the killing? The odd thing about the conversation is that I could tell it was the first time he had even heard the alternative argument.
This extremism can be defeated. But it will be defeated only by recognising that we have not created it; it cannot be negotiated with; pandering to its sense of grievance will only encourage it; and only by confronting it, the methods and the ideas, will we win.
ly over the years; the accidental endorsement in the Guardian [by Timothy Garton Ash] of the great-uncle who finds something admirable in the September 11 attacks–what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?
Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.
full of time-travelling wasps the size of a billionth of an electron and you get some kind of an idea of it.
How to prove the existence of the Werninghaus Meson? – what physicists are already calling, no really this one definitely is the God particle. A much larger, more expensive piece of equipment will be required, this time the size of the M25, and engineered to one billion-billionth of a metre’s accuracy. It’ll provide employment for a whole new generation of physicists wandering around underground in white coats clutching clipboards like in all those Bond films.
Perched on plywood seats at long Formica tables, earnest young researchers swig beer and argue over the minutiae of particle physics. As the LHC reaches readiness, the air of expectation is palpable.
“In a way we are in a perfect situation,” says Dr Jo Cole of Britain’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and a leading worker in the CMS experiment hall.
“Either we prove the theoreticians are right and help in the garnering of Nobel prizes. Or we will show they were wrong. We will have found something else that is new and exciting, and will have overturned accepted science.”
The intriguing point is that most Cern scientists, if given the choice, would probably plump for the “wrong” scenario. Yes, it would be great to beat the Americans to the Higgs, but it would be even better if Cern found that Higgs did not exist at all, or that it came with a whole new class of sister particles that had never been predicted by theorists.
You see? They can’t lose. It’s a scam.
Says Evans: “I will happily bet a month’s salary, which admittedly is not very much, that we will have thrown up whole new fields of physics within two years of switching on the LHC.”
It’s not a machine for discovering truths about the universe: it’s a machine for generating employment for physicists. And the guy’s even got the nerve to drop in a complaint about his salary.
[On a similar theme, here’s what I wrote a while back.]
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Kamal Labwani, accused of contacts with the United States, was sentenced to 12 years in jail, the harshest sentence since Bashar Al Assad took power.
Update: here’s Barry Rubin on Syrian foreign policy (via Michael J. Totten):
In the Middle East, violence is not the result of poor communication but a tool for political gain. Nothing proves that point better than Syria’s successful use of violence and terrorism to promote its interests. No amount of dialogue is going to change that reality.
Now Syria is using a Palestinian front group to start a war inside Lebanon, just as it employed another Lebanese client organization, Hezbollah, to battle Israel last year. The Syrian government’s message is simple: Lebanon will know no peace until it again becomes our satellite.
In two years, 15 major terrorist attacks targeted Lebanon’s independent-minded leaders. Most notorious was the assassination of popular former prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005, which also killed 21 bystanders…
What is less understood is how the regime’s radical strategy is used at home and why this makes it impossible to gain anything from engaging with Syria. Like other Middle Eastern dictatorships, Syria’s rulers face a paradox. How to stay in power after failing so completely? The economy is a mess, there is little freedom, and the regime is dominated by a small Alawite minority which is historically secular.
Since taking power in 2000 on his father’s death, Bashar has met this challenge. He sends terrorists against Iraq, Israel, Lebanon and even the U.S. military, but nobody retaliates in kind against him. At home, the regime sounds increasingly Islamist; abroad it is the biggest sponsor of radical Islamist groups in the region.
Bashar has even declared a new doctrine he calls “Resistance,” which combines Arab nationalism and Islamism. The West’s goal, he claims, is to enslave the Arabs. The mistake made by other Arabs was to abandon war. “The world will not be concerned with us and our interests, feelings, and rights unless we are powerful,” and victory requires “adventure and recklessness.” Any who disagree are mere “political mercenaries” and “parasites.”
This mandatory radicalism ensures that Syria interprets western concessions and confidence-building measures as acts of surrender, proving its strategy is working. Years of dialogue and numerous visits by secretaries of state could not even get Syria to close the terrorist offices in Damascus, much less make any policy changes.
Anwar al-Bunni, a democratic dissident, explained in 2003 that the only thing that held back the regime was fear of America. It was only due to “the fright it gave our rulers, that we reformers stand a chance here.”
But once U.S. members of Congress flocked to Damascus, offering words of praise and advocating detente, Bunni was proven right. He was sentenced on trumped-up charges to five years’ imprisonment.
From a Time article on the potential dangers of herbal supplements:
Researchers found that the most common mistake users of herbal remedies make is believing that the substances they take actually work.
Well yes. Otherwise, you know, they probably wouldn’t bother taking them.
issue bores right to the heart of the mission of Arab journalism and the self-identity of those who practice it.
That was vividly apparent at a one-day workshop on the crisis organized by the International Crisis Group and hosted by the Center for Electronic Journalism at The American University in Cairo in April this year and it was evident again, two weeks later, at the 2007 Arab Broadcast Forum, the annual gathering of Arab television executives.
The central issue: “The Arabs see the victims are not Arabs, and we don’t care,” Khaled Ewais, Al Arabiya’s political producer, told the Cairo gathering, which brought together reporters and editors from across the Arab world. Fayez el Sheikh Saleik, Khartoum correspondent of Al-Hayat, concurred: “Sudan is a marginal country when it comes to the Arab region.”
Some pointed to an even more insidious issue: In other regional conflicts, Arabs are the victims. In Darfur, Arab militias are the perpetrators. That’s not a popular topic.
“The media are directly responsible for this crisis,” an angry representative of the Liberation Front of Darfur told those assembled in Cairo. While few of the journalists were willing to go quite that far, there was widespread acknowledgement that Darfur has been the biggest untold story of the Arab world.
Mine’s bigger than yours! In Incheon, South Korea, they’re planning a pair of new world-beating towers – but they’re not the only ones thinking tall:
On a stretch of reclaimed land, near where Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s forces came ashore during the Korean War, this city will build a towering monument to its rising ambitions: twin skyscrapers reaching 2,013 feet into the sky, higher than the tallest building in the world today.
Developers in neighboring Seoul responded by increasing the height of a skyscraper they were planning by 66 feet. In December, the chief of a Seoul ward announced an even more grandiose plan to erect a 220-story building that, at almost 3,200 feet, would be twice as high as the Sears Tower in Chicago.
Incheon and Seoul are part of one of the biggest booms in tall-building construction since the skyscraper appeared more than a century ago, a rush spreading from established tower magnets like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai and Hong Kong to lesser-known cities across fast-rising East Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Awash with cash from South Korea’s economic takeoff, Incheon and Seoul are being joined in the building rush by Busan, which also plans two skyscrapers of more than 100 stories. In the Middle East, Mecca and Doha are building soaring new towers. So are a half dozen lesser-known cities in China, including Tianjin, Guangzhou and Wenzhou. Experts say the next wave of skyscraper proposals could come from economically booming India.
Here’s a comparison with the current high-rises.
Other skyscraping proposals – apart from the Burj Dubai, where they’re not revealing the height until completion in the hope of frustrating possible rivals – include the Shanghai World Financial Centre, the Freedom Tower in New York, the Chicago Spire, the Mubarak al-Kabir Tower in Kuwait, and the Port Tower Complex in Karachi.
Top of the world though is…London! Tower Hamlets, in fact. Populararchitecture have proposed a mile-high tower capable of holding 100,000 people. I wouldn’t hold your breath, mind. Here’s a more realistic summary of what London is actually going to get in terms of new high-rises.
A small ray of light in an otherwise dismal story:
A Libyan court has dismissed defamation charges against five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor already sentenced to death in a separate trial.
The six have been convicted for infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV, the virus that causes Aids.
They had also been charged with defaming police officers and a doctor by accusing them of torture during investigations into their case.
The foreign medics say their confessions were given under duress.
The six have already spent eight years in prison. During a retrial in 2006, they said prosecution evidence had been obtained under torture.
They said they had been mistreated by several police officers, including a police officer, Juma al-Mishri and a doctor, Abdulmajid al-Shoul.
The two men then sued, claiming 5m Libyan dollars ($4m) in compensation.
Interesting information on Sidique Khan, one of the 7/7 London bombers:
The ringleader of the July 7 suicide bombers converted to violent jihadism at least six years before he blew himself up on the London Underground, his brother has revealed in his first interview.
Gultasab Khan, a taxi driver from Beeston, Leeds, disclosed that Mohammad Sidique Khan had visited the family’s spiritual adviser in 1999 and told him he wanted to travel to Afghanistan to train for jihad (holy war).
Gultasab Khan’s revelation of his younger brother’s long process of radicalisation, published in next month’s Prospect magazine, goes far beyond the sketchy information that has previously emerged.
He describes how in the mid 1990s Sidique Khan converted to wahhabism, the fundamentalist strain of Islam espoused by the September 11 hijackers. From there he moved into the ranks of violent jihadists – before the 2001 attacks on America or the Iraq invasion two years later.
I wish they wouldn’t refer to Trevor Forrest – Abdullah al-Faisal – as a race-hate preacher:
A race-hate preacher who influenced one of the men involved in the July 7 terror attacks on the London transport system was deported yesterday…
He told young British Muslims that it was their duty to kill nonbelievers, Jews, Hindus and Westerners, and urged them to adopt a “jihad mentality”.
The jury watched a video of al-Faisal after the September 11 attacks telling up to 150 young Muslims that the Koran justified attacking “kaffirs”, or unbelievers.
“When there is a legitimate target, you strike at it,” he said. “If women and children die, they become collateral damage.
Is it permissible to drop bombs on a kaffir nation, even if Muslims live there? It is permissible and the Muslims become martyrs.”
This isn’t race hate – it’s faith hate. To call it race hate is in a way to trivialise it; to take the sting out of it and make it something we can understand. It turns it into an offence we’ve already learnt the appropriate responses to; something nasty like a kind of reverse BNP. He’s worse than that. He thinks non-Muslims should be killed – that it’s a moral duty of Muslims to kill non-believers. Not because of what they are, but because of what they believe. It’s a long way from Nick Griffin.
Also, of course, this conflation of race and religion plays into the hands of the Islamophobia crowd, trying to make out that criticism of Islam is like racism.