Author: Mick Hartley

From the Middle East Times:

Lama and Dima Hattab are 26-year-old Jordanian twins with adventure in their souls. Experienced marathon runners, the women have turned to mountains – and now have Everest firmly in their sights.

Their aim is to become the first Arab women to conquer a series of the world’s highest peaks starting in June of this year, with Everest itself the hoped-for summit of their achievement in March 2009…

“We’re determined to change attitudes in the Middle East, where people doubt the ability of women to endure the same physical challenges as men,” one twin said.

Dima cited the Wadi Rum marathon in their native Jordan as an example.

The three-day event is run across 168 kilometers of awesome desert, which inspired Lawrence of Arabia to write his classic Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

“When we took part, many people made fun of us and said things like ‘But what are you doing out here in the desert? Go home to your parents,’” Dima said.

“Hearing such comments made us very sad. We had hoped that people would applaud us for taking part, rather than the other way round.”

And:

A prosecutor has charged a Jordanian man with murdering his daughter for “honor” after forcing her to undergo an abortion for a pregnancy out of wedlock, the Jordan Times reported Tuesday.

The criminal prosecutor charged the 68-year-old suspect with premeditated murder after he shot dead his 26-year-old daughter Monday “for reasons related to family honor,” the daily said.

The victim was shot six times in the head and the neck and when police arrived at their home, the suspect “fired several rounds in the air, saying he was celebrating the killing of his daughter,” one official said.

“I have cleared the family’s name and cleansed my honor,” the official quoted the suspect as saying, the newspaper said…

The victim was the seventh woman reportedly murdered in a so-called “honor crime” in conservative Muslim Jordan since January, the daily said.

From the Times:

Ullswater is now the setting for a video that aims to make the Lake District cool “with the YouTube generation”. Cumbria Tourism has shot a rap music version of Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud featuring MC Nuts, a giant squirrel.

David McKitterick, of the Wordsworth Trust, said that the poet might have approved. “When Wordsworth was young he was very much a radical,” he said.

Yes indeed, and it doesn’t get any more radical than a giant rapping squirrel.

No doubt you’re anxious to check it out, so here it is, in all its glory.

As the man squirrel says, Respect Wordsworth.

e thought. They are nothing but a collection of data. A collection of data taken from a book does not constitute the book itself. The problem with them is that they do not limit the texts they memorized to their contemporary context. […]

The real living culture is the Western culture. There is no doubt about it. It is Western civilization that has generated this civilization. Western civilization, from the days of ancient Greece to our times – if we skip the Middle Ages – is the living culture that can breathe life into even backward civilizations, or those that have almost collapsed internally…

Fouad Ajami writes from Baghdad:

There is a growing Shia unease with the Mahdi Army–and with the venality and incompetence of the Sadrists represented in the cabinet–and an increasing faith that the government and its instruments of order are the surer bet. The crackdown on the Mahdi Army that the new American commander, Gen. David Petraeus, has launched has the backing of the ruling Shia coalition. Iraqi police and army units have taken to the field against elements of the Mahdi army. In recent days, in the southern city of Diwaniyya, American and Iraqi forces have together battled the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr. To the extent that the Shia now see Iraq as their own country, their tolerance for mayhem and chaos has receded. Sadr may damn the American occupiers, but ordinary Shia men and women know that the liberty that came their way had been a gift of the Americans.

The young men of little education–earnest displaced villagers with the ways of the countryside showing through their features and dialect and shiny suits–who guarded me through Baghdad, spoke of old terrors, and of the joy and dignity of this new order. Children and nephews and younger brothers of men lost to the terror of the Baath, they are done with the old servitude. They behold the Americans keeping the peace of their troubled land with undisguised gratitude. It hasn’t been always brilliant, this campaign waged in Iraq. But its mistakes can never smother its honor, and no apology for it is due the Arab autocrats who had averted their gaze from Iraq’s long night of terror under the Baath.

But what of the mass demonstration by “hundreds of thousands” of supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr, calling for US forces – “your arch enemy” – to leave? Here’s Omar Fadhil:

Speaking of the Sadrists’ pitiful demonstrations, Sadr’s aides were hoping to gather a million marchers for yesterday but all they could manage were less than ten thousand, even when they bussed people from Baghdad and Basra.

The Arabic-speaking al-Alam Iranian channel [and the BBC] claims the number was “hundreds of thousands” but that’s just al-Alam, other channels and the footage we saw all put the number between 5 and 10 thousand. I have personally been to a demonstration of 10 thousand once and what I saw yesterday was definitely smaller.

Flying Iraqi flags in large numbers is another cheap trick combining methods from both Hezbollah and Saddam. Replacing partisan sectarian banners with the national flag was likely inspired from Hezbollah’s rallies in Lebanon. Both movements desperately try to show themselves as patriotic movements because they realize others see them as Iran’s tools.

On the other hand the way the flags were gathered is a trademark of the Ba’ath work; the flags that were carried during the demonstration as well as the flags that were seen hanging on walls in Baghdad were not donated by NGO’s, nor bought with Sadr’s money.

Elements of the Mehdi army paid visits to hundreds of shops and stores in several neighborhoods in Baghdad and “asked” the owners for money to buy flags; 6,000 dinars ($5) from stores on main streets and 2,000 dinars from stores in the alleys. This is exactly what the Ba’ath thugs used to do; using intimidation to steal hard-earned money from hardworking Iraqis to decorate their false demonstrations with posters and portraits.

And here’s Gateway Pundit:

Of all of the 1,800 plus articles published yesterday on the Al Sadr Anti-US-occupation protest in Najaf, Iraq, not one mentioned that the turnout was way below what was expected and hoped for by the media and the pro-Iranian Muqtada al-Sadr.

rom Peking (I can testify) to Peru.

It’s all gone now, “dead as mutton,” as English people used to say. Now there is nothing there but a flock of whimpering Eloi, giggling over their gadgets, whining for their handouts, crying for their Mummies, playing at soldiering for reasons they can no longer understand, from lingering habit. Lower the corpse down slowly, shovel in the earth. England is dead.

If he wrote that here in England, he’d be “laughed out of court”, as English people used to say. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t live here anymore. Well, that and the death of his Mum, obviously.

We all have our idea of how to behave, of course, and what constitutes that notable “example of adult behavior—the English Gentleman”. I’m not sure, but does it, I wonder, cover that type of Englishman who emigrates to America and then spends his time loudly and pompously announcing how much he hates England but loves the “blessed U.S. of A.”? I mean, that takes the kind of courage those “saps and worms” captured and interrogated by the Iranians can only dream about.

It may not be much, but it is at least a sign that China’s getting concerned about the bad publicity coming its way over Darfur:

Sudan’s key ally China has urged it to show greater flexibility in discussions over its war-torn Darfur region.
Assistant Foreign Minister Zhai Jun told President Omar al-Bashir that he needed to do more to improve security, China’s state media reports…

The BBC’s Jonah Fisher in Khartoum says China is seen as the key in terms of trying to get the Sudanese government to change its mind on sending UN peacekeepers to Darfur.

He says China is Sudan’s most loyal friend and buys most of the crude oil it produces.

China sells military hardware to Khartoum and Chinese workers are building dams, roads and bridges across Sudan.

Thanks to its close ties with Beijing, Khartoum no longer has to worry about what the Western world says about the conflict in Darfur, our correspondent says.

Until now, China has refused to get involved in the Darfur conflict, but our correspondent says that position has shown some small signs of changing in recent months.

More here:

China urged Sudan on Monday to accept the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur, increasing the pressure on a key economic partner that Beijing has been criticized for protecting.
China’s assistant foreign minister, Zhai Jun, warned that putting too much pressure on Sudan could be counterproductive. But he said Sudan should accept the peacekeeping plan proposed last year by then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Is this, I wonder, in any way relevant?

China on Thursday blasted separate calls by a French politician and Mia Farrow to use the upcoming 2008 Olympic Games to pressure Beijing into doing more to stop the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region.

“We don’t think it is appropriate to link the Olympic Games in Beijing with the Darfur issue and we don’t think it will be popularly accepted or echoed by people around the world,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang.

“It is a totally misguided approach for people to link the Darfur issue with the Games and try to tip the balance in their favor in order to enhance their own reputation,” he said at a regular press briefing.

How the new UN Human Rights Council is going the same way as the old discredited UN Commission on Human Rights (via b&w):

The fourth session of the new Human Rights Council was held in Geneva from 12 to 30 March 2007, but high hopes that the Council would find a way forward on Darfur were dashed when the Council declined to act on the report of a High-Level Mission to Darfur led by Nobel prizewinner Jodie Williams because of obstruction by the Sudanese government. And the Council further reverted to type when Pakistan pushed through a resolution “combating Defamation of Religions” against numerous objections from the western democracies.

The Every year from 1999 to 2005 the Organization of the Islamic Conference, representing the 57 Islamic states, presented a resolution to the UN Commission on Human Rights, called “Combating Defamation of Religions”. While the text of the resolution referred to all religions the preamble made it clear that the sponsors’ concerns related primarily to one religion: Islam. The resolution was adopted every year by typically a two thirds majority. By 2005, the Commission for Human Rights had become widely discredited. In the words of then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan “.. the selectivity and politicizing of its activities [were] in danger of bringing the entire UN system into disrepute”. The Commission was abolished by vote of the UN General Assembly in 2006 and replaced by a shiny new Human Rights Council which met for the first time in March 2006. Hopes were soon dashed however that the newly elected 47 member states of the Council – each pledged to uphold international human rights law – would behave any differently from the 53 members of the old Commission. Of the first four resolutions passed by the Council, three were resolutions condemning Israel. Whatever breaches of human rights law Israel may have committed, it beggars belief that these were the only violations of human rights on the planet worthy of condemnation by the Council. By way of contrast, the Council adopted a resolution which inter-alia congratulated the Sudan for its efforts to bring peace to Darfur.

From the Middle East Times.

This, from a meteorologist, seems to be that rare thing, a sensible article about global warming:

Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we’ve seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth’s climate history, it’s apparent that there’s no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman’s forecast for next week. […]

Modelers claim to have simulated the warming and cooling that occurred before 1976 by choosing among various guesses as to what effect poorly observed volcanoes and unmeasured output from the sun have had. These factors, they claim, don’t explain the warming of about 0.4 degrees C between 1976 and 1998. Climate modelers assume the cause must be greenhouse-gas emissions because they have no other explanation. This is a poor substitute for evidence, and simulation hardly constitutes explanation. Ten years ago climate modelers also couldn’t account for the warming that occurred from about 1050 to 1300. They tried to expunge the medieval warm period from the observational record—an effort that is now generally discredited. The models have also severely underestimated short-term variability El Niño and the Intraseasonal Oscillation. Such phenomena illustrate the ability of the complex and turbulent climate system to vary significantly with no external cause whatever, and to do so over many years, even centuries.

Is there any point in pretending that CO2 increases will be catastrophic? Or could they be modest and on balance beneficial?

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs (no, I’d never heard of them either) have published the results of a study on people’s attitudes to UN intervention (via Coalition for Darfur):

Publics around the world say the United Nations has the responsibility to protect people from genocide and other severe human rights abuses even if this means acting against the will of their own government, according to a multinational study.

Large numbers are open to UN intervention in Darfur, where Arab militias linked to the Sudanese government are accused of massacring the civilian population. But many seem to be uninformed about the situation in Western Sudan and declined to answer.

Support for action to halt genocide is consistent with the final document endorsed by the 2005 United Nations World Summit, which recognized that the world body has a “responsibility to protect” vulnerable populations from “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” should national authorities fail to do so.

“There seems to be a world-wide consensus that the UN Security Council has a responsibility to act to protect populations against genocide,” said Steven Kull, editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org. “It also seems that, to the extent that people are aware of the situation in Darfur, most believe that the United Nations has the right, if not the responsibility to intervene there.”…

Respondents in 12 countries were asked whether the UN Security council has the “responsibility to authorize the use of military force to protect people from severe human rights violations, such as genocide, even against the will” of the government committing such abuses. The most common response in all 12 countries polled on this question is that the UN Security Council has a responsibility to authorize the use of military force in such cases.

The Chinese public shows the highest level of support for the idea that the United Nations has a responsibility to intervene (76%), followed by the United States (74%), the Palestinian territories (69%) and Israel (64%). The lowest levels of support are in Ukraine (40%), Thailand (44%), Russia (48%), and Argentina (48%). But the proportions in these four countries that say the UN Security Council does not have such a responsibility ranged between only 16 to 31 percent.

I imagine a poll taken in an Arab or Muslim country would give substantially different results. And this is ironic:

Support for UN action is highest in France where 84 percent say the Security Council has either the “responsibility” to authorize intervention in Darfur (55%) or the “right” (29%) to do so.

It is, of course, one thing to agree with the sentiments: quite another to actually do something, especially when the body bags start coming home.