Author: Mick Hartley

reason to obey its moral inferiors, be they allies or enemies. China has now learned that despite decades of military and economic assistance it can draw on no residue of good will in dealing with Pyongyang.

>intense, and provocative, with the odd “everything relates to everything else” to pad it out a bit. No doubt they even believe it. And the message they’re pushing is this: art is produced by a special group of people, a specially sensitive and talented and indeed charismatic group of people, who provide the rest of us – poor drab lost souls that we are – with a glimpse into the world of human genius and creativity, which we gain access to only by entering the magic kingdom of the art gallery.

This, of course, is so diametrically opposed to what so many of the greats of modern art believed that it makes you weep – but that’s the way with revolutions: the visionaries give way to the bureaucrats.

Ken speaks out:

London Mayor Ken Livingstone said he would like Muslims to give up the veil.

But he suggested change was not something that could be imposed from outside the Muslim community.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Getting Muslim women to give up the veil – which I suspect is something most people would like to see in the long term, including myself – is not going to be done by old white male politicians telling them to do it.

“It will be change from within. That is why it’s important we should engage with the progressive elements and leaders in the Muslim community.”

Like, um, support-suicide-bombers, kill-homosexuals, beat-wives-as-long-as-the-marks-don’t-show Sheikh Qarawadi?

e the nature of human life on earth into the image of the Taliban. If you want the whole earth to look like Taliban Afghanistan, then you’re on the same side as them. If you don’t want that, you’re not. They do not represent the quest for human justice. That, I think, is one of the great mistakes of the left.” […]

He senses soft racism in the refusal to see Islamic fundamentalists for what they are. When looking at the Christian fundamentalists of the United States, most people see an autonomous movement of superstitious madmen. But when they look at their Islamic equivalents, they assume they cannot mean what they say. “One of the things that’s commonly said by Islamists is that it’s acceptable to bomb a disco, because a disco is a place where people are behaving in a disgusting way. Go away and die – that’s all Bin Laden wants you to do. It’s not just about Iraq, it’s about ham sandwiches and kissing in public places and sex with girls you’re not married to.” He pauses. “It’s about life.” […]

It horrifies Salman that so many people in his natural political home – the left – don’t get this. They seem to imagine that when people call for a novelist to be beheaded for blasphemy, they are really calling for a return to the 1967 borders, or an independent Kashmir, or an end to the occupation of Iraq. They are not, he stresses. They mean what they say. “I think the left is misreading the situation for two reasons. The worthy reason is a desire to understand rather than condemn, to go out of your way to see what they’re on about.”

But “so much of the left always seems to fall for fascist bastards pretending to be speaking on behalf of the masses. They’ve done it before with communism in its various forms, and here’s another bunch of fascist bastards claiming to be speaking for the downtrodden masses, and they’re falling for it again.”

And now it’s 654,966 (via):

Iraqi kidnappers who abducted a Syrian Orthodox priest three days ago left his beheaded corpse in an outlying suburb of the northern city of Mosul last night. Father Boulos Iskander, 59, was snatched off a Mosul street on Monday afternoon (October 9) while searching for car parts at local mechanic shops. The Muslim kidnappers telephoned the priest’s oldest son soon afterwards, demanding $350,000 ransom from the family. After negotiations in several more calls, the kidnappers gradually reduced their demands to $40,000 but added another stipulation: that the priest’s church must publicly repudiate Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks about Islam in his lecture in Germany last month. The family managed to raise and pay the ransom, and the St. Ephram parish of the Syrian Orthodox Church placed 30 large signboards on walls around the city, distancing itself from the pontiff’s comments. But then the telephone calls stopped. Fr. Iskander’s dismembered body was discovered last night (October 11) at about 7 p.m. in the remote Tahrir City district, two kilometers (1.2 miles) from the center of Mosul. His arms and legs had been severed and arranged around his head, which rested on his chest.

If it’s achieved nothing else, at least the North Korean nuclear test has highlighted the political divisions in SE Asia [update: er, East Asia):

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun talked about his views on the history of Japan’s wartime atrocities for 40 minutes during talks with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Seoul on Monday, forcing them to abandon a joint statement, entourage sources said.

Roh refused Abe’s request to issue a joint statement condemning North Korea for its alleged nuclear test, according to the sources. The South Korean leader then talked for 40 minutes about his views on the history of Japan’s atrocities during World War II and visits by Japanese politicians to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine.

During the meeting, South Korean Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Ban Ki-moon handed a memorandum to Roh, urging him to discuss a joint statement with Abe. The sources said this suggested there is a perception gap between the president’s office and the ministry over the country’s interpretation of history and its North Korea policy.

No doubt it’s all part of Kim Jong-Il’s cunning plan.

a misleading impression of ordered hierarchy. Public dissent is impossible, and private disputes are, even for the powerful, one-way passes to labour camps. But there are unmistakable if necessarily sketchy indications of chronic and worsening tensions within the regime.

Beijing is undoubtedly aware of a recent note circulated to senior Workers’ Party cadres, reporting the theft of several thousand weapons from military depots and, linked to these thefts, the murder of 200 high-ranking officers by attackers who dispersed before they could be captured. High-ranking party members no longer go out late at night and have asked for camouflaged guards to ward off attacks.

In the ranks of North Korea’s 1.2 million-strong military, indiscipline bred of deprivation and hunger is spreading despite Kim’s vaunted “military first” policy. Soldiers raid food stores and sell surplus rations to even hungrier civilians. There is rampant smuggling of military equipment and fuel across the supposedly closely policed border with China. Patrol boats have been stranded at sea because sailors had pumped out the fuel tanks and filled them up with water. Factory managers and the secret police are into similar rackets, stripping factories idled for want of fuel and raw materials.

With Kim, it’s difficult to tell how much is cunning and how much is desperation. Of course if the whole thing was a dud, then it’ll turn into farce.

Update: more on the problems of a collapsing regime:

As the United Nations Security Council mulls sanctions against North Korea, it must consider one question that could affect the stability of North Asia for years to come: Would the collapse of Kim Jong Il’s government prove more dangerous than leaving him in charge of a nuclear-armed state?

The prospect of regime change in Pyongyang may cheer many in Washington who view Mr. Kim as running a militarist regime that has tortured and starved its own people and traded missiles to Pakistan, Iran, Syria and others. But turmoil in North Korea could damage the economies of China and South Korea, set off a refugee crisis and lead to military conflict.

Does the requirement that young women serve their destiny by becoming mothers mean that they can never be used as suicide bombers to blow up Zionists? Such is the thorny dilemma tackled head on by Dr. Muhammad Salim Al-Awa, secretary-general of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, on Al-Jazeera (clip 1287):

The Muslims who fight the Zionists in the West Bank and Gaza – in Palestine – have begun to use young women as [human] bombs in self-sacrifice operations, in which a person blows himself up in a Zionist crowd of soldiers or policemen, and so on. One [sheik] ruled that this is forbidden. Why? He said: “Because Allah created women for pregnancy and childbirth, so if you send her to explode, or convince her to blow herself up, you prevent the will of Allah from being fulfilled, because this woman will never marry, get pregnant, or give birth.” Well, what if she dies in a car crash or a plane crash? What if she dies a natural death? What if she never gets married? What is this nonsense? What is more important: The right of countries to be liberated from the colonialists, or the right of a woman to get married and give birth? If this can be called a right at all, because it may or may not happen… This fatwa had a negative effect in Palestine, I’m sad to say, because many mothers – good, dear mothers – began to fear that if their daughters did this, they would be committing a sin, so they told them that this sheik forbade it. A long debate ensued, but, Allah be praised, eventually people ignored this fatwa.

ters to take advantage of all the opportunities that Britain has to offer, do not encourage them to wear the veil. We must unite against the radical Muslim men who would love women to be hidden, unseen and unheard.

I was able to take advantage of what Britain has got to offer and I hope Mr Straw’s comments will help more Muslim women to do the same. But my argument with those Muslims who would only be happy in a Talebanised society, who turn their face against integration, is this: “If you don’t like living here and don’t want to integrate, then what the hell are you doing here? Why don’t you just go and live in an Islamic country?”

It’s difficult to see quite what Kim Jong-Il hopes to achieve by his nuclear weapons test; it’s more like a display of petulant machismo. He’s now seriously annoyed China, his one remaining ally, and some form of UN sanctions are surely inevitable. The South Koreans will be reconsidering their Sunshine Policy, the Japanese will be thinking about the degree to which they need to arm themselves…

Maybe he just wants to go out with a bang.