Author: Mick Hartley

The Libyan leader is playing tough over the case of the Benghazi six:

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has rejected calls for the release of six foreign medics sentenced to death for infecting children with HIV/Aids.

Those who committed crimes must accept the consequences, he said….

Colonel Gaddafi stressed the “the independence of the Libyan judicial system”, and he rejected what he called “Western intervention and pressure in this affair”.

Whether he’ll stick to that position remains to be seen, but it’s now going to look like weakness if he backs down.

Is there an element of revenge for Lockerbie in all this?

Gadaffi also remains bitter about the pariah status he acquired after the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Earlier this year Libya said Bulgaria should pay the families of the children $2.7bn (£1.8bn) in compensation – which is exactly the sum paid by Libya for the 270 lives lost in the Pan Am 103 bombing.

Many, including some of the victims’ families, continue to believe that the Lockerbie investigation was subject to political pressure, and Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, eventually convicted for the crime, was little more than a scapegoat. Paul Foot, who published numerous pieces in Private Eye on this, was the most eloquent and persistent of those who believed in a cover-up:

There is, in my opinion (not necessarily shared by the families), an explanation for all this, an explanation so shocking that no one in high places can contemplate it. It is that the Lockerbie bombing was carried out not by Libyans at all but by terrorists based in Syria and hired by Iran to avenge the shooting down in the summer of 1988 of an Iranian civil airliner by a US warship. This was the line followed by both British and US police and intelligence investigators after Lockerbie. Through favoured newspapers like the Sunday Times, the investigators named the suspects – some of whom had been found with home-made bombs similar to the one used at Lockerbie.

This line of inquiry persisted until April 1989, when a phone call from President Bush senior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned her not to proceed with it. A year later, British and US armed forces prepared for an attack on Saddam Hussein’s occupying forces in Kuwait. Their coalition desperately needed troops from an Arab country. These were supplied by Syria, which promptly dropped out of the frame of Lockerbie suspects. Libya, not Syria or Iran, mysteriously became the suspect country, and in 1991 the US drew up an indictment against two Libyan suspects. The indictment was based on the “evidence” of a Libyan “defector”, handsomely paid by the CIA. His story was such a fantastic farrago of lies and fantasies that it was thrown out by the Scottish judges.

In Britain, meanwhile, Thatcher, John Major and Blair obstinately turned down the bereaved families’ requests for a full public inquiry into the worst mass murder in British history.

It follows from this explanation that Megrahi is innocent of the Lockerbie bombing and his conviction is the last in the long line of British judges’ miscarriages of criminal justice. This explanation is also a terrible indictment of the cynicism, hypocrisy and deceit of the British and US governments and their intelligence services. Which is probably why it has been so consistently and haughtily ignored.

Foot, of course, had his own far-left axe to grind, and was inclined to see conspiracies everywhere. He could be completely mistaken, as he was in the case of James Hanratty. On the other hand he may just have been on to something, the ramifications of which are playing out now in Libya.

cost an estimated one million lives. He instituted genocidal campaigns against the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Marsh Arabs in the south. Ruling through the Sunni minority of which he was a member, he ignored the claims of the country’s majority Shia population….

Saddam appeared to have psychopathic tendencies which, combined with the exacerbating circumstances of his absolute power, resulted in the killing of more fellow Muslims, possibly, than Genghis Khan and Tamberlaine had caused between them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Yet, until he invaded the oil-rich state of Kuwait, he enjoyed the collaboration of many governments abroad – including those in the West – who had given him backing in his unprovoked assault on Iran.

His invasion of the important Kuwait oilfields in 1990, however, resulted in the formation of an international military coalition against him, which was given sanction by United Nations resolutions. US-led, it inflicted a severe defeat on his forces and administered a check to his territorial ambitions – though it made him a hero to many Muslim militants and Arab nationalists. Even with defeat staring him in the face he continued to proclaim victory to his people.

And after his expulsion from Kuwait and the massive casualties inflicted on his army, Saddam continued defiant, thwarting the efforts of UN inspectors to check on his weapons stocks and refusing to let himself be cowed by the overflying of his country by armed British and American aircraft. Meanwhile he continued with projects to develop new weapons to threaten territories outside his borders, apparently secure in his power, in spite of the sufferings of his people, which were in such painful contrast to the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by himself and his family.

A fervent admirer of Hitler on account of the latter’s boldness and hatred of Jews, he told his official biographer in 1980 that he wanted Iraqis to think of Nebuchadnezzar every day. “We could march into Palestine and bring all those Jews here in Babylon with their hands tied behind their backs once more”, he said.

I’m glad there’s someone else who doesn’t think that the death of languages is necessarily all bad:

The death of languages is typically described in a rueful tone. There are a number of books treating the death of languages as a crisis equal to endangered species and global warming. However, I’m not sure it’s the crisis we are taught that it is.

There is a part of me, as a linguist, that does see something sad in the death of so many languages. It is happening faster than ever: It has been said that a hundred years from now 90% of the current 6,000 languages will be gone.

Each extinction means that a fascinating way of putting words together is no longer alive. In, for example, Inuktitut Eskimo, which, by the way, is not dying, “I should try not to become an alcoholic” is one word: Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga.

Yet the extinctions cannot be stopped, for the most part. Trying to teach people to speak their ancestral languages, for example, will almost never get far beyond the starting gate. […]

The language revivalists yearn for — surprise — diversity. What they miss is that language death is a healthy outcome of diversity.

If people truly come together, then they speak a common language. We can muse upon a “salad bowl” ideal in which people go home and use their nice “diverse” language with “their own.” But in reality, almost always the survival of that “diverse” language means that the people are segregated in some way, which in turn is almost always due to an unequal power relationship — i.e., precisely what “diversity” fans otherwise consider such a scourge….

In the end, the proliferation of languages is an accident: a single original language morphed into 6,000 when different groups of people emerged. I hope that dying languages can be recorded and described. I hope that many persist as hobbies, taught in schools and given space in the press, as Irish, Welsh, and Hawaiian have.

However, the prospect we are taught to dread — that one day all the world’s people will speak one language — is one I would welcome. Surely easier communication, while no cure-all, would be a good thing worldwide. There’s a reason the Tower of Babel story is one of havoc rather than creation.

As I wrote here, I’m all for the preservation of dying languages in theory: how can you possibly disapprove? But I’m very glad it’s not me who’s one of the few remaining speakers.

ell:

No country today is as misunderstood as North Korea. Journalists still refer to it as a Stalinist or communist state, when in fact it espouses a race-based nationalism such as the West last confronted during the Pacific War. Pyongyang’s propaganda touts the moral superiority of the Korean race, condemns South Korea for allowing miscegenation, and stresses the need to defend the Dear Leader with kyeolsa, or dare-to-die spirit–the Korean version of the Japanese kamikaze slogan kesshi. The six-party talks are therefore less likely to replicate the successes of Cold War détente than the negotiating failures of the 1930s. According to early reports from Beijing, the North Korean delegation appears more confident than ever. It has clearly been emboldened not only by its accession to the nuclear club, but by the awareness that Seoul will continue providing food and financial support no matter what happens.

This support is not meant to expedite unification, which South Koreans are happy to put off indefinitely. Nor has it much to do with concern for starving children; by now everyone knows where the “humanitarian” aid really goes. No, the desire to help North Korea derives in large part from ideological common ground. South Koreans may chuckle at the personality cult, but they generally agree with Pyongyang that Koreans are a pure-blooded race whose innate goodness has made them the perennial victims of rapacious foreign powers. They share the same tendency to regard Koreans as innocent children on the world stage–and to ascribe evil to foreigners alone. Though the North expresses itself more stridently on such matters, there is no clear ideological divide such as the one that separated West and East Germany. Bonn held its nose when conducting Ostpolitik. Seoul pursues its sunshine policy with respect for Pyongyang.

More on the North Korean obsession with racial purity here.

afford to pay the price of ensuring their cooperation.

True, Syria and Iran are playing a major role in supporting Iraqi insurgents, and Syria is still encouraging the trafficking of jihadists and weapons across its borders with Iraq. But the idea that these activities can be halted at will is naive.

As is the idea that that Syria and Iran have any interest in halting these activities. The last thing they want is a strong democratic Iraq on their borders.

fjords!”

Cue much loud squawking and stamping of claws.

I wouldn’t mind just the once, but it gets a bit wearisome every single lesson. Still, that’s a minor quibble.

Our current topic: anthropomorphism in animal psychology.

of which included an effort to apprehend those Palestinians involved in such attacks. Some of those pursued, themselves not Christians, chose to take refuge in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The almost worldwide condemnation which Israel received then, when it sought to extricate those concerned, is parallel to the easy condemnation of the security fence, which now affects Bethlehem and many other areas with significant Arab populations.

My experience during many visits to Israel is that most Israeli Jews, as well as Israeli Arabs and Christians, dislike the fence. It is ugly, expensive and bad for Israel’s battered image. But they dislike even more being blown up as they travel on buses or eat in restaurants. The sad fact is that the fence has saved lives.

And another from Professor Shaun Gregory of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford:

The Archbishop of Canterbury is right to draw attention to the suffering of Christians in the Middle East but wrong to lay the blame for this at the feet of Western foreign policy.

The genocide, displacment and repression of Christians across the Muslim world is one of the great untold stories of the past 150 years. Were it more widely known it would explode the myth of Islamic tolerance of other faiths.

The Archbishop falls into precisely the intellectual trap which has long obscured the reality of Christian persecution under Islam: an unwillingness to risk offending Muslim leaderships reinforced by orientalist guilt for the West’s troubled past with the Islamic world.

ation to the third SLA faction – known both as the Group of Nineteen and SLA Unity. In the months since the Abuja peace process ended, SLA Unity has dealt the government a series of stunning battlefield defeats and is suddenly the single strongest rebel force on the ground in Darfur. Its success has undoubtedly been one the factors that has propelled some Arabs off the fence.

The godfather of soul – in his prime.

It may not be a white Christmas here, but there’s always Archangel: