t take on the whole Parliafunkadelicmentthang that I’ve yet come across. And then there’s The Motherpage.
“Behold, I am Funkadelic. I am not of your world. But fear me not, I will do you no harm. Loan me your funky mind and I shall play with it. For nothing is good unless you play with it. And all that is good, is nasty!”
Update: advert for Parliament’s “Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome” album (they don’t make titles like that any more), released 1977, on YouTube.
– Uzbekistan – to the city of Mazar-e-Sharif. He takes us back to May 1997. The Taliban have just occupied the city:
Then fighting broke out. The Hazara especially – Shias distrustful of the fiercely Sunni Taliban – turned on the invaders in a wholesale massacre. The Taliban were mown down in streets they did not know. Some two thousand were taken west into the desert at Dasht-e-Laili, where they were thrown down wells, or asphyxiated in shipment containers. Even those sheltering in the Hazrat Ali shrine where I walked were taken out and shot.
But the next year, in August, the Taliban returned. They drove their jeeps into the city, machine-gunning shopkeepers, women, old men, children, even donkeys and dogs. Then they hunted down the Hazaras, house by house, killing the men with three shots, to the head, chest, and testicles. Their leaders broadcast from the mosques that the Hazara were pagans, and so licensed their death. As refugees streamed from the city, Taliban aircraft strafed them at will…
In the nearby village of Qezelabad, Thubron talks to a group of men:
When the Taliban came, they said, they had escaped into the mountains, and at last to their fellow believers in Shia Iran. But their old people were left behind, with those who could not flee. They had been shot or stabbed to death. None were left.
“People came from the outside to bury our dead,” a man said. “They were lying in the streets, they told us, and in the houses. Old people, harmless. They were our elders. It was four years before we could return, after the Taliban left. And nobody knew their graves.”
“There were three hundred families here,” said another man. “Now there are barely a hundred. They killed thirteen people from my family.”
At the village school:
Threadbare carpets covered the earth floor of a gutted house, where forty children sat. There was no furniture, no light. A blackboard stood in a crumbled alcove, where a young woman was teaching geography. In the sunlight falling through the fractured walls, the children turned to stare at us, clear-faced and smiling. Under the gaping roof next door a young man was holding an exam among older students, some of them adults, male and female mixed. A few of the women were miraculously beautiful. The teacher stood in a patch of broken sun. I stayed and listened for a while, wishing I spoke their Persian. His voice made a nervous music. But it was the women who burnt the eyes with tears. The Taliban had hated them. All schools were closed to them. Together with a ban on music, chess and the flying of kites, no woman’s voice was to be heard in public – on pain of whipping – nor her laughter, nor even her footsteps.
ability and the need to establish an effective ICC to deter future war criminals should take precedence over the immediate suffering of the northern Ugandans.
On the other hand, it is inconceivable that those directly responsible for these unspeakable crimes should escape being held accountable.
This is the dilemma that must be resolved when all other solutions to the conflict have failed.
A good overview of the Mohammed Al Dura affair (via Solomonia) which lays much of the blame for the outcome of the recent French libel trial on the silence of the Israeli government:
In their judgment last week, the judges argued that Karsenty’s allegations against Enderlin and France 2 could not be credible since “no Israeli authority, neither the army which is nonetheless most affected, nor the Justice [Ministry] have ever accorded the slightest credit to these allegations” regarding the mendacity of the Dura film.
Over the years Israeli officials have justified their silence by saying that it was a losing proposition to reopen the Dura case. We’ll be accused of blaming the victim, they said.
This statement is both cowardly and irresponsible. As the French verdict shows, without an Israeli protest, the protests of private individuals, however substantial, ring hollow. When Israel refuses to defend itself from blood libels, it gives silent license to attacks against Israel and world Jewry in the name of those libels.
In 2000, Barak was desperately trying to close a peace deal with Yasser Arafat. The last thing he wanted was to admit that Arafat was promulgating blood libels against Israel. So he was silent. This is unforgivable, but understandable.
Israel’s continued silence is a sign that Israeli officialdom has still not understood what the war of images demands of it. The Dura film, like the fictional massacre of Lebanese children at Kafr Kana in Lebanon this summer, shows that victory or defeat in wars is today largely determined on television. To win, Israel must go on the offensive and attack untruthful, distorted images that are used to justify the killing of Israelis and Jews throughout the world.
Could this be the next step in Sudan’s Darfur campaign? (via)
President Omar al-Bashir lashed out Tuesday at foreign media and relief groups active in Darfur implying that aid organizations serving the some 2.5 million people forced to flee their homes could face expulsion.
The Sudanese leader’s warning follows the departure Monday by the United Nations chief envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, after the government gave him three days to leave the country.
Sudan’s government was working to “rid (refugee) camps of those exploiting the suffering of the people, those suspicious organizations who are part of a series of conspiracies,” the official news agency quoted al-Bashir as saying during his speech at the start of Muslims’ Eid al-Fitr vacation.
“We have promised before God not to let Darfurians’ suffering be a pretext for foreign intervention or a subject for hostile media,” al-Bashir said according to SUNA.
Well, why not? They have liitle to fear from the UN, and sanctions are unlikely to hurt given the oil-inspired boom currently underway. And if you want to stop hostile media attention, just do what the Chinese do in Tibet or Xinjiang – get rid of the media.
From the NYT:
While one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises continues some 600 miles away in Darfur, across Khartoum bridges are being built, office towers are popping up, supermarkets are opening and flatbed trucks hauling plasma TV’s fight their way through thickening traffic.
Despite the image of Sudan as a land of cracked earth and starving people, the economy is booming, with little help from the West. Oil has turned it into one of the fastest growing economies in Africa — if not the world — emboldening the nation’s already belligerent government and giving it the wherewithal to resist Western demands to end the conflict in Darfur.
American sanctions have kept many companies from Europe and the United States out of Sudan, but firms from China, Malaysia, India, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are racing in. Direct foreign investment has shot up to $2.3 billion this year, from $128 million in 2000, all while the American government has tried to tighten the screws. […]
The boom is also strengthening the government’s hand at home. Over the past few years, Mr. Bashir has been on an infrastructure binge, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into roads, bridges, power plants, hospitals and schools, projects that tend to boost any government’s popularity. Mr. Bashir seems to desperately need it, with many people across the country, not just in Darfur, openly rebelling against his rule.
Mr. Bashir, an army general, seized power in 1989 through a military coup, and among the biggest beneficiaries of these boom times have been his troops. Ms. Mahdi said more than 70 percent of the government’s share of oil profits is spent on defense. A government priority is to manufacture guns and ammunition domestically, in case external supplies are cut off.
Astonishingly, no prosecutions have yet been brought in Britain against those practising female circumcision:
Hundreds of young girls in Britain are suffering genital mutilation at the hands of women paid to come to Britain by their families.
African immigrants are clubbing together to pay for practitioners to fly to Britain and circumcise their daughters in highly secretive rituals.
Police believe that the trend has developed among parents who do not have passports or cannot afford to return to their home countries to have their daughters circumcised, a brutal practice that remains commonplace throughout Africa.
The procedure is generally performed by elderly women, in unsterilised conditions with no anaesthetic. Children as young as five have parts or all of their clitoris or labia removed. Some have their vaginas sewn up or the flesh shrunk with corrosives. […]
In Britain, female circumcision — or female genital mutilation (FGM) — is illegal, and carries a maximum sentence of 14 years’ imprisonment. The penalty has, however, failed to halt the practice, with thousands of young girls taken abroad each year for that purpose. There has never been a prosecution, although it has been an offence since 1985 with the introduction of the FGM Act. Since 2003, taking a child to another country to have it done has also been an offence.
Female circumcision among the African community in Britain has been commonplace for years but the wider population has been unaware of it. Now, however, police, social services and health workers have become concerned. They believe it to be widespread, with about 25,000 young girls remaining at risk in Britain, according to the Foundation for Women’s Health Research and Development (Forward).
In the US, though, a father is being prosecuted for allegedly circumcising his daughter at the age of two, at home, with a pair of scissors (via):
Adem, 30, was charged with aggravated battery and cruelty to children more than three years ago and, if convicted, could face 40 years in prison. He was born in Ethiopia, where circumcision is a common procedure for young girls.
Adem’s trial may be a landmark case for health and human rights activists fighting against the African custom they call genital mutilation. But for those close to the victim, this trial is about vindication and healing for a little girl who was forced to endure unbearable pain.
uncil of Ulema in Mecca and Medina, the Shi’ite seminaries of Najaf (Iraq) and Qom (Iran) and all five associations of Iraq’s Sunni clerics.
This may strike you as absurdly optimistic, if you’ve been soaking up the entirely negative coverage we’ve been getting here of late. But on the other hand…why not? As Mao supposedly said of the effects of the French Revolution – and as Jeff Jacoby argues here – it’s too early to tell.
A French court has ruled against Philippe Karsenty in his case with France2 Television, on the Mohammed al-Dura affair:
A French television company yesterday won a libel case over accusations that it faked a report into the killing of a Palestinian boy whose death in 2000 became a symbol of the uprising known as the second intifada.
A court in Paris ordered Philippe Karsenty, the director of the Media Ratings website, to pay France 2 and its Israel correspondent, Charles Enderlin, symbolic damages of 1 [Euro] each.
“Hopefully, this decision will end a campaign of defamation that is particularly dangerous because it affects those with a duty to inform the public,” Benedicte Amblard, a lawyer for France 2, said after the ruling.
Mr Karsenty, who was also fined 1,000 (£670) and told to pay legal costs of 3,000, said: “It is a very sombre day for France. We are going to appeal.”
Media Ratings accused France2 of using staged footage in a report on the death of Mohammed al-Durra, 12 , which accused Israeli troops of shooting the boy as he took cover with his father during a gun battle between Israelis and Palestinians.
More at PM, plus some details from Richard Landes.