Author: Mick Hartley

mes Brown was a proud Republican. Little Richard quit the stage at the height of his stardom and became a born-again preacher. Jerry Lee Lewis was a standard-issue Louisiana good ol’ boy. Even Chuck Berry, who had a love-hate relationship with his country, wrote two-minute paeans to American capitalism.

Rolling Stone and its fellow travelers declared such music trivial, if not counter-revolutionary. It decreed that rock authenticity belonged to guitar bands with long, silky hair and a willingness to assert (or at least not to contradict) the idea that the Vietnam War was the worst imaginable atrocity. Cover after cover was devoted to the likes of John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia and James Taylor.

Generally speaking, black kids didn’t see themselves at this particular party. They had no illusions about Vietnam, but their primary interest was saving (and celebrating) their own skins. James Brown cut “Say it Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and went to Saigon to entertain the troops. And soul superstar Joe Tex composed one of the great, politically incorrect war ballads of all time: “When I got your letter baby/ I was in a foxhole on my knees/ And your letter brought me so much strength/ I raised up and got me two more enemies.”

Meanwhile, many standard-issue white kids found that they weren’t invited to the Rolling Stone bash either. They turned to country music and stewed. Merle Haggard summed up their resentment: “I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee/ A place where even squares can have a ball./ We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,/ And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all.”

The editors of Rolling Stone are not at all apologetic about turning rock ‘n’ roll into three-chord propaganda and laying down a lasting line of generational grievance. On the contrary, they see it as their great accomplishment. Which is why they appeared disconcerted, in recent interviews, by the unwillingness of some family members to follow the script.

Mick Jagger, for example, offered a critique of the war in Iraq that owed more to Brent Scowcroft than Abbie Hoffman. Keith Richards, asked for his views on social change, ventured that it is all a bit confusing these days and steered the conversation to Mozart and Billie Holiday.

Poor Jack Nicholson even admitted that he was “incapable of hating a president of the United States.” This was considered so amazing that the editors displayed the quote prominently in a box.

“We seem to be hellbent on destruction,” Wenner said during his interview with Rolling Stone’s idol-in-chief, Bob Dylan. “Do you worry about global warming?”

To which Dylan replied: “Where’s the global warming? Its freezing in here.”

Bless his rock ‘n’ roll heart.

At MEMRI, three liberal Arab authors criticise the support for terrorism in the Arab and Muslim world:

In an article posted on the liberal Arab website Elaph on April 23, 2007 and titled “This Is the Difference Between Muslims and the Civilized World,” Riyadh ‘Abd compared the reaction of Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui’s family to that of families of suicide bombers in Iraq:

“What caught my attention was a report… that the criminal’s family… offered its apologies and expressed grief, embarrassment, and shame, as well as consternation and incomprehension of their son Cho Seung-Hui’s atrocious crime… This Korean family expressed a sense of sadness and grief, profound remorse, and a sense of partial responsibility for what their son did.

“Let’s compare this natural, human, civilized behavior that places value on human life with [that of] the families of Arabs in Islamic lands who lost their sons in Iraq in criminal suicide operations whose victims number tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.

“Instead of the Iraqis receiving apologies and feelings of grief and consolation for these filthy criminals’ killing and slaughtering of innocents and their demolishing and destroying of property, we see the families of these killers holding mourning ceremonies and bragging of the ‘martyrdom’ of their sons the mujahideen – [and at these ceremonies] they receive congratulations instead of condolences.

“This strange behavior and sick pride in criminal acts can only be explained as a conclusive sign of the moral decline and deterioration of contemporary Islamic and Arab civilization.”

“There are hundreds of examples of this barbaric and disgraceful behavior, from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab countries. Where is the apology from the family of the barbaric criminal, the beheader known as Abu Mus’ab Al-Zarqawi, to the Iraqi people for the crimes of mass murder, destruction of property, and cutting off [people’s] livelihoods? Don’t the Iraqis deserve an apology from the family, tribe, and village of this dirty scoundrel?

“Where is the apology from the family of the Jordanian criminal who caused the deaths of 200 innocent civilians in Al-Hilla, in a suicide bombing in a popular market in 2005? It is known that there was a large mourning ceremony after the death of this criminal, that was attended by a number of important Jordanian statesmen…

“I read an article from a few years ago about an attempt by CNN… to interview, in Cairo, the father of the criminal Muhammad ‘Atta, the commander of the group responsible for [9/11]… It is known that this individual had at first spread made-up stories about the Mossad kidnapping his son, stories snatched up at the time by the Egyptian media, which is known for its addiction to invented stories and raving analyses…

“Later he began to brag about what his son did, calling his abominable criminal act ‘jihad.’ When CNN asked him for an interview, he made it contingent upon them paying him $5,000 for it. When they told him that it is station policy not to pay interviewees, Muhammad ‘Atta’s father turned down the interview, claiming that a Muslim is not allowed to aid the infidels without remuneration. Did the Muslims disapprove of this disgraceful position?… I don’t think so.

Ben Macintyre on whaling:

Japanese tactics in the whaling struggle have been ruthlessly cynical. Last year Japanese whalers killed 853 minke whales and 10 fin whales, and they will start hunting humpback whales this year. All were eaten, in the name of “scientific research” that most reputable biologists dismiss as a sham. Killing a whale for research is like building a coal-fired power station to examine greenhouse gases.

ernational Centre for Neuro-Psychoanalysis, of which Mark Solms is a co-director. There’s an interview with him at Bookslut.

Editor Jessa Crispin evidently found it deeply inspiring: “It was somewhere during the editing of an 11-page interview with a Freud scholar and translator that I realized I have the best job in the world.” I wish I could feel the same enthusiasm. Having read it I’m no clearer about what neuro-psychoanalysis involves than I was before.

Neuro-psychoanalysis arises out of the belief that the theoretical models we construct in psychoanalysis from our observations of the subjective life of the mind, that those models describe a thing, which must be the same thing that neuroscientists are attempting to study when they derive models of the mental apparatus from their neuroscientific observations. In other words, neuro-psychoanalysis exists because we believe that there’s only one thing called the human mind, which we’re studying from these two different points of view. And if that assumption is valid, then it sort of necessarily implies that we have everything to gain and little to lose by trying to combine our different findings in order to correct viewpoint-dependent errors and arrive at a more satisfactory account of how the mind works.

Um, yes. OK. Neurology and psychoanalysis are two different approaches to the study of mind. True enough. There are plenty more, of course. Phrenology, for instance, or astrology. Will we be seeing a new field of neuro-astrology, combining the findings of the two disciplines “in order to correct viewpoint-dependent errors”? Or neuro-psychoanalytic-astrology, perhaps, combining the findings of all three disciplines? Neuro-kabbalism? Neuro-anthroposophy? Neuro-men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus?

As a psychoanalyst, having trained in Britain, it’s very hard to not learn a great deal of what follows from Freud, particularly in the Kleinian tradition, and in my work as a psychoanalyst, I rely on all manner of theoretical developments post-Freud. The reason I focus so strongly on Freud, however, in my neuro-psychoanalytical work is because it’s a very complicated task to try and link psychoanalytical concepts with neuroscientific ones. To start with the most rudimentary, the most basic concepts, simplifies the task, and that’s a first step. And I think once we’ve been able to ascertain the neural correlates of our most elementary psychoanalytic concepts, that is to say Freudian concepts, then we have a bedrock upon which we can build more elaborated psychoanalytical models into this correlative effort. But I think that we do need to start with one particular model, because there are such a plethora of mutually incompatible, in many respects, psychoanalytical models these days. Since you have to choose one, I think choosing the one from which they are all ultimately derivative, and therefore choosing the simplest one, is therefore the right place to start. But it really is a start, it’s not meant to be any kind of right-wing Freudian project that refuses everything that came after.

Once we’ve been able to ascertain the neural correlates of our most elementary psychoanalytic concepts. Ah yes. Good luck with that.

The Euston Manifesto event on Monday 30th April, Humanitarian Intervention post-Iraq, has now been posted in its entirety on Youtube.

From Pat McFadden MP , Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Cabinet Office, and one of Tony Blair’s key advisors at No. 10 in the run up to the Iraq conflict:

“We should reject the notion, frequently held, which says that when it comes to security problems at home or terrorist acts abroad, we have brought it on ourselves.

There is nothing inevitable about bombing marketplaces. People chose to do it and it is an outrage against universal values of human decency.”

And on the Islamist threat:

“This ideology, bottled up during the Cold War, was leading people to commit terrorist outrages before either President Bush or Tony Blair took office and the threat it poses will remain when both of them have gone. Liberalism, pluralism and democracy are worth defending and it will remain necessary to defend our beliefs and to be strong and vigilant in the face of the security threat facing the country.”

chooling, the 600,000 German Alevis are a bulwark against Islamist radicalism in their country of adoption or, in many cases, of their birth.

Some young Alevis I interviewed in Cologne said they would gladly go to Macedonia to clean out the Wahhabis if encouraged to do so. But all over Europe, moderate Muslims expect their governments to act. They seem destined to be disappointed. European states are frozen in a posture of accommodation, willful oblivion, ignorance, and simple denial of the reality: The enemy will not be beaten so long as he finds places to rekindle his jihad.

I’m not sure how convincing this tale of moderate Muslims “ready to act” really is. If a religion is based on submission to the word, revealed 1400 years ago, then there’s little defence against the kind of reactionary extremism of the Wahhabis and the like, who can claim to be reverting to the purity of the original revelation.

Here’s another take:

Although the majority of Bosnian Muslims are secular in orientation, there have always been fundamentalist currents with political influence among the Bosnian intelligentsia. Alija Izetbegovic, the first Bosnian President following the 1992 declaration of Bosnian independence, is a case in point. Izetbegovic openly expressed sympathy for Islamist doctrine, even if he did not adopt it as the basis for his policies. He brought thousands of Arab Mujahideen to Bosnia to reinforce his troops, many of them veterans of the war in Afghanistan. “We enjoyed great privileges among both the political and the military leadership in Sarajevo,” Ali Hamad, a former Mujahideen commander from Bahrain, recently told the German weekly Der Spiegel.

The fact that Bosnia has become such a fertile source of new recruits for the Wahhabi sectarians is a legacy of this alliance. Having obtained Bosnian passports, several hundred Mujahideen remained in Bosnia after the war. With the generous financial support of Saudi Arabia, they built up a network of organizations that they are using to attract the next generation of Islamists.

ineering of an earlier era, the Chinese government has relocated some 250,000 Tibetans – nearly one-tenth of the population – from scattered rural hamlets to new “socialist villages,” ordering them to build new housing largely at their own expense and without their consent.

The government calls the year-old project the “comfortable housing program,” and its stated aim is to present a more modern face for this ancient region, which China has controlled since 1950.

It claims that the new housing on main roads, sometimes only a mile from previous homes, will enable small farmers and herders to have access to schools and jobs, as well as better health care and hygiene.

But the broader aim seems to be remaking Tibet – a region with its own culture, language and religious traditions – in order to have firmer political control over its population. It comes as China prepares for an influx of millions of tourists in the run-up to next year’s Summer Olympic Games.

A vital element in the strategy is to displace a revered leader, the Dalai Lama, now 71, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for advocating resistance to the communist government. The government hopes to replace him after he dies with a state-appointed successor, and in the meantime it’s opened the gates of Tibet to greater numbers of ethnic Han Chinese and tightened control of religious activity…

Other than a state media account that proclaimed that “beaming smiles” were “fixed on the faces of farmers and herders” as they built and moved into new housing in what it called “socialist villages,” the Chinese news media have given almost no coverage to the forced relocation.

Foreign reporters, under tight strictures that largely prevent them from traveling to Tibet except on once-a-year trips under Foreign Ministry guidance, risk being removed from the region if they openly interview people. This report was prepared while undertaking tourism in Tibet.

fugees in the Goz Beida camps in Chad a few days ago. The Janjaweed usually come at dawn, hurling flaming torches into the huts. They smash the tall clay jars with their clubs, spilling millet and sorghum onto the ground and then setting fire to it. They scream ferociously as they ride around the flames. They rip babies from their mothers’ arms and toss them into the bonfires. They rape the women, beat them, disembowel them. They round up the men and execute them with machine guns. When finally everything has burned, when all that is left of the village is crumbling, smoking ruins, they round up the terrified animals and drive them toward Sudan.

My witnesses have names. There is Hadja Abdelaziz, 30, with six children, three of whom perished during the attack on the village of Khortial. And Fatmah Moussa Nour, 28, who lost her husband in the bombing of Birmaza last October. But stories like these can be heard in the camps on the other side of the border. What can’t always be gleaned from that distance is the fact that these infernal columns, which Khartoum describes as uncontrollable hordes of bandits, are always under the supervision of officers of the regular Sudanese army. There were Sudanese in Tawila, Rocco tells me, in February of 2004, when 67 were killed, 93 women raped, and more than 5,000 people displaced. There were also Sudanese in Hashaba, which is a little higher up, but there were no deaths because a battallion of the SLA was able to evacuate the civilians. “And, as for Disa–let’s go there, to Disa. You will see with your own eyes.”

Fifteen kilometers to the east, Disa is another village recently razed to the ground. We go there in three trucks. A survivor, whose eyes are dilated in fear, wanders among the charred ruins of his house and tells us how the Janjaweed came twice. Once to destroy the millet granaries, burn the huts and mosque, and kill. They came back the second time to demolish the school. “Both times,” he says, “it was a captain from Khartoum directing the operation. Let the investigators from the international court come here if they want–we’ll give them the evidence!” So, could it be that the Janjaweed, the much-discussed “horsemen of the Apocalypse,” are perhaps just a convenient bogeyman? And could it be that the Janjaweed are really a proxy for the fundamentalist, Islamist, racist Sudan?

and inheritance. Decision-making is left to the males of the household who enjoy, by default, the legal status of “head of household.” All of these concepts are supported by the family courts.

While husbands can divorce their spouses easily – often instantaneously through oral repudiation – wives’ access to divorce is often extremely limited, and they frequently confront near-insurmountable legal and financial obstacles. Although Egyptian women can now legally initiate a divorce without cause, they must agree not only to renounce all rights to the couple’s finances, but must also re-pay their dowries.

Violence against women in Egypt also continues to be a major issue with 35 percent of women in Egypt reported as being beaten by their husbands according to a recent Amnesty International report. Honor killings, whereby women who are suspected of tarnishing the family’s reputation through their sexual indiscretions are murdered by male family members, are also carried out periodically, but the Egyptian government isn’t interested in researching or providing statistics. Furthermore, the penal code of Egypt has a partial or complete “defense” for this crime.

l them if they find out they’ve slept with a man. But it’s important to say no, because if we don’t we’re giving in to the fundamentalists.” […]

Dr Stéphane Saint-Léger, head of gynaecology at Aulnay-sous-Bois hospital, outside Paris, refuses virginity certificates because “it’s not a medical problem whether you’re a virgin or not”.

But other doctors are prepared to deliver them. Jacques Milliez, head of the department of gynaecology and obstetrics at Saint-Antoine hospital, Paris, told Le Monde: “I worked in Algeria as a junior doctor and when I was on call at night I saw these young women whose throats had been slit because they were suspected of having lost their virginity. So if someone asks me, I sign the certificate.”

And here are some of those Muslim brides, in storage, hymens guaranteed intact, waiting to be shipped out at a moment’s notice.