pause].
PM: Is that a valid question?
AR: I don't... think so... no.
PM: And you went to Cranleigh, a top public school.
AR: I did, yes.
PM: Do you feel uncomfortable answering that question?
AR: It falls into the category of something I don't feel embarrassed about, but you get on to a slippery slope about what else you talk about, don't you?
PM: It's not really about your private life though, is it? It's just a fact. And I assume by your reluctance to answer the question that they are privately educated.
AR: [Pause] Again, I am trying to make a distinction between...
PM: You often run stories about Labour politicians sending their kids to private schools, and you are quite censorious about it. Are you worried that it makes you look a hypocrite again?
AR: No. I think there are boundaries. It goes back to this question of whether editors are public figures or not.
PM: And you don't think they are?
AR: Well, again, I've tried to draw a distinction between making my journalism accountable, but I have never tried to go around talking about my private life and therefore making myself into a public figure.
PM: You were originally a gossip columnist on The Guardian. Did you never write about anyone's private life?
AR: I can't remember writing about someone's private life.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
U.N. Watch exposes the U.N. Human Rights Council
Thanks to Andy for putting me onto this. UN Watch is an NGO whose name betrays their interests, and here one of their guys telling the UN a few home truths. The most interesting thing is the hostile reaction to his speech, while outrageous lies from the likes of Syria and Zimbabwe receive thanks.
The New York Sun reported on this below.
'I Will Not Express Thanks'
New York Sun
March 30, 2007
Every once in a while there comes a diplomatic moment to remember, and New Yorkers who want to share one can go up on youtube.com and watch the representative in Geneva of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, in a March 23 speech before the 4th session of the Human Rights Council. In the adjacent columns, we print the full text of his remarks, lamenting the loss of the dream of Eleanor Roosevelt and other architects of the human rights movement within the United Nations system. Mr. Neuer offers the substance. But it's worth watching the full clip (it's only a few minutes long) to catch the scandalous behavior of the president of the council, as he — for what may be the only time in its history — refuses to thank a speaker for his intervention and declares he will ban Mr. Neuer, or any other critic of the commission, if he says anything similar again.
To provide the full context, UN Watch has put together a compendium of clippings (Watch Video) called "Admissible and Inadmissable at the U.N. Human Rights Council." It shows actual film clips of the president of the Human Rights Council, Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, thanking various diplomats for their testimony. He thanks a speaker for Zimbabwe talking about the ignorance of a delegate who has criticized human rights under President Mugabe. He thanks the delegate from Cuba for insulting a human rights expert who exposed abuses of the communist regime. When the permanent observer of Palestine asserts that the one that has a "monopoly on human rights violations" is Israel, which, he adds, is the darling of not only the ambassadors of America and Canada but also of the human rights commissioner, Louise Arbour, the observer is thanked by Mr. de Alba. On the clip one can see Mr. de Alba thanking the delegation of Sudan for a statement saying that reports of violence against women in Darfur has been "exaggerated."
Then one can watch and hear an envoy from Nigeria assert that "stoning under Sharia law for unnatural sexual acts … should not be equated with extrajudicial killings …" Or watch an envoy of Iran defend the Holocaust denial conference. Or watch a defense of the Hezbollah terrorist organization. Or speaker after speaker liken Israel to the Nazis, only to get thanked by Mr. de Alba or whoever is presiding. Then one can watch Mr. de Alba lean back demonstrably in his chair and fold his arms across his face and adopt a disapproving visage as Mr. Neuer of UN Watch begins his recent testimony. He notes that 60 years ago, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rene Cassin, and others gathered on the banks of Lake Geneva to reaffirm the principle of human dignity and created the Commission on Human Rights. He asks what has become of "this noble dream" and offers a devastating answer with a reprise of all the human rights abuses on which the council has been silent.
"Why has this council chosen silence?" Mr. Neuer asks. "Because Israel could not be blamed." He ticks off the actions against Israel, the only one the council takes. When Mr. Neuer is done, Mr. de Alba says, "for the first time in this session, I will not express thanks for that statement. ... I will not tolerate any similar statements in the council." And he threatens to strike any similar statements from UN Watch from the record of the proceedings. We had to tip our hat to Mr. Neuer, who has, on occasion, written for these pages. Newspapermen have to have strong stomachs, but it's nothing compared to what he needs to sit through these sessions. He presents with memorable force and dignity. The compendium of clips runs only seven minutes or so and is winging its way around the World Wide Web. It's worth watching, a reminder of the wisdom of the decision of America's former ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, and his colleagues in the Bush administration to stand down from participating in this charade.
The New York Sun reported on this below.
'I Will Not Express Thanks'
New York Sun
March 30, 2007
Every once in a while there comes a diplomatic moment to remember, and New Yorkers who want to share one can go up on youtube.com and watch the representative in Geneva of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, in a March 23 speech before the 4th session of the Human Rights Council. In the adjacent columns, we print the full text of his remarks, lamenting the loss of the dream of Eleanor Roosevelt and other architects of the human rights movement within the United Nations system. Mr. Neuer offers the substance. But it's worth watching the full clip (it's only a few minutes long) to catch the scandalous behavior of the president of the council, as he — for what may be the only time in its history — refuses to thank a speaker for his intervention and declares he will ban Mr. Neuer, or any other critic of the commission, if he says anything similar again.
To provide the full context, UN Watch has put together a compendium of clippings (Watch Video) called "Admissible and Inadmissable at the U.N. Human Rights Council." It shows actual film clips of the president of the Human Rights Council, Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, thanking various diplomats for their testimony. He thanks a speaker for Zimbabwe talking about the ignorance of a delegate who has criticized human rights under President Mugabe. He thanks the delegate from Cuba for insulting a human rights expert who exposed abuses of the communist regime. When the permanent observer of Palestine asserts that the one that has a "monopoly on human rights violations" is Israel, which, he adds, is the darling of not only the ambassadors of America and Canada but also of the human rights commissioner, Louise Arbour, the observer is thanked by Mr. de Alba. On the clip one can see Mr. de Alba thanking the delegation of Sudan for a statement saying that reports of violence against women in Darfur has been "exaggerated."
Then one can watch and hear an envoy from Nigeria assert that "stoning under Sharia law for unnatural sexual acts … should not be equated with extrajudicial killings …" Or watch an envoy of Iran defend the Holocaust denial conference. Or watch a defense of the Hezbollah terrorist organization. Or speaker after speaker liken Israel to the Nazis, only to get thanked by Mr. de Alba or whoever is presiding. Then one can watch Mr. de Alba lean back demonstrably in his chair and fold his arms across his face and adopt a disapproving visage as Mr. Neuer of UN Watch begins his recent testimony. He notes that 60 years ago, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rene Cassin, and others gathered on the banks of Lake Geneva to reaffirm the principle of human dignity and created the Commission on Human Rights. He asks what has become of "this noble dream" and offers a devastating answer with a reprise of all the human rights abuses on which the council has been silent.
"Why has this council chosen silence?" Mr. Neuer asks. "Because Israel could not be blamed." He ticks off the actions against Israel, the only one the council takes. When Mr. Neuer is done, Mr. de Alba says, "for the first time in this session, I will not express thanks for that statement. ... I will not tolerate any similar statements in the council." And he threatens to strike any similar statements from UN Watch from the record of the proceedings. We had to tip our hat to Mr. Neuer, who has, on occasion, written for these pages. Newspapermen have to have strong stomachs, but it's nothing compared to what he needs to sit through these sessions. He presents with memorable force and dignity. The compendium of clips runs only seven minutes or so and is winging its way around the World Wide Web. It's worth watching, a reminder of the wisdom of the decision of America's former ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, and his colleagues in the Bush administration to stand down from participating in this charade.
Iran captures 15 British Royal Marines
I haven't been following this story that closely, but the bit that has always bothered me the most (even more than where *did* this thing actually take place?) is how come a 5000 ton warship did nothing to prevent the capture in the first place?'.
Here's an article that discusses exactly that, and let me warn you, friends, it does not make good reading for supporters of the once-great Royal Navy, nor for our politicians.
-----------------------
Focus: In the eye of the storm
Fifteen sailors snatched and publicly humiliated without a single shot fired. Tony Allen-Mills, Michael Smith and Marie Colvin on a shambles Britain could have avoided
Sunday Times
April 1, 2007
They should have known the Iranians might spring a trap. Several months before the current hostage crisis a small group of American and Iraqi soldiers had been patrolling near the Iranian border 75 miles east of Baghdad.
They spotted a single Iranian soldier lurking in Iraqi territory near the town of Balad Ruz and moved forward to question him. The Americans were, according to a US army report obtained by The Sunday Times, promptly ambushed by a much larger platoon of Iranian soldiers who had been hiding across the nearby border.
An Iranian captain warned the Americans that “if they tried to leave their location, the Iranians would fire upon them”. For a few moments the US paratroopers must have felt as helpless as the British sailors in inflatable speedboats who were surprised 10 days ago by more heavily armed Iranian vessels.
The US incident last September ended very differently. Firing broke out. Both sides scattered and a potential hostage crisis was averted as the Americans escaped unhurt.
By contrast, the 14 British service-men and one woman proved humiliatingly vulnerable to a low-tech Iranian naval manoeuvre that has provoked mocking headlines around the world. Yesterday they were still at the mercy of their unpredictable Iranian captors, reduced to making forced false apologies for breaching Iranian territory.
Nathan Thomas Summers, one of the captured crewmen, was paraded on television. “We trespassed without permission,” he said. “I deeply apologise for entering your waters.”
Yesterday Hussein Shari’atma-dari, a senior adviser to the regime, described the incident as a “plot from London to put more pressures on Iran”. He said: “The path taken by Britain and the West shows that they do not want to take any step for the release of the British soldiers, therefore Iran must put them on trial.”
How could the British forces have been caught so unawares? They should have been alerted months ago by the Balad Ruz clash to the heightened threat of an Iranian assault. They might even have read subsequent warnings – reported in The Sunday Times as recently as two weeks ago – that Tehran was threatening to kidnap “a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers”.
As Iranian radicals rejoiced at their propaganda triumph last week, even some of Britain’s friends were scathing in their condemnation of military impotence and political incompetence.
“Wimping out on Iran” was one of the more polite commentaries in the New York Daily News. John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, dubbed the British government’s performance as “pathetic”.
The crisis has reduced Tony Blair and several of his officials to the status of irrelevant foghorns, issuing empty warnings about “stepping up the pressure” and “moving to the next phase”.
Such is the shambles that senior Royal Navy officers at the fleet’s operational headquarters have been directed to review the rules of engagement for naval boarding parties. If necessary they will recommend changes to ensure Britain’s forces are never again seized so easily without a shot being fired.
THE streets of Tehran were largely empty last week as Iranians celebrated Norouz, their new year festival. There was a chill in the air and snow on the distant mountains as Mullah Ahmad Khatami mounted his podium in the courtyard of Tehran University to lead Friday prayers.
Khatami, viewed as a rising hard-liner, quickly turned to the hostage crisis. “Britain must know that this is not the 19th century and it should not be taking an imperial posture,” the burly mullah said.
“Everyone knows that Britain is a defeated nation that acts as a political broker [for the Americans],” he went on. “You cannot frighten Iran by sending gunboats and doing whatever pleases you. Iran today is a strong Iran and is the only country that stands up to the Americans.”
Iran has been resisting a campaign led by the United States and Britain at the UN to force the mullahs to end Iran’s programme of enriching uranium. Iran claims it will be used to produce civilian nuclear power but the West fears Iran wants to produce a nuclear bomb.
Khatami said his religious colleagues sent their “warmest congratulations” to the “mighty border guards” who had seized the British sailors. He condemned London for “bullish declarations and devious actions” and warned: “Britain should understand that if they want to continue that path of bullying, they would pay a huge price.”
This was scarcely the response that Blair can have been hoping for when he warned last Tuesday that Britain’s campaign to free the captives would “move into a different phase” if Iran did not respond.
Blair added: “I hope we manage to get them to realise that they have to release them.”
While there was no doubting the outrage shared by British ministers, it was equally clear by Thursday’s cabinet meeting that Britain’s big mistake was to have allowed the sailors to be captured in the first place.
“It’s not as simple as just being tough with the Iranians,” Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, argued to her colleagues.
“They have tentacles in all sorts of areas such as the Afghan warlords, the Iraqi insurgents and Hamas.”
In other words, Beckett was suggesting, any military action against Tehran was likely to be met by a barrage of terrorist reprisals by Iranian allies around the globe. “We have to be more sophisticated,” she insisted.
At 10 Downing Street, senior officials took a similar line. “There is no real point in sabre-rattling for its own sake,” said one official. “We have been looking for the opportunity to engage through our multilateral contacts.”
Variations on that peacemongering theme were expressed widely in Whitehall last week. John Williams, a former Foreign Office director of communications who was intimately involved in protracted negotiations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, said he believed Beckett’s hands were tied. “The Foreign Office objective is to get our people out safely. There is just too much at stake for any other approach,” he said.
Such diplomatic hand-wringing was last week driving American hawks to distraction. “The Brits have laboured mightily for many years to prevent the United States from pursuing vigorous action against Iran,” sneered Michael Ledeen, a prominent neocon and Middle East scholar who has long argued for regime change in Tehran. “Now they will have to answer to the families of the hostages.” Ledeen argued that coalition forces should “undertake the legitimate self-defence to which we are entitled”, and attack terrorist training camps and bomb factories inside Iran.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican congressman who is considering a presidential bid, urged Britain to use military force to destroy Iran’s petrol production company. If a lack of petrol for their cars forced Iranians to “go back to walking and using oxen to pull carts”, the people might rise against the ayatollahs, Gingrich said.
None of which will come as much comfort to the frightened family of Leading Seaman Faye Turney, 26, who has become the human face of the crisis. Psychologists have had a field day analysing the pitiful videos of Turney attempting to cooperate under obvious duress.
The three letters she has purportedly written to her parents. to a “representative of the House of Commons” and to “British People” were obviously dictated in large part by her Iranian captors. Yet however crude Iran’s propaganda may seem in Britain, it is mainly aimed elsewhere. Iran is patently showing off to its radical acolytes around the globe, revelling in the chance to kick sand in the face of the West.
The so-called confessions of Turney and Summers were first aired not in Farsi, which is spoken by most Iranians, but on an Arab-language television station watched widely in Iraq and Arab Gulf countries. The message was clear – the Arab world must look to Tehran if it wishes to vanquish the American invaders and see off their yapping British lapdogs.
How they must have laughed in Iran last week when Britain failed to persuade the UN even to “deplore” the seizure of its sailors. The UN security council expressed “grave concern” instead. “That’ll really show the Iranians we mean business,” commented one disillusioned British diplomat. WITH diplomatic efforts apparently stalling, attention is likely to return this week to how the Royal Navy, pride of Britain for at least 350 years, allowed this disaster to happen in the first place. Have we really sunk so low that we cannot fight off a few Iranian thugs in what amounted to little more than militarised speedboats?
Vice-Admiral Charles Style, a deputy chief of defence staff, made a good fist of defending the navy’s position at a Ministry of Defence press conference on Wednesday. He had all the right satellite coordinates and charts to show the Iranians were at fault, but everyone listening knew that it no longer really mattered exactly where our chaps had been arrested – they should not have been arrested at all.
That point was rammed home by an officer on board the US frigate that is the other main ship in Task Force 158, the British-commanded fleet patrolling off Iraq. Lieutenant-Commander Erik Horner of the USS Underwood said US sailors’ rules of engagement meant they not only had the right to defend themselves against that kind of aggression, but also were obliged to do so. “Our reaction was: why didn’t your guys defend themselves?” Horner said.
John Pike, one of America’s leading military analysts, was similarly baffled that the sailors’ home ship, HMS Cornwall, was up to 11 miles away, too far to offer immediate cover as the British inflatables searched an Indian freighter in a routine antismuggling check. Despite all the evidence that Iran was looking to capture “blue-eyed officers”, Pike said, “there seems to have been a loss of situational awareness on the part of the folks on Cornwall that their boarding party could be snuck up on like that”.
Admiral Sir Alan West, the former first sea lord, defended the lack of aggression on the British side, pointing out that UK rules of engagement “are very much deescalatory, because we don’t want wars starting”. He added: “The reason we are there is to be a force for good, to make the whole area safe. So we try to downplay things. Rather than roaring into action and sinking everything in sight we try to step back and that, of course, is why our chaps were . . . captured.”
The British lapse was all the more surprising because the same thing happened in June 2004, when eight sailors and marines were seized in the same area and released three days later. The defence ministry compiled a “lessons learnt” paper to ensure that those mistakes were not repeated.
The Sunday Times has learnt that the paper highlighted the need for “top cover” for boarding parties, which should always have been covered from the air by the presence of a helicopter. The Cornwall’s Lynx – armed with a .50 machinegun that could have caused serious damage to the Iranian fast boats – had apparently been overhead when the sailors boarded the Indian freighter.
Why did it turn back, leaving the sailors exposed? The ministry initially said last week that it needed to refuel before retreating behind an insistence that there was no standard procedure for keeping a helicopter in place.
It also remained a mystery how the Cornwall’s advanced radar and sonar systems failed to alert its crew to a problem. As a type22 frigate, the Cornwall has the capability to track ships up to 200 miles away. One recently retired naval officer said even basic navigation radar should have picked up motorboats at shorter range, assuming someone was looking out for them.
An official board of inquiry will ultimately be charged with examining the incident and establishing, among many other things, why no immediate effort was made to intercept the Iranians as they departed with their captives.
Less easy to predict is how the standoff will be resolved. “A military confrontation would just be losing all round. Both sides realise that,” said Robert Lowe of the Chatham House think tank. He said the solution had to be one where “neither side loses face”.
One experienced source who has dealt with Iran in the past expects the hostages to be released after a week to 10 days, but he said that was likely only if Britain relaxed its pressure. “They will not want to be seen to be reacting to anything we are saying or doing,” he said.
A rescue attempt, if successful, would be hugely popular in Britain and might restore Blair’s tattered image in America. “There are plans being made [for a possible rescue],” one senior British source acknowledged. But it is not even clear where the sailors are being held.
Nor is history on the prime minister’s side. A US attempt to rescue embassy hostages in Iran in 1980 ended in a fiasco of colliding aircraft in the desert. Those hostages were held for 444 days.
Here's an article that discusses exactly that, and let me warn you, friends, it does not make good reading for supporters of the once-great Royal Navy, nor for our politicians.
-----------------------
Focus: In the eye of the storm
Fifteen sailors snatched and publicly humiliated without a single shot fired. Tony Allen-Mills, Michael Smith and Marie Colvin on a shambles Britain could have avoided
Sunday Times
April 1, 2007
They should have known the Iranians might spring a trap. Several months before the current hostage crisis a small group of American and Iraqi soldiers had been patrolling near the Iranian border 75 miles east of Baghdad.
They spotted a single Iranian soldier lurking in Iraqi territory near the town of Balad Ruz and moved forward to question him. The Americans were, according to a US army report obtained by The Sunday Times, promptly ambushed by a much larger platoon of Iranian soldiers who had been hiding across the nearby border.
An Iranian captain warned the Americans that “if they tried to leave their location, the Iranians would fire upon them”. For a few moments the US paratroopers must have felt as helpless as the British sailors in inflatable speedboats who were surprised 10 days ago by more heavily armed Iranian vessels.
The US incident last September ended very differently. Firing broke out. Both sides scattered and a potential hostage crisis was averted as the Americans escaped unhurt.
By contrast, the 14 British service-men and one woman proved humiliatingly vulnerable to a low-tech Iranian naval manoeuvre that has provoked mocking headlines around the world. Yesterday they were still at the mercy of their unpredictable Iranian captors, reduced to making forced false apologies for breaching Iranian territory.
Nathan Thomas Summers, one of the captured crewmen, was paraded on television. “We trespassed without permission,” he said. “I deeply apologise for entering your waters.”
Yesterday Hussein Shari’atma-dari, a senior adviser to the regime, described the incident as a “plot from London to put more pressures on Iran”. He said: “The path taken by Britain and the West shows that they do not want to take any step for the release of the British soldiers, therefore Iran must put them on trial.”
How could the British forces have been caught so unawares? They should have been alerted months ago by the Balad Ruz clash to the heightened threat of an Iranian assault. They might even have read subsequent warnings – reported in The Sunday Times as recently as two weeks ago – that Tehran was threatening to kidnap “a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers”.
As Iranian radicals rejoiced at their propaganda triumph last week, even some of Britain’s friends were scathing in their condemnation of military impotence and political incompetence.
“Wimping out on Iran” was one of the more polite commentaries in the New York Daily News. John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, dubbed the British government’s performance as “pathetic”.
The crisis has reduced Tony Blair and several of his officials to the status of irrelevant foghorns, issuing empty warnings about “stepping up the pressure” and “moving to the next phase”.
Such is the shambles that senior Royal Navy officers at the fleet’s operational headquarters have been directed to review the rules of engagement for naval boarding parties. If necessary they will recommend changes to ensure Britain’s forces are never again seized so easily without a shot being fired.
THE streets of Tehran were largely empty last week as Iranians celebrated Norouz, their new year festival. There was a chill in the air and snow on the distant mountains as Mullah Ahmad Khatami mounted his podium in the courtyard of Tehran University to lead Friday prayers.
Khatami, viewed as a rising hard-liner, quickly turned to the hostage crisis. “Britain must know that this is not the 19th century and it should not be taking an imperial posture,” the burly mullah said.
“Everyone knows that Britain is a defeated nation that acts as a political broker [for the Americans],” he went on. “You cannot frighten Iran by sending gunboats and doing whatever pleases you. Iran today is a strong Iran and is the only country that stands up to the Americans.”
Iran has been resisting a campaign led by the United States and Britain at the UN to force the mullahs to end Iran’s programme of enriching uranium. Iran claims it will be used to produce civilian nuclear power but the West fears Iran wants to produce a nuclear bomb.
Khatami said his religious colleagues sent their “warmest congratulations” to the “mighty border guards” who had seized the British sailors. He condemned London for “bullish declarations and devious actions” and warned: “Britain should understand that if they want to continue that path of bullying, they would pay a huge price.”
This was scarcely the response that Blair can have been hoping for when he warned last Tuesday that Britain’s campaign to free the captives would “move into a different phase” if Iran did not respond.
Blair added: “I hope we manage to get them to realise that they have to release them.”
While there was no doubting the outrage shared by British ministers, it was equally clear by Thursday’s cabinet meeting that Britain’s big mistake was to have allowed the sailors to be captured in the first place.
“It’s not as simple as just being tough with the Iranians,” Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, argued to her colleagues.
“They have tentacles in all sorts of areas such as the Afghan warlords, the Iraqi insurgents and Hamas.”
In other words, Beckett was suggesting, any military action against Tehran was likely to be met by a barrage of terrorist reprisals by Iranian allies around the globe. “We have to be more sophisticated,” she insisted.
At 10 Downing Street, senior officials took a similar line. “There is no real point in sabre-rattling for its own sake,” said one official. “We have been looking for the opportunity to engage through our multilateral contacts.”
Variations on that peacemongering theme were expressed widely in Whitehall last week. John Williams, a former Foreign Office director of communications who was intimately involved in protracted negotiations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, said he believed Beckett’s hands were tied. “The Foreign Office objective is to get our people out safely. There is just too much at stake for any other approach,” he said.
Such diplomatic hand-wringing was last week driving American hawks to distraction. “The Brits have laboured mightily for many years to prevent the United States from pursuing vigorous action against Iran,” sneered Michael Ledeen, a prominent neocon and Middle East scholar who has long argued for regime change in Tehran. “Now they will have to answer to the families of the hostages.” Ledeen argued that coalition forces should “undertake the legitimate self-defence to which we are entitled”, and attack terrorist training camps and bomb factories inside Iran.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican congressman who is considering a presidential bid, urged Britain to use military force to destroy Iran’s petrol production company. If a lack of petrol for their cars forced Iranians to “go back to walking and using oxen to pull carts”, the people might rise against the ayatollahs, Gingrich said.
None of which will come as much comfort to the frightened family of Leading Seaman Faye Turney, 26, who has become the human face of the crisis. Psychologists have had a field day analysing the pitiful videos of Turney attempting to cooperate under obvious duress.
The three letters she has purportedly written to her parents. to a “representative of the House of Commons” and to “British People” were obviously dictated in large part by her Iranian captors. Yet however crude Iran’s propaganda may seem in Britain, it is mainly aimed elsewhere. Iran is patently showing off to its radical acolytes around the globe, revelling in the chance to kick sand in the face of the West.
The so-called confessions of Turney and Summers were first aired not in Farsi, which is spoken by most Iranians, but on an Arab-language television station watched widely in Iraq and Arab Gulf countries. The message was clear – the Arab world must look to Tehran if it wishes to vanquish the American invaders and see off their yapping British lapdogs.
How they must have laughed in Iran last week when Britain failed to persuade the UN even to “deplore” the seizure of its sailors. The UN security council expressed “grave concern” instead. “That’ll really show the Iranians we mean business,” commented one disillusioned British diplomat. WITH diplomatic efforts apparently stalling, attention is likely to return this week to how the Royal Navy, pride of Britain for at least 350 years, allowed this disaster to happen in the first place. Have we really sunk so low that we cannot fight off a few Iranian thugs in what amounted to little more than militarised speedboats?
Vice-Admiral Charles Style, a deputy chief of defence staff, made a good fist of defending the navy’s position at a Ministry of Defence press conference on Wednesday. He had all the right satellite coordinates and charts to show the Iranians were at fault, but everyone listening knew that it no longer really mattered exactly where our chaps had been arrested – they should not have been arrested at all.
That point was rammed home by an officer on board the US frigate that is the other main ship in Task Force 158, the British-commanded fleet patrolling off Iraq. Lieutenant-Commander Erik Horner of the USS Underwood said US sailors’ rules of engagement meant they not only had the right to defend themselves against that kind of aggression, but also were obliged to do so. “Our reaction was: why didn’t your guys defend themselves?” Horner said.
John Pike, one of America’s leading military analysts, was similarly baffled that the sailors’ home ship, HMS Cornwall, was up to 11 miles away, too far to offer immediate cover as the British inflatables searched an Indian freighter in a routine antismuggling check. Despite all the evidence that Iran was looking to capture “blue-eyed officers”, Pike said, “there seems to have been a loss of situational awareness on the part of the folks on Cornwall that their boarding party could be snuck up on like that”.
Admiral Sir Alan West, the former first sea lord, defended the lack of aggression on the British side, pointing out that UK rules of engagement “are very much deescalatory, because we don’t want wars starting”. He added: “The reason we are there is to be a force for good, to make the whole area safe. So we try to downplay things. Rather than roaring into action and sinking everything in sight we try to step back and that, of course, is why our chaps were . . . captured.”
The British lapse was all the more surprising because the same thing happened in June 2004, when eight sailors and marines were seized in the same area and released three days later. The defence ministry compiled a “lessons learnt” paper to ensure that those mistakes were not repeated.
The Sunday Times has learnt that the paper highlighted the need for “top cover” for boarding parties, which should always have been covered from the air by the presence of a helicopter. The Cornwall’s Lynx – armed with a .50 machinegun that could have caused serious damage to the Iranian fast boats – had apparently been overhead when the sailors boarded the Indian freighter.
Why did it turn back, leaving the sailors exposed? The ministry initially said last week that it needed to refuel before retreating behind an insistence that there was no standard procedure for keeping a helicopter in place.
It also remained a mystery how the Cornwall’s advanced radar and sonar systems failed to alert its crew to a problem. As a type22 frigate, the Cornwall has the capability to track ships up to 200 miles away. One recently retired naval officer said even basic navigation radar should have picked up motorboats at shorter range, assuming someone was looking out for them.
An official board of inquiry will ultimately be charged with examining the incident and establishing, among many other things, why no immediate effort was made to intercept the Iranians as they departed with their captives.
Less easy to predict is how the standoff will be resolved. “A military confrontation would just be losing all round. Both sides realise that,” said Robert Lowe of the Chatham House think tank. He said the solution had to be one where “neither side loses face”.
One experienced source who has dealt with Iran in the past expects the hostages to be released after a week to 10 days, but he said that was likely only if Britain relaxed its pressure. “They will not want to be seen to be reacting to anything we are saying or doing,” he said.
A rescue attempt, if successful, would be hugely popular in Britain and might restore Blair’s tattered image in America. “There are plans being made [for a possible rescue],” one senior British source acknowledged. But it is not even clear where the sailors are being held.
Nor is history on the prime minister’s side. A US attempt to rescue embassy hostages in Iran in 1980 ended in a fiasco of colliding aircraft in the desert. Those hostages were held for 444 days.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Saudis propose Middle East peace plan
Will be interesting to keep an eye on this one. It certainly makes an interesting contrast with the three no's of the Khartoum Resolution. And as the article hints, Saudi fear of Iran is at least as much behind this as any desire for a lasting resolution with Israel. If they don't lead the Arab world, the Persians might.
------------
Accept peace plan or face war, Israel told
Telegraph
28/03/2007
The "lords of war" will decide Israel's future if it rejects a blueprint for peace crafted by the entire Arab world, Saudi Arabia's veteran foreign minister warned yesterday.
As leaders began gathering in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, for today's summit of the Arab League, Prince Saud al-Faisal told The Daily Telegraph that the Middle East risks perpetual conflict if the peace plan fails.
Under this Saudi-drafted proposal, every Arab country would formally recognise Israel in return for a withdrawal from all the land captured in the war of 1967.
This would entail a Palestinian state embracing the entire West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. Every Arab country will almost certainly endorse this blueprint when the Riyadh summit concludes tomorrow. Prince Saud said Israel should accept or reject this final offer.
"What we have the power to do in the Arab world, we think we have done," he said. "So now it is up to the other side because if you want peace, it is not enough for one side only to want it. Both sides must want it equally."
Speaking inside his whitewashed palace, surrounded by luxuriant lawns and manicured flower beds resembling a green oasis in the drabness of Riyadh, Prince Saud delivered an unequivocal warning to Israel.
"If Israel refuses, that means it doesn't want peace and it places everything back into the hands of fate. They will be putting their future not in the hands of the peacemakers but in the hands of the lords of war," he said.
Prince Saud dismissed any further diplomatic overtures towards Israel. "It has never been proven that reaching out to Israel achieves anything," he said.
"Other Arab countries have recognised Israel and what has that achieved?
"The largest Arab country, Egypt, recognised Israel and what was the result? Not one iota of change happened in the attitude of Israel towards peace."
Israel has numerous reservations about the Arab peace plan - which was previously proposed at a summit in 2002. Israel fears any hint that Palestinian refugees would have the right to return to their homes in the event of a peace settlement.
...
The menacing spectre of Iran, the rising Shia power with nuclear-tipped ambitions for regional dominance, looms large across the waters of the Gulf. Saudi Arabia is quietly moving to contain its bellicose neighbour. Prince Saud offered conciliatory words to Iran, laced with coded criticism.
more...
------------
Accept peace plan or face war, Israel told
Telegraph
28/03/2007
The "lords of war" will decide Israel's future if it rejects a blueprint for peace crafted by the entire Arab world, Saudi Arabia's veteran foreign minister warned yesterday.
As leaders began gathering in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, for today's summit of the Arab League, Prince Saud al-Faisal told The Daily Telegraph that the Middle East risks perpetual conflict if the peace plan fails.
Under this Saudi-drafted proposal, every Arab country would formally recognise Israel in return for a withdrawal from all the land captured in the war of 1967.
This would entail a Palestinian state embracing the entire West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. Every Arab country will almost certainly endorse this blueprint when the Riyadh summit concludes tomorrow. Prince Saud said Israel should accept or reject this final offer.
"What we have the power to do in the Arab world, we think we have done," he said. "So now it is up to the other side because if you want peace, it is not enough for one side only to want it. Both sides must want it equally."
Speaking inside his whitewashed palace, surrounded by luxuriant lawns and manicured flower beds resembling a green oasis in the drabness of Riyadh, Prince Saud delivered an unequivocal warning to Israel.
"If Israel refuses, that means it doesn't want peace and it places everything back into the hands of fate. They will be putting their future not in the hands of the peacemakers but in the hands of the lords of war," he said.
Prince Saud dismissed any further diplomatic overtures towards Israel. "It has never been proven that reaching out to Israel achieves anything," he said.
"Other Arab countries have recognised Israel and what has that achieved?
"The largest Arab country, Egypt, recognised Israel and what was the result? Not one iota of change happened in the attitude of Israel towards peace."
Israel has numerous reservations about the Arab peace plan - which was previously proposed at a summit in 2002. Israel fears any hint that Palestinian refugees would have the right to return to their homes in the event of a peace settlement.
...
The menacing spectre of Iran, the rising Shia power with nuclear-tipped ambitions for regional dominance, looms large across the waters of the Gulf. Saudi Arabia is quietly moving to contain its bellicose neighbour. Prince Saud offered conciliatory words to Iran, laced with coded criticism.
more...
Saturday, March 17, 2007
The Guardian's Simon Jenkins on The Guardian
This article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian is extraordinary.
I don't know sure what I'm more shocked by:
(1) That the Guardian ran a supplement that appeared to be it's own editorial but was in fact paid for by the Government.
or
(2) That the Guardian published an article by Jenkins on the same story where he effectively accuses his own newspaper of being an accesory to Government sleaze.
Here are the money quotes:
'Inducing newspapers to dress public relations as journalism in a ministerial spat with the Treasury is close to sleaze'
and
'None of the writers (nor The Guardian's readers) was told of this, or that their fees were being paid, in effect, by the Blair government. Some were given to understand that they were writing for The Observer.'
I don't know sure what I'm more shocked by:
(1) That the Guardian ran a supplement that appeared to be it's own editorial but was in fact paid for by the Government.
or
(2) That the Guardian published an article by Jenkins on the same story where he effectively accuses his own newspaper of being an accesory to Government sleaze.
Here are the money quotes:
'Inducing newspapers to dress public relations as journalism in a ministerial spat with the Treasury is close to sleaze'
and
'None of the writers (nor The Guardian's readers) was told of this, or that their fees were being paid, in effect, by the Blair government. Some were given to understand that they were writing for The Observer.'
Friday, March 09, 2007
How Diana died
Well said, Boris!
I'll come clean: I know exactly how Diana died
Boris Johnson
Telegraph Comment
08/03/2007
I'll come clean: I know exactly how Diana died
Boris Johnson
Telegraph Comment
08/03/2007
Thursday, March 08, 2007
In search of an Arab Schindler
Did anyone else know of the "104 labour and punishment camps built by the Nazis and their allies in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco"? I didn't till I read this book review:
In search of an Arab Schindler
The Sunday Times
February 25, 2007
Howard Jacobson
Review of:
Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands
by Robert Satloff
This book has a twofold ambition: first, to remind us that the Nazis and their collaborators exported their persecution of Jews to Arab north Africa; second, to find an Arab Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg who stood out against that persecution, and to have him honoured as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s monument to the Holocaust, where no Arab has yet been recognised. Thus it is not simply as a historian that Robert Satloff sets about raking through the ashes, but as a man on a mission of peace — to discover evidence of as much or as little humanity as it will take for all parties to Arab/Jewish hostilities over the past 60 years to feel better about one another.
Considering which, Among the Righteous is a surprisingly muted book — an act of gentlemanly civility amid the shouting that seems to concede its ineffectiveness almost before it starts. Indeed, so careful is Satloff not to raise our hopes that he dashes them before the opening sentence is cold on the page. “Did any Arabs,” he asks, in a diminuendo of expectation, “save any Jews during the Holocaust?” Do I hear a hundred, do I hear fifty, do I hear one?
It all but gives the game away. Whatever humanity he is going to find among those ashes, it won’t put the world to rights. Such realism is not a general reflection on the character of Arabs. Satloff has an axe to grind, but it is not that one. As the search progresses — from anecdote to official record to actual sites of recorded human kindness — we are not surprised to learn that Arabs behaved the way everyone behaves in time of war. Some were benevolent, some were brutes, some just looked the other way.
What makes it difficult for Satloff to return from his travels and researches with evidence more compelling than this is the silent world in which he is obliged to operate. A silence of general ignorance — for who now knows or recalls that the Holocaust extended its reach to Arab countries, or could name a single one of the 104 labour and punishment camps built by the Nazis and their allies in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, or has heard of the tombeaux , or torture tombs of Morocco, where Jews, under the supervision of Arab guards, were ordered to lie in their own waste for weeks on end? A silence of fading memory and disappearing witness. But above all a silence of refusal typified by the “forbidden room” of the library at the University of Jordan where Satloff did his doctoral research, and that contained books frowned upon by the ruling royal family. In the instance of Satloff’s search for evidence of Arab kindness to Jew, the “forbidden room” is Arab resolve to wipe every trace of the Holocaust from its consciousness. And if that means wiping out every trace of its own humanity to Jews caught up in the tragedy, so be it.
“Soon after 9/11,” Satloff writes — and it’s here that his nerves begin to fray — “I surveyed Holocaust and tolerance-related institutions and found that not a single module, text, or programme for Holocaust education existed in an Arab country, even within the context of studying 20th-century history, modern genocides, or tolerance education.” This is not Holocaust denial but Holocaust negation. Because, in Arab eyes, the Holocaust was deployed to legitimise Zionism and Zionism was the cause of the Arabs’ own “Catastrophe”, it had to be expunged. So much Satloff knew before he started on his trek to find his Arab Schindler. But what he had not prepared himself for was how deep this negation ran even away from official discourse, and how hard it was therefore going to be to find friends or relatives of a Righteous Arab prepared to acknowledge the good he’d done, let alone accept thanks for it.
Thus the desolating emptiness at the heart of Satloff’s quest. He hears stories of heroic generosity but the corroborations he seeks are walled up in that “forbidden room”. When he finally tracks down the grandson of Si Ali Sakkat, a Tunisian Arab of noble descent, who threw open his farm to a group of Jews fleeing a nearby labour camp, lodging, feeding and protecting them, he is warned not to discuss these actions in front of the present farm labourers, who “just would not understand”. Even when an acknowledgment of past helpfulness is made, it is accompanied by irritation, embarrassment, blankness. Our times have seen many examples of history airbrushing what it finds inconvenient. But things are terrible indeed when goodness itself becomes a guilty secret to be banished from our sight.
That no Arab might want to be honoured as Righteous in an Israeli memorial to the Holocaust Satloff knows and understands, but cannot quite bear to admit. In this, there is something of the Don Quixote about him, foisting a troublesome idealism on an unwilling world. And it would be ungenerous not to allow that he does, at the last, put together a modest collection of little, unnamed, unremembered acts of kindness and of love, even identifying, just about, a solitary Schindler — Khaled Abdelwahhab, a wealthy, hedonistic Tunisian, who spirited away a Jewish family and hid them, at great risk to himself, until the Germans left.
No less importantly, Satloff’s researches have played a part in getting the German government to agree compensation to survivors of almost 100 labour camps in Arab north Africa. Which is itself a contribution to our education into the “Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands”. But how long it will be before the Arab world accepts that it, too, was touched by the Holocaust — and by that I do not only mean catastrophically — and how long it will be before both sides accept that there is no hope of peace until each agrees to swim in the other’s past, is anybody’s guess. Among the Righteous taps politely on the door. But there is no answer from the “forbidden room”.
In search of an Arab Schindler
The Sunday Times
February 25, 2007
Howard Jacobson
Review of:
Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands
by Robert Satloff
This book has a twofold ambition: first, to remind us that the Nazis and their collaborators exported their persecution of Jews to Arab north Africa; second, to find an Arab Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg who stood out against that persecution, and to have him honoured as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s monument to the Holocaust, where no Arab has yet been recognised. Thus it is not simply as a historian that Robert Satloff sets about raking through the ashes, but as a man on a mission of peace — to discover evidence of as much or as little humanity as it will take for all parties to Arab/Jewish hostilities over the past 60 years to feel better about one another.
Considering which, Among the Righteous is a surprisingly muted book — an act of gentlemanly civility amid the shouting that seems to concede its ineffectiveness almost before it starts. Indeed, so careful is Satloff not to raise our hopes that he dashes them before the opening sentence is cold on the page. “Did any Arabs,” he asks, in a diminuendo of expectation, “save any Jews during the Holocaust?” Do I hear a hundred, do I hear fifty, do I hear one?
It all but gives the game away. Whatever humanity he is going to find among those ashes, it won’t put the world to rights. Such realism is not a general reflection on the character of Arabs. Satloff has an axe to grind, but it is not that one. As the search progresses — from anecdote to official record to actual sites of recorded human kindness — we are not surprised to learn that Arabs behaved the way everyone behaves in time of war. Some were benevolent, some were brutes, some just looked the other way.
What makes it difficult for Satloff to return from his travels and researches with evidence more compelling than this is the silent world in which he is obliged to operate. A silence of general ignorance — for who now knows or recalls that the Holocaust extended its reach to Arab countries, or could name a single one of the 104 labour and punishment camps built by the Nazis and their allies in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, or has heard of the tombeaux , or torture tombs of Morocco, where Jews, under the supervision of Arab guards, were ordered to lie in their own waste for weeks on end? A silence of fading memory and disappearing witness. But above all a silence of refusal typified by the “forbidden room” of the library at the University of Jordan where Satloff did his doctoral research, and that contained books frowned upon by the ruling royal family. In the instance of Satloff’s search for evidence of Arab kindness to Jew, the “forbidden room” is Arab resolve to wipe every trace of the Holocaust from its consciousness. And if that means wiping out every trace of its own humanity to Jews caught up in the tragedy, so be it.
“Soon after 9/11,” Satloff writes — and it’s here that his nerves begin to fray — “I surveyed Holocaust and tolerance-related institutions and found that not a single module, text, or programme for Holocaust education existed in an Arab country, even within the context of studying 20th-century history, modern genocides, or tolerance education.” This is not Holocaust denial but Holocaust negation. Because, in Arab eyes, the Holocaust was deployed to legitimise Zionism and Zionism was the cause of the Arabs’ own “Catastrophe”, it had to be expunged. So much Satloff knew before he started on his trek to find his Arab Schindler. But what he had not prepared himself for was how deep this negation ran even away from official discourse, and how hard it was therefore going to be to find friends or relatives of a Righteous Arab prepared to acknowledge the good he’d done, let alone accept thanks for it.
Thus the desolating emptiness at the heart of Satloff’s quest. He hears stories of heroic generosity but the corroborations he seeks are walled up in that “forbidden room”. When he finally tracks down the grandson of Si Ali Sakkat, a Tunisian Arab of noble descent, who threw open his farm to a group of Jews fleeing a nearby labour camp, lodging, feeding and protecting them, he is warned not to discuss these actions in front of the present farm labourers, who “just would not understand”. Even when an acknowledgment of past helpfulness is made, it is accompanied by irritation, embarrassment, blankness. Our times have seen many examples of history airbrushing what it finds inconvenient. But things are terrible indeed when goodness itself becomes a guilty secret to be banished from our sight.
That no Arab might want to be honoured as Righteous in an Israeli memorial to the Holocaust Satloff knows and understands, but cannot quite bear to admit. In this, there is something of the Don Quixote about him, foisting a troublesome idealism on an unwilling world. And it would be ungenerous not to allow that he does, at the last, put together a modest collection of little, unnamed, unremembered acts of kindness and of love, even identifying, just about, a solitary Schindler — Khaled Abdelwahhab, a wealthy, hedonistic Tunisian, who spirited away a Jewish family and hid them, at great risk to himself, until the Germans left.
No less importantly, Satloff’s researches have played a part in getting the German government to agree compensation to survivors of almost 100 labour camps in Arab north Africa. Which is itself a contribution to our education into the “Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands”. But how long it will be before the Arab world accepts that it, too, was touched by the Holocaust — and by that I do not only mean catastrophically — and how long it will be before both sides accept that there is no hope of peace until each agrees to swim in the other’s past, is anybody’s guess. Among the Righteous taps politely on the door. But there is no answer from the “forbidden room”.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Is The Guardian institutionally racist? Theodore Dalrymple
Brilliantly and humourously argued.
Is The Guardian institutionally racist?
Theodore Dalrymple
Social Affairs Unit
23/09/05
Is The Guardian - the best newspaper in Britain - institutionally racist? Alas, I think the answer must be a resounding Yes.
I had long had the impression that blacks were over-represented in photographs published in the newspaper by comparison with people from the Indian subcontinent or with the Chinese, and I tested the accuracy of my impression by counting the photographs in the edition of 19th September 2005.
There was only one photograph of an Indian, and that was in a commercial advertisement, over the content of which The Guardian, presumably, had little or no control. By contrast, there were 26 photographs of blacks. Surely this was a discrepancy that could not have arisen by chance, and is proof positive of a systematic bias amounting to racism. After all, there are more people of South Asian descent in Britain than of African and West Indian descent, and yet Indians were the subjects of fewer than 4 per cent of all the photographs of ethnic minorities to appear in the newspaper.
How are we to explain this? Does it mean that The Guardian, if it systematically ignores Indians, harbours specially friendly feelings towards blacks? By no means: I think the most likely explanation is quite otherwise. I admit that my hypothesis cannot be proved and is somewhat speculative, but I think it is more plausible than the alternatives.
The people who run and write The Guardian have deep, suppressed and subliminal doubts about the equality of human races. To prove to themselves that they do not have such doubts, they overcompensate by publishing as many photographs of blacks as possible in their pages.
They don't have any such doubts with regard to the Indians and the Chinese. Moreover, these two groups have a horrible and fatal vice, as far as the mindset of The Guardian and its readers is concerned: grosso modo, these two groups can shift for themselves, and require no help from the coalition of intellectuals, moral entrepreneurs and bureaucrats in order to thrive. On the contrary, they are well on the way to outstripping the white population in achievement, thus demonstrating the redundancy of that coalition.
By contrast, blacks are regarded in the pages of The Guardian much as conservationists regard endangered species, in need of special protection. They therefore represent a goldmine for the coalition.
No doubt my hypothesis will be regarded as far-fetched by some, and founded on the spurious assumption that the numbers of photographs in a newspaper can tell you something important about the views and feelings of those who write and publish it. But in essence I am only applying to them the methods and arguments they so easily, frequently and earnestly apply to others.
more...
Is The Guardian institutionally racist?
Theodore Dalrymple
Social Affairs Unit
23/09/05
Is The Guardian - the best newspaper in Britain - institutionally racist? Alas, I think the answer must be a resounding Yes.
I had long had the impression that blacks were over-represented in photographs published in the newspaper by comparison with people from the Indian subcontinent or with the Chinese, and I tested the accuracy of my impression by counting the photographs in the edition of 19th September 2005.
There was only one photograph of an Indian, and that was in a commercial advertisement, over the content of which The Guardian, presumably, had little or no control. By contrast, there were 26 photographs of blacks. Surely this was a discrepancy that could not have arisen by chance, and is proof positive of a systematic bias amounting to racism. After all, there are more people of South Asian descent in Britain than of African and West Indian descent, and yet Indians were the subjects of fewer than 4 per cent of all the photographs of ethnic minorities to appear in the newspaper.
How are we to explain this? Does it mean that The Guardian, if it systematically ignores Indians, harbours specially friendly feelings towards blacks? By no means: I think the most likely explanation is quite otherwise. I admit that my hypothesis cannot be proved and is somewhat speculative, but I think it is more plausible than the alternatives.
The people who run and write The Guardian have deep, suppressed and subliminal doubts about the equality of human races. To prove to themselves that they do not have such doubts, they overcompensate by publishing as many photographs of blacks as possible in their pages.
They don't have any such doubts with regard to the Indians and the Chinese. Moreover, these two groups have a horrible and fatal vice, as far as the mindset of The Guardian and its readers is concerned: grosso modo, these two groups can shift for themselves, and require no help from the coalition of intellectuals, moral entrepreneurs and bureaucrats in order to thrive. On the contrary, they are well on the way to outstripping the white population in achievement, thus demonstrating the redundancy of that coalition.
By contrast, blacks are regarded in the pages of The Guardian much as conservationists regard endangered species, in need of special protection. They therefore represent a goldmine for the coalition.
No doubt my hypothesis will be regarded as far-fetched by some, and founded on the spurious assumption that the numbers of photographs in a newspaper can tell you something important about the views and feelings of those who write and publish it. But in essence I am only applying to them the methods and arguments they so easily, frequently and earnestly apply to others.
more...
Friday, March 02, 2007
Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel
This is simply one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Got through it in a weekend, absolutely unputdownable. Get it, read it, buy copies and distribute them:
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Here she and her book are the subject of an Observer feature, and some interesting stuff comes out about a debate she had with Tariq Ramadan (some more links at the end).
---------------------------------
Taking the fight to Islam
Sunday February 4, 2007
The Observer
...
Strictly speaking Hirsi Ali is not an infidel but an apostate, a designation that in the Koran warrants the punishment of death. The distinction is not without significance. In a poll published last week, one in three British Muslims in the 16-24 age group agreed that 'Muslim conversion is forbidden and punishable by death'.
This figure comes as no surprise to Hirsi Ali. She argues that Europe's determination to maintain cultural difference will lead increasing numbers of alienated Muslims to seek the unambiguity of fundamentalism. Liberals, she says, have shirked the responsibility of making the case for their own beliefs. They need to start speaking out in favour of the values of secular humanism. And they need to make clear that they are not compatible with religious bigotry and superstition. 'You have to say that if you want the Prophet Muhammad to be your moral guide in the 21st century and you are aware of the choices the Prophet Muhammad made towards unbelievers, women, homosexuals, do you really think you're going to succeed? You will get into some sort of cognitive dissonance if you at the same time want to adapt to a life here.'
Without an open and robust critique of the nature of the prophet's teachings, she goes on, 'these clerics proselytising radical Islam make much, much more sense. Because the radical Muslims say that democracy is bad, and the young Muslim mind says "Why is it bad?". Because the Koran says it's bad. That makes more sense than democracy is good, the rights of individuals must be observed but you can also hang on to what the Koran says. I say stop that and appeal to and challenge young minds.'
When it comes to words, Hirsi Ali is not one to look for the mincer. She speaks in a language that makes no concessions to the softening euphemisms of political correctness. Those immersed in circumspection and ever vigilant to the contemporary sin of offence are bound to ask themselves if she's allowed to say what she says. In this respect her predicament is reminiscent of the moment in Basic Instinct when Sharon Stone lights a cigarette under interrogation in a police station. She's told that's it's non-smoking environment and she replies: 'So arrest me.' Hirsi Ali's life is already in jeopardy. She's long past the point of polite restraint.
Some observers find her forthright approach refreshing and, indeed, intoxicating, but many recoil from her unadorned conviction. Writing in the New York Review of Books, the historian Timothy Garton Ash described Hirsi Ali as a 'slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist'. Last year when Garton Ash chaired a discussion with Hirsi Ali at the ICA, he seemed both to admire the incisiveness of her quietly spoken logic and to wince at its unshakeable conclusions.
'For him,' Hirsi Ali laughs, 'the Enlightenment is complex. For me, it isn't. There's nothing complex about it.' A student of 17th- and 18th-century political ideas, she doesn't mean that she thinks the Enlightenment was some kind of uniform philosophical movement. The simplicity, for her, is the legacy of the Enlightenment, the things we take for granted about Western sociopolitical culture: the rule of law, the rights of the individual, freedom of expression. To Hirsi Ali these are bedrock precepts that should not be compromised in the name of cultural diversity.
Most of the political classes would agree with her in principle but like to take a more nuanced, and often evasive, stance in practice. She was one of the few intellectuals, for example, who rushed to support the Danes in the cartoon crisis last year. If you believe in the right of freedom of expression, she says, you have to defend that right. In a debate a few years back, Hirsi Ali challenged the Swiss Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan, something of a poster boy for the multicultural left, to be more consistent and clear-cut in what he said. Was the Koran the word of God or a man-made text that was out of date? Ramadan responded by questioning Hirsi Ali's adversarial style. 'The question,' he said, 'is whether you want to change the mentality or please the audience.'
Does her bald delivery not further alienate Muslims, forcing them to cling to traditional values? Hirsi Ali is too smooth of skin and composure to bristle, but it is obviously an accusation she finds irritating.
'Tariq Ramadan is filled with contempt for Muslims because he believes they have no faculties of reason,' she replies in a beguilingly friendly tone, as though she had remarked that he had an excellent taste in shirts. 'If I say that terrorism is created in the name of Islam suddenly they take up terrorism? He gives me so much more power than I have. Why don't my remarks make him turn to terrorism? Because he's above that. Like many believers in multiculturalism, he puts himself on a higher plane. The other thing is that it's not about your style, it's about your content. Are my propositions right or wrong? Is it social, cultural and religious beliefs that cause economic backwardness or is it the other way round? My take on this is the cultural and religious elements are far more important to look at. That is what we should be looking at and not how I say it.'
All the same, it's fair to say that her audience is made up largely of white liberal males, rather than the Muslim women she wishes to liberate. In Holland, a female Muslim politician named Fatima Elatik told me: 'She's appealing to Dutch society, to middle-class Dutch-origin people. She talks about the emancipation of women but you can't push it down their that you didn't bring John Stuart Mill and left us only with the Koran. It doesn't help to say my forefathers oppressed your forefathers, and remain guilty forever.'throats. If I could talk to her, I would tell her that she needs to get a couple of Muslim women around her.'
Hirsi Ali dismisses this as 'a very silly remark. I started off in a position where none of these women were visible anyway except as proxies to be put forward to get subsidies from the government. Just keep singing we're discriminated against. No Muslim women are allowed into this debate by their own groups. So it's way too early. By the time these women are assertive enough, I won't be around. It will be one generation on.'
She also argues that it's important to address white liberals because they need to overcome the self-censoring effects of post-colonial guilt. 'If you want to feel guilty,' snaps Hirsi Ali, 'feel guilty
There is no zealot like the convert, goes the old saying, and many commentators have concluded that Hirsi Ali is a prime secular example. 'In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals,' wrote Garton Ash, 'she has gone from one extreme to the other'. The word on Hirsi Ali is that she is 'traumatised' by her upbringing and her subsequent adoption of a Western lifestyle. It's the word that Ian Buruma uses to describe her condition in his book Murder In Amsterdam.
Needless to say, she finds this appraisal of her ideas patronising. It was, she says, partly in an effort to combat this impression that she wrote Infidel. 'People can see that there is not much trauma in my story.'
That depends on what you think constitutes trauma. The account of being held down by the legs, aged five, and having her clitoris and inner labia cut off with a pair of scissors will certainly alarm many readers. 'I heard it,' she writes, 'like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat.' The fierce beatings she receives at the hands of her embittered mother, and the fractured skull inflicted on her by a brutal religious teacher, these too would leave psychological scars on most of us.
But as Hirsi Ali writes, they were normal events in her childhood and in the lives of people she knew. Death and illness were commonplace in Africa, and by African standards she lived well. There is nothing melodramatic in Hirsi Ali's prose. It's matter-of-fact and also, as she is quick to point out, entirely subjective. It's possible, she says, that her family will remember things differently. 'But it's my story and if you undertake such an endeavour you have to be honest. Usually people make excuses for their culture and family etcetera. I could tell the story that we in the Third World have things that the West could learn from, which is obviously true, but that isn't what I wanted to show. My argument is that western liberal culture is superior to Islamic tribal group culture.'
...
Hirsi Ali, say her opponents, is an arch exponent of Islamophobia. One such critic has written a stinging attack on Hirsi Ali in this month's Times Literary Supplement. Maria Golia, an Egyptian-based academic, writes: 'Hirsi Ali seems far more interested in indicting Islam than helping damaged women, whose horror stories she conveniently trots out whenever she needs to bludgeon home a point.'
She takes Hirsi Ali to task on female genital mutilation which, she points out, is not an Islamic practice. Hirsi Ali wanted the Dutch government to institute medical checks on young girls in vulnerable circumstances. Golia calls the idea 'institutionalised violence' and prefers an approach that 'requires understanding of context and coalition-building, not to mention compassion and subtlety'.
It should be said that in Infidel Hirsi Ali specifically states that FGM predates Islam, is not limited to Islam and that it is not practised in many Islamic countries. However, she adds, it is very often 'justified in the name of Islam'. Indeed one need only look at the advice of the leading Egyptian cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is considered one of the most influential scholars in Islam. Qaradawi has been promoted by London mayor Ken Livingstone as a moderate voice, but on his Islam-online website he writes of female circumcision: 'Anyhow, it is not obligatory, whoever finds it serving the interest of his daughters should do it, and I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world.'
She characterises the manner in which liberals sidestep such details as a confusion of facts and strategy. 'Some people will accept that Islam is backward but they're not going to say that because Muslims will be offended. "We want them to become liberals, so we're just going to trick them into a secular humanistic way of thinking."' At this she lets out a giggle, as if tickled by the absurdity of the idea. 'But people are aware of what's going on. That's why many Muslims are suspicious of liberals. Because they know they are not being taken seriously.'
Perhaps a more telling symbol of the growing cultural gap between mainstream Western society and doctrinaire Islam is the veil. Again Hirsi Ali does not look around for a fence to sit on. 'The veil,' she says, 'is to show that women are responsible for the sexual self-control of men.' It's a surgical observation, cutting right through to the bone of the issue. She goes on to note that in all communities where the veil is actively observed boys are not taught to restrain themselves. 'They look upon all those who are not veiled as women who are looking for sexual contact and they just go about molesting and being a nuisance.'
But what about those women who say that the veil has nothing to do with sex, that is a demonstration of their love of Allah. 'That is a very small group of women?' But are you to deny them their right to dress as they please? 'No,' she insists, 'I don't want to deny them that and I don't want anyone to deny them that.'
Her solution is secular civic space - for example in schools and government offices - in which all religion is removed. The French model then? That's hardly been a great success. 'It's never been tried,' she counters. 'The French have voiced it but never implemented it. They've created these zones outside Paris where people from Third World countries are put together and excluded from the secular neutral model. They've preached secular Republicanism and practised multiculturalism, that's the whole French hypocrisy.'
...
But of course in voicing her opinion in the style she does, she risks lumping together over a billion people from different nations, cultures and traditions as a single 'problem'. For Hirsi Ali, the problem is one of self-definition. If Muslims want to assert a religious text as the basis of their public identity, then they have to accept public debate of that text and its ideas with all the discomfort and offence that may involve.
---------------------------------
More on Ali v Tariq Ramadan
Lessons from the Cold War about reforming Islam
pulpmovies.com
Sunday 25 Jun 2006
Muslim pundits clash over future of Islam in Europe
FT
June 17 2006
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Here she and her book are the subject of an Observer feature, and some interesting stuff comes out about a debate she had with Tariq Ramadan (some more links at the end).
---------------------------------
Taking the fight to Islam
Sunday February 4, 2007
The Observer
...
Strictly speaking Hirsi Ali is not an infidel but an apostate, a designation that in the Koran warrants the punishment of death. The distinction is not without significance. In a poll published last week, one in three British Muslims in the 16-24 age group agreed that 'Muslim conversion is forbidden and punishable by death'.
This figure comes as no surprise to Hirsi Ali. She argues that Europe's determination to maintain cultural difference will lead increasing numbers of alienated Muslims to seek the unambiguity of fundamentalism. Liberals, she says, have shirked the responsibility of making the case for their own beliefs. They need to start speaking out in favour of the values of secular humanism. And they need to make clear that they are not compatible with religious bigotry and superstition. 'You have to say that if you want the Prophet Muhammad to be your moral guide in the 21st century and you are aware of the choices the Prophet Muhammad made towards unbelievers, women, homosexuals, do you really think you're going to succeed? You will get into some sort of cognitive dissonance if you at the same time want to adapt to a life here.'
Without an open and robust critique of the nature of the prophet's teachings, she goes on, 'these clerics proselytising radical Islam make much, much more sense. Because the radical Muslims say that democracy is bad, and the young Muslim mind says "Why is it bad?". Because the Koran says it's bad. That makes more sense than democracy is good, the rights of individuals must be observed but you can also hang on to what the Koran says. I say stop that and appeal to and challenge young minds.'
When it comes to words, Hirsi Ali is not one to look for the mincer. She speaks in a language that makes no concessions to the softening euphemisms of political correctness. Those immersed in circumspection and ever vigilant to the contemporary sin of offence are bound to ask themselves if she's allowed to say what she says. In this respect her predicament is reminiscent of the moment in Basic Instinct when Sharon Stone lights a cigarette under interrogation in a police station. She's told that's it's non-smoking environment and she replies: 'So arrest me.' Hirsi Ali's life is already in jeopardy. She's long past the point of polite restraint.
Some observers find her forthright approach refreshing and, indeed, intoxicating, but many recoil from her unadorned conviction. Writing in the New York Review of Books, the historian Timothy Garton Ash described Hirsi Ali as a 'slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist'. Last year when Garton Ash chaired a discussion with Hirsi Ali at the ICA, he seemed both to admire the incisiveness of her quietly spoken logic and to wince at its unshakeable conclusions.
'For him,' Hirsi Ali laughs, 'the Enlightenment is complex. For me, it isn't. There's nothing complex about it.' A student of 17th- and 18th-century political ideas, she doesn't mean that she thinks the Enlightenment was some kind of uniform philosophical movement. The simplicity, for her, is the legacy of the Enlightenment, the things we take for granted about Western sociopolitical culture: the rule of law, the rights of the individual, freedom of expression. To Hirsi Ali these are bedrock precepts that should not be compromised in the name of cultural diversity.
Most of the political classes would agree with her in principle but like to take a more nuanced, and often evasive, stance in practice. She was one of the few intellectuals, for example, who rushed to support the Danes in the cartoon crisis last year. If you believe in the right of freedom of expression, she says, you have to defend that right. In a debate a few years back, Hirsi Ali challenged the Swiss Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan, something of a poster boy for the multicultural left, to be more consistent and clear-cut in what he said. Was the Koran the word of God or a man-made text that was out of date? Ramadan responded by questioning Hirsi Ali's adversarial style. 'The question,' he said, 'is whether you want to change the mentality or please the audience.'
Does her bald delivery not further alienate Muslims, forcing them to cling to traditional values? Hirsi Ali is too smooth of skin and composure to bristle, but it is obviously an accusation she finds irritating.
'Tariq Ramadan is filled with contempt for Muslims because he believes they have no faculties of reason,' she replies in a beguilingly friendly tone, as though she had remarked that he had an excellent taste in shirts. 'If I say that terrorism is created in the name of Islam suddenly they take up terrorism? He gives me so much more power than I have. Why don't my remarks make him turn to terrorism? Because he's above that. Like many believers in multiculturalism, he puts himself on a higher plane. The other thing is that it's not about your style, it's about your content. Are my propositions right or wrong? Is it social, cultural and religious beliefs that cause economic backwardness or is it the other way round? My take on this is the cultural and religious elements are far more important to look at. That is what we should be looking at and not how I say it.'
All the same, it's fair to say that her audience is made up largely of white liberal males, rather than the Muslim women she wishes to liberate. In Holland, a female Muslim politician named Fatima Elatik told me: 'She's appealing to Dutch society, to middle-class Dutch-origin people. She talks about the emancipation of women but you can't push it down their that you didn't bring John Stuart Mill and left us only with the Koran. It doesn't help to say my forefathers oppressed your forefathers, and remain guilty forever.'throats. If I could talk to her, I would tell her that she needs to get a couple of Muslim women around her.'
Hirsi Ali dismisses this as 'a very silly remark. I started off in a position where none of these women were visible anyway except as proxies to be put forward to get subsidies from the government. Just keep singing we're discriminated against. No Muslim women are allowed into this debate by their own groups. So it's way too early. By the time these women are assertive enough, I won't be around. It will be one generation on.'
She also argues that it's important to address white liberals because they need to overcome the self-censoring effects of post-colonial guilt. 'If you want to feel guilty,' snaps Hirsi Ali, 'feel guilty
There is no zealot like the convert, goes the old saying, and many commentators have concluded that Hirsi Ali is a prime secular example. 'In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals,' wrote Garton Ash, 'she has gone from one extreme to the other'. The word on Hirsi Ali is that she is 'traumatised' by her upbringing and her subsequent adoption of a Western lifestyle. It's the word that Ian Buruma uses to describe her condition in his book Murder In Amsterdam.
Needless to say, she finds this appraisal of her ideas patronising. It was, she says, partly in an effort to combat this impression that she wrote Infidel. 'People can see that there is not much trauma in my story.'
That depends on what you think constitutes trauma. The account of being held down by the legs, aged five, and having her clitoris and inner labia cut off with a pair of scissors will certainly alarm many readers. 'I heard it,' she writes, 'like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat.' The fierce beatings she receives at the hands of her embittered mother, and the fractured skull inflicted on her by a brutal religious teacher, these too would leave psychological scars on most of us.
But as Hirsi Ali writes, they were normal events in her childhood and in the lives of people she knew. Death and illness were commonplace in Africa, and by African standards she lived well. There is nothing melodramatic in Hirsi Ali's prose. It's matter-of-fact and also, as she is quick to point out, entirely subjective. It's possible, she says, that her family will remember things differently. 'But it's my story and if you undertake such an endeavour you have to be honest. Usually people make excuses for their culture and family etcetera. I could tell the story that we in the Third World have things that the West could learn from, which is obviously true, but that isn't what I wanted to show. My argument is that western liberal culture is superior to Islamic tribal group culture.'
...
Hirsi Ali, say her opponents, is an arch exponent of Islamophobia. One such critic has written a stinging attack on Hirsi Ali in this month's Times Literary Supplement. Maria Golia, an Egyptian-based academic, writes: 'Hirsi Ali seems far more interested in indicting Islam than helping damaged women, whose horror stories she conveniently trots out whenever she needs to bludgeon home a point.'
She takes Hirsi Ali to task on female genital mutilation which, she points out, is not an Islamic practice. Hirsi Ali wanted the Dutch government to institute medical checks on young girls in vulnerable circumstances. Golia calls the idea 'institutionalised violence' and prefers an approach that 'requires understanding of context and coalition-building, not to mention compassion and subtlety'.
It should be said that in Infidel Hirsi Ali specifically states that FGM predates Islam, is not limited to Islam and that it is not practised in many Islamic countries. However, she adds, it is very often 'justified in the name of Islam'. Indeed one need only look at the advice of the leading Egyptian cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is considered one of the most influential scholars in Islam. Qaradawi has been promoted by London mayor Ken Livingstone as a moderate voice, but on his Islam-online website he writes of female circumcision: 'Anyhow, it is not obligatory, whoever finds it serving the interest of his daughters should do it, and I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world.'
She characterises the manner in which liberals sidestep such details as a confusion of facts and strategy. 'Some people will accept that Islam is backward but they're not going to say that because Muslims will be offended. "We want them to become liberals, so we're just going to trick them into a secular humanistic way of thinking."' At this she lets out a giggle, as if tickled by the absurdity of the idea. 'But people are aware of what's going on. That's why many Muslims are suspicious of liberals. Because they know they are not being taken seriously.'
Perhaps a more telling symbol of the growing cultural gap between mainstream Western society and doctrinaire Islam is the veil. Again Hirsi Ali does not look around for a fence to sit on. 'The veil,' she says, 'is to show that women are responsible for the sexual self-control of men.' It's a surgical observation, cutting right through to the bone of the issue. She goes on to note that in all communities where the veil is actively observed boys are not taught to restrain themselves. 'They look upon all those who are not veiled as women who are looking for sexual contact and they just go about molesting and being a nuisance.'
But what about those women who say that the veil has nothing to do with sex, that is a demonstration of their love of Allah. 'That is a very small group of women?' But are you to deny them their right to dress as they please? 'No,' she insists, 'I don't want to deny them that and I don't want anyone to deny them that.'
Her solution is secular civic space - for example in schools and government offices - in which all religion is removed. The French model then? That's hardly been a great success. 'It's never been tried,' she counters. 'The French have voiced it but never implemented it. They've created these zones outside Paris where people from Third World countries are put together and excluded from the secular neutral model. They've preached secular Republicanism and practised multiculturalism, that's the whole French hypocrisy.'
...
But of course in voicing her opinion in the style she does, she risks lumping together over a billion people from different nations, cultures and traditions as a single 'problem'. For Hirsi Ali, the problem is one of self-definition. If Muslims want to assert a religious text as the basis of their public identity, then they have to accept public debate of that text and its ideas with all the discomfort and offence that may involve.
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More on Ali v Tariq Ramadan
Lessons from the Cold War about reforming Islam
pulpmovies.com
Sunday 25 Jun 2006
Muslim pundits clash over future of Islam in Europe
FT
June 17 2006
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