Author: Mick Hartley

Sometimes a metaphor just kind of grabs you. Here’s Gerard Baker, on the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination:

With no obvious conservative candidate in the field, the contest between Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney is coming down for many conservatives to a choice of whom you hate least.

Currently, Mr Giuliani leads this Dutch auction. This has given rise to one of the more remarkable spectacles in politics — that of the libertine New Yorker Mr Giuliani feeling the love of Southern conservative Christians despite his record, views and predilections. Watching them embrace Mr Giuliani is like watching survivors from a shipwreck clinging to a giant turd in the water. It’s no one’s first choice of support from the briny waves but if you hold your nose it’s still better than any of the alternatives.

Rudi Giuliani as a giant turd? We can only hope we’re spared the cartoons.

Not that I want to keep on about Arsenal, but here’s what Simon Barnes (not an Arsenal fan, it should be noted) has to say:

Arsenal: a nation mourns. They lost the Carling Cup final, despite playing better than Chelsea. They were knocked out of the FA Cup, despite playing better than Blackburn Rovers over two matches. They have lost all chance of winning the Barclays Premiership, despite playing better than Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool. They are in danger of failing to qualify for the Champions League next season, despite playing better than all the clubs below them. And now they are out of Europe’s premier club competition this season, despite playing better than PSV Eindhoven over two legs and playing better than all eight clubs that remain in the competition.

It’s not really fair, is it? But then Arsenal’s football was not better in terms of goals and victories and all that; it was better morally. Arsenal play the right way. They play with style and brio, with beautiful passes, with intricate patterns, with wit and charm. They also play with youth, plucked from the ranks and taught to seek and find greatness.

This season Arsenal produced a team of pure and dizzy talent, the distilled essence of football. They embodied every kind of footballing virtue. Question: does defeat in four competitions destroy the moral argument? Does rightness depend on victory? Or is there really a right way and wrong way to play? Is it better to lose the right way than win the wrong way?

Deep questions indeed. And no, he doesn’t come up with any answers.

milies headlong into unemployment, shabby education, poor health and CocaCola showed more clearly than anything else that the people are just too dumb for Socialism.

Socialism is indeed a better way to run things than capitalism, but first we have to find ourselves another ‘people’.

Move on mate. You’ll only cause yourself heartache.

On that missing Iranian general – here’s the latest:

A former Iranian deputy defense minister who once commanded the Revolutionary Guard has left his country and is cooperating with Western intelligence agencies, providing information on Hezbollah and Iran’s ties to the organization, according to a senior U.S. official.

Ali Rez Asgari disappeared last month during a visit to Turkey. Iranian officials suggested yesterday that he may have been kidnapped by Israel or the United States. The U.S. official said Asgari is willingly cooperating. He did not divulge Asgari’s whereabouts or specify who is questioning him, but made clear that the information Asgari is offering is fully available to U.S. intelligence.

Asgari served in the Iranian government until early 2005 under then-President Mohammad Khatami. Asgari’s background suggests that he would have deep knowledge of Iran’s national security infrastructure, conventional weapons arsenal and ties to Hezbollah in south Lebanon. Iranian officials said he was not involved in the country’s nuclear program, and the senior U.S. official said Asgari is not being questioned about it. Former officers with Israel’s Mossad spy agency said yesterday that Asgari had been instrumental in the founding of Hezbollah in the 1980s, around the time of the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.

tball/teams/a/arsenal/6421475.stm”>agrees with me:

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger reflected on an “horrendous” spell after their 2-1 aggregate defeat to PSV Eindhoven put them out of the Champions League.

In the space of 11 days Arsenal have lost the Carling Cup final, exited the FA Cup and been knocked out of Europe – ending their hopes of silverware.

He said: “There are a lot of positives….

From the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Alawsat:

The one thing in common between Abu Qatada, who is currently in jail in Britain, Osama Nasr, who was kidnapped in Rome, and Omar Bakri, who fled London after the 7/7 attacks, is their preference for Western countries over their own native Muslim countries.

Abu Qatada, for instance, prefers to remain in his UK prison than to be extradited to Jordan. Abu Omar Osama al Masri (Osama Nasr), the imam of an Italian mosque who was kidnapped by the CIA and taken to Egypt, is also demanding to be returned to Milan, Italy’s fashion capital, in addition to monetary compensation. The third and probably the most infamous of the three, Omar Bakri, fled London for Lebanon, as the British government was preparing to implement measures against instigators of violence and terrorism. Now, after this period in his native country, he is constantly requesting to be allowed to return to London in spite of government measures and his comments against such measures.

So what prompts these anti-western extremist fundamentalists to flock to western nations ahead of others, and then fight to remain there?…

We never hear of their desire to go to Somalia, Pakistan, or their own home countries, despite all their sermons and literature telling us that our religious duty is to our homelands, and that all others are infidels to the point where some of them have advocated violence against them.

What makes Omar Bakri, who enjoyed the benefits and freedoms of living in Britain, feel compelled to incite hatred against that country and its culture? Is it reasonable for someone like him to request to be allowed to return to Britain after everything he has said and done?…

These individuals unquestionably enjoy the benefits that are afforded to them by the western governments that they hate. They want the financial aid, security, protection, legal justice and freedom of expression that these governments provide.

Doesn’t that constitute extreme hypocrisy? Aren’t they deceiving their followers through the discrepancy between their words and actions?

aded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.

Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas — and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.

Surely the point of holding a Secular Islam Summit is to advance the cause of an Islamic enlightenment – to reach out to those Muslims appalled by what they see being done nowadays in the name of Islam, and who might perhaps be inspired by the example of Muslims with the courage and vision to argue that Islam can exist in a modern secular world side by side with other religions and beliefs: Muslims who “affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience”. Whether such a movement is feasible is of course open to question, but it’s not going to be helped by articles such as this, which see Islam itself as the problem. All it’ll do is antagonise the kind of Muslim it should be trying to attract.

As she outlines at the start of her article Chesler has her own reasons for believing in the “barbarity of Islam” (I wonder if that’s her title, or one that the Times imposed: whichever, it wasn’t a smart move), and much that she says is spot on, but it doesn’t seem to me to advance the cause at all. Nor do I think we in the West are in any immediate danger of being “overrun by Sharia”. Still, I suppose it’s a sign of some kind of progress that I can now read articles in the Times that I find too harsh on Islam.

Life in Saudi Arabia:

A Saudi woman who was kidnapped at knifepoint, gang raped, and then beaten by her brother has been sentenced to 90 lashes – for meeting a man who was not a relative, a newspaper reported Monday.

In an interview with the Saudi Gazette, the 19-year-old said she was blackmailed a year ago into meeting a man who threatened to tell her family they were having a relationship outside wedlock, which is illegal in the ultra-conservative desert kingdom.

After driving off together from a shopping mall near her home, the woman and the man were stopped and abducted by a gang of men wielding kitchen knives who took them to a farm where she was raped 14 times by her captors.

Five men were arrested for the rape and given jail terms ranging from 10 months to five years by a panel of judges in the eastern city of Qatif, near the woman’s hometown.

But the judges also decided to sentence the woman, identified by the newspaper only as “G,” and the man to lashing for being alone together in the car….

The woman also told the paper she tried to commit suicide because of her ordeal and was beaten by her younger brother because the rape had brought shame on their family.

a private visit from Damascus, Syria, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported Tuesday.

Iran’s top police chief, Gen. Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghaddam, said Iran was investigating the fate of Asghari through the Turkish police.

“It is likely that Asghari has been abducted by the Western intelligence services,” IRNA quoted the Iranian police general as saying. The general did not elaborate.

Here are the results of a poll which “asked 28,000 people in 27 countries to rate a dozen countries plus the EU in terms of whether they have a positive or negative influence”. These surveys are next to useless, but if nothing else they show how countries are routinely presented in the media.

So – which country is at the bottom? It’s below Iran, and it’s below North Korea.

Yes of course: the country which has the most negative influence on the world is…Israel!

[Top? The country with the most positive influence? It’s, um, Canada.]