Author: Mick Hartley

anitarian intervention against genocidal dictators, and ‘democracy promotion’ enthusiasts. Sotto voce, other are being attacked, namely the Iraqis who believed, and still believe, that Iraq might become a federal and pluralist democracy. Many of these Iraqis have a major grudge against James Baker III. After all, he decisively argued that Saddam should be left in power in 1991 after the first President Bush had encouraged the Kurds and Shi‘a Arabs to rebel. Baker now reportedly says that no one asks him any longer why he did that. If so, that is proof of consistency. Baker does not listen to representative Kurds and Shi‘a Arabs, or follow their counsel, because they are disposable instruments in the realistic appraisal of America’s interests. The ISG Report suggests, by implication that President George W Bush should have listened to Baker, in the way that his father did. This last sentence now has widespread consent within informed American opinion, which has mostly turned strongly against America’s intervention in Iraq. But Baker was wrong in 1991. Moreover he is wrong now, and it must be hoped that his errors do not become the new orthodoxy of American foreign policy.

at any one of them, given that headscarf and told to put it on, would have said: “You can hang me with it if you like, but I’ll be damned if I’ll wear the filthy thing.” The men likewise. What on earth has happened to the British? Where is John Moyse?

Well, he is of course on Wikipedia. Who isn’t? To spare you the trouble of reading all through, Moyse was a British soldier of the East Kent Regiment, nick-named “The Buffs” on account of their 17th-century uniforms, which prominently featured that color. Moyse was captured by the Chinese during the Second Opium War of the late 1850s. Taken before a Mandarin, he was ordered to kowtow, but refused. He was thereupon clubbed to death and decapitated, and his body thrown on a dung-heap. Sir Francis Doyle wrote a poem to celebrate Moyse’s defiance of the enemy…

And all this was, of course, brought to my mind by the story of these British servicemen captured by the Iranians. To return to my earlier question: What on earth has happened to the British?

What has happened is multiculturalism. The British no longer feel that contempt for other nations that sustained them for so many centuries….

And so on.

I could still be persuaded that it’s all tongue-in-cheek, but, really, it isn’t, is it?

Hitchens visits Iraqi Kurdistan:

Everybody knows how to snigger when you mention Jeffersonian democracy and Iraq in the same breath; try sniggering when you meet someone who is trying to express these ideas in an atmosphere that only a few years ago was heavy with miasmic decay and the reek of poison gas.

This is inspiring:

The European Union has drawn up guidelines advising government spokesmen to refrain from linking Islam and terrorism in their statements.

Brussels officials have confirmed the existence of a classified handbook which offers “non-offensive” phrases to use when announcing anti-terrorist operations or dealing with terrorist attacks.

Banned terms are said to include “jihad”, “Islamic” or “fundamentalist”.

The word “jihad” is to be avoided altogether, according to some sources, because for Muslims the word can mean a personal struggle to live a moral life.

One alternative, suggested publicly last year, is for the term “Islamic terrorism” to be replaced by “terrorists who abusively invoke Islam”.

Even better, why just not say anything at all. That way no one’ll be offended.

Adam LeBor has already flagged this at Harry’s Place, but still, the more publicity the better:

Dawn had just broken when the bombs dropped on the village in Darfur where Amuna Ibrahim, four months pregnant with her second child, was tending to her young son.

The air assault on Hamada was a prelude to an attack by the Janjawid, the Arab “devils on horseback”, who left 105 people, more than half the village, dead.

The horrors of that day, two years ago, have barely subsided. But, as Mrs Ibrahim sits barefoot on the floor of her home in Doncaster, she faces new horrors — the prospect that she and her two children, one born in Birmingham, are to be sent back to the land from which she fled.

She is among scores of Darfuris summoned in recent days by the Home Office. The sudden rush to deport them — some are due to be flown back tomorrow — comes before a crucial Court of Appeal ruling that could stop Britain from sending them back to Khartoum, the seat of the government that sent the murderous horsemen and bombers to wreak havoc on Darfur.

Mrs Ibrahim grabbed her son, Omar, and fled the Janjawid attack. When she returned, at the end of the day, Hamada was burnt-out and littered with the corpses of women and children.

Mrs Ibrahim, 33, who arrived in Britain 18 months ago, is among 60 Darfuri asylum-seekers who have received letters in the past week, ordering them to report to immigration officials. At least two dozen more, who were in the process of making fresh asylum claims, have been taken into detention in preparation for their deportation — against the explicit advice of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who insists that Darfuris are at risk if returned to Khartoum.

Lawyers and campaigners say that the unprecedented flurry of activity is the Government’s attempt to meet deportation targets before the Khartoum route is closed to it. John Bercow, the former Conservative frontbencher who raised the issue in the Commons this week, called on the Government to suspend the deportations until after the judicial ruling.

“It is unacceptable for the Government to steamroller ahead with a policy that may be very soon judged out of order,” he told The Times. “By returning them, the Government is exposing vulnerable people to possible imprisonment, torture or death.”

His comments came after revelations about a Darfuri deported from Britain to Khartoum who was tortured on arrival by intelligence agents. They had apparently been made aware of his return by Sudanese embassy officials in London who had worked with the Home Office to deport him.

And here’s Adam’s
accompanying piece.

ample, football matches can turn otherwise decent individuals into ranting idiots chanting mindless obscenities, or worse. Then again, if there was, say, a panic in the crowd and people were being crushed, some of those mindless idiots would perform heroically to rescue others, including fans of the opposing teams. Others, including no doubt some of those horrified at the obscene chants, wouldn’t. It’s a complicated old business, this human behaviour.

But now, because a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University got together some undergraduates, called some of them prisoners and some of them guards, and made them do some role playing which got out of hand, there’s no more room for doubt or nuance. It’s been proved that there’s no such thing as evil. This is science: just like medicine, just like, say, Ronald Ross and his discovery that malaria is transmitted by mosquitos. Right there in that mock-up jail in Stanford, Zimbardo, the Ronald Ross of psychology, discovered that the causes of human behaviour lie not in some intrinsic character but in the situations in which people find themselves. What a breakthrough! So all that complicated stuff about the interaction between character and environment that’s so engrossed historians, novelists and philosophers for so long turns out to have been a complete waste of time. Science has, finally, given us the answer.

It is, unsurprisingly, on Abu Ghraib that the reviewer, Michael Bywater, concentrates. Not, that is, the Abu Ghraib of Saddam, with its blood-drenched walls, where people were invited to see their children tortured, or their pregnant wives have their babies ripped from their bellies, but the Abu Ghraib where US soldiers humiliated prisoners. Which is fair enough, I suppose. After all, these scientific findings, as we know, only apply to decent middle-class Westerners.

What of the rest of the world? Yes, there are a few brave souls out there willing to push back the barriers of psychological research. Take, for instance, the director of Jamia Hafsa Madrassah (below). To get those women all dressed up like that, in a state of righteous indignation that only serves to consolidate their subjugation, well, that’s some powerful little experiment he’s got going there. And this cleric, persuading people to kill themselves, and others, to preserve his own power – persuading them that it doesn’t get much peachier than blowing other people into little bits – with the notion that, after death, they’ll be given 70 (or is it 72?) beautiful virgins to have their way with – well, you’d think a reasonably intelligent four-year-old would be able to see through that, but there are thousands, maybe even millions, who believe it. Oh yes, the West has no monopoly on exciting psychological experiments.

After the triumph of the brothel case, the women of the Jamia Hafsa Madrassah are now aiming at the whole country (via):

It is an ultimatum not a request: if within a week Sharia law is not enforced throughout the country than true Muslims “will islamify society on their own”. Maulana Abdul Aziz, Imam of the Lal Masjid Mosque and director of Jamia Hafsa Madrassah has said.

Speaking after Friday prayers to thousands of faithful, Aziz clarified: “If the government ignores our requests than we will have to enforce them ourselves”. The man then asked for the closure of “all brothels and gaming houses as soon as possible”, also adding in this case that “that aim may only be achieved thanks to the help of the Madrassah students”.

The Imam’s threats must not be ignored, because just days ago female students from the Madrassah directed by Aziz attacked a suspected brothel taking the women who lived within the house hostage.

Sources say that the Madrassah religious leaders are preparing a “list of impure places” to be forcibly shut down. The plan concluded Aziz, “is not limited to Islamabad. We will meet April 5th to decide on an line of action together with other good Muslims”.

Another Muslim cleric extols the glories of martyrdom:

In Islam, one of the goals of Jihad, one of the goals of fighting is for there to be martyrs. We used to think that when people are martyred, it is a disaster, but they are martyrs… One of the goals of the Muslims is to attain martyrdom. This is very important. Why? Because a Muslim harbors the love of martyrdom. Of course, Western thinking does not understand this. They think this is a kind of suicide, despair, and so on. Absolutely not. The martyrs are the ones who have changed the course of history. They are the ones who have changed the course of human life. The course of human life proceeds this way, until a martyrdom-seeker collides with it, changing and diverting it. Whenever a martyrdom-seeker collides into it, he restores the course of humanity to the path planned by Allah. Men march towards evil this way, unless they encounter a mujahid who strikes at them, and diverts their course to what Allah had wanted. Therefore, for Muslims, martyrdom embodies hope, not disaster. […]

The [martyr] does not lose anything. He does not die. All of a sudden he ascends to the angels and lives next to Allah. He pleads on behalf of 70 of his family members. When a martyr is next to Allah, he has an important role and is greatly rewarded. He pleads on behalf of 70 of his family members. In his death, he feels no pain beyond a mosquito bite. That’s it. Allah removes from him the marks of death and its torments. The martyr is not tested in his grave. He is not asked about his god or religion. The glitter of the sword over his head suffices. The Crown of Honor is placed on his head. The gem in this crown is more precious than the whole world. He is married off to 70 black-eyed virgins. If one of these virgins were to descend to this world, her light would extinguish the light of the sun and the moon. That’s how beautiful she is.

So – let’s see – he’s encouraging mass murder as a way of keeping people like himself in power. The UN Human Rights Council is on the case though, and they’ve hit on the obvious solution: a global prohibition on any criticism of this kind of rhetoric:

Islamic countries pushed through a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday urging a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion — a response largely to the furor last year over caricatures published in a Danish newspaper of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

The statement proposed by the Organization of Islamic Conference addressed what it called a “campaign” against Muslim minorities and the Islamic religion around the world since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The resolution, which was opposed by European and a number of other non-Muslim countries, “expresses deep concern at attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence and human rights violations.”

hand and surrender to religious fanatics and terrorists on the other.”

Iraq’s parties of the left were shocked when the new Socialist government in Spain decided to withdraw from the US-led coalition in 2004.

“We had hoped that with a party of the left in power in Madrid we would get more support against the Islamofascists not a withdrawal,” says Aziz Al-Haj, the veteran Iraqi Communist leader.

Tareq Al-Hashemi, vice president of Iraq, has also gambled his impeccable progressive record on the success of the pluralist experiment in his country.

“Our enemy is Al-Qaeda, not the United States,” he says.

Skimming through Middle Eastern press these days could produce unexpected results. It is not rare to see a virulently anti-American article by an American or Western European leftist appearing on the same page of a newspaper alongside a pro-American article from an Arab, Iranian or Afghan progressive figure.

In Iran, for example, Hussein Shariatmadari, the ultra Islamist editor of the daily newspaper Kayhan and a theoretician of the extreme right, often admiringly cites such American leftist figures as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Jane Fonda…

“Anti-Americanism is a luxury we cannot afford in the Middle East,” says Adnan Hussein, a leftist Iraq writer recently picked by the Financial Times as one of the 50 most influential columnists in the world. “Blinded by anti-Americanism, the left in the West ends up on the same side as religious fascists and despots.”

ition of the book a list of “Famous homosexuals and bisexuals in history” in which Atatürk was included. He also said that Arena’s request for a meeting with Ambassador Fuat Tanlay has been accepted, without specifying an exact date.

Arena also sent a letter to the embassy in which she said her government had no intention of insulting Atatürk. Arena’s spokesperson, Jennifer Wilquot, speaking with Today’s Zaman, admitted that it was “a mistake” to put Atatürk’s name on the list.

(Via The Brussels Journal)