Author: Mick Hartley

While our investigative reporters uncover sordid but ultimately unremarkable tales of bungs in the backrooms of football clubs, Panorama’s Iranian counterparts are after altogether bigger fish. Yes, here’s Ali-Reza Maghsoud, reporting for IRINN, Tehran, on the Evil Tentacles of Zionist Capital:

While John Stith was busy in the laboratory testing various medications and substances, he discovered an essence that creates a [unique] flavor in the mouth, and this is how the cola drinks came into being. Since then, following fast-growing industrial production, these new drinks went beyond their country of origin. Due to our insatiable appetite, the manufacturers have become commercial giants and have managed to cross all borders worldwide, from the hotels and casinos of Las Vegas to the slums of Darfur in Sudan and of Afghanistan, reaching the winding alleys of all the cities of the world.

If only it were that simple… The Zionists are the largest shareholders in the world’s drink manufacturers. They make hundreds of thousands of billions of dollars from this annually. This way, they export their colonialist schemes with this product, at no additional cost.

Take, for example, the Pepsi drink. Do you know what Pepsi stands for? ‘Pay Each Penny Save Israel.’ […]

Many streets in countries around the world, and, unfortunately, in Arab countries too, are full of colorful billboards advertising Zionist companies. The money earned this way has turned into lead, which rips apart the chests of children in Palestine and Lebanon.

McDonald’s, Marlboro, Disney, Timberland, Revlon, Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, L’Oreal, and Garnier – these are among the capitalist companies that belong to the Zionist regime. All these companies have received the Jubilee Award, a special award granted by the Zionist regime in appreciation of people and investors who strengthen the Zionist regime.

Islamophobia” is a word that I do disapprove of quite a lot because it seems to me there is no reason why you should not dislike an idea. But if you have ideas that I don’t like, it’s perfectly OK for me to be phobic about them. To use that as a term of criticism is very anti-intellectual. There are people who dislike my ideas who have not been afraid of being phobic about them.

Here’s a classic piece of Arab victimology from Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, “Minister of Expatriates in Syria, and writer and professor at Damascus University”, writing in the London-based Asharq Alawsat:

Arabs face today a dilemma that appears to be conceptual or philosophical, however, it is political in depth and has grave consequences on the future of Arab generations and Arab homelands. Arabs’ problem is that they are intentionally forbidden from being victims despite all the massacres, war crimes and arbitrary acts committed by various forces against them.

Always the victims, the Arabs, but never the perpetrators. The world’s problems in a nutshell. And who’s the main culprit here?

In his last speech, President Bush classified all Arabs and Muslims as fascists, terrorists and enemies of freedom. He took the 19 perpetrators who attacked world trade towers as his evidence and neglected the humanistic and tolerant directions of Muslims throughout their history. What such a classification could be called except neo-racism against Muslims? It is like saying that all Americans are Timothy McVeigh who attacked the nursery in Oklahoma City. What hatred produced such logic and what violence and destruction such logic could produce?

A wilful misunderstanding of Bush’s remarks about the struggle against Islamo-fascism? Surely not. This is a woman with a distinguished career:

She received her Ph.D. in English Literature from Warwick University in England in 1982, and joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an advisor in 1988. Since then, she has represented Syria as a spokeswomen on an international level. In 2005 Dr. Shaaban was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in the same year, was presented with “the Most Distinguished Woman in a Governmental Position” award by the Arab League. Dr. Shaaban has published four books, and contributed to numerous others.

From an intrepid BBC reporter:

There are many thousands of Chinese restaurants around in the UK and everyone has their favourite dish, but only in China itself do chefs specialise in a range of slightly more unusual delicacies.

The dish in front of me is grey and shiny.

“Russian dog,” says my waitress Nancy.

“Big dog,” I reply.

“Yes,” she says. “Big dog’s penis…”

We are in a cosy restaurant in a dark street in Beijing but my appetite seems to have gone for a stroll outside.

Nancy has brought out a whole selection of delicacies.

They are draped awkwardly across a huge platter, with a crocodile carved out of a carrot as the centrepiece.

Nestling beside the dog’s penis are its clammy testicles, and beside that a giant salami-shaped object.

“Donkey,” says Nancy. “Good for the skin…” […]

Laughter trickles through the walls of our dining room.

“Government officials,” says Nancy. “Two of them upstairs. They’re having the penis hotpot.”

Most of the restaurant’s guests are either wealthy businessmen or government bureaucrats who, as Nancy puts it, have been brought here by people who want their help.

What better way to secure a contract than over a steaming penis fondue.

annicus: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain is published next week. “One day it just overflowed the top of the chalk ridge and started pouring over. Once the torrent started it would have ripped through the soft chalk and poured down towards the Atlantic.” […]

The discovery of the Channel flood may help to solve one of the enduring mysteries of British archeology — the apparent abandonment of the British Isles by humans for 120,000 years.

Researchers like Stringer have found that early humans first arrived in Britain at least 700,000 years ago. They were driven out by repeated glaciations but kept on returning whenever the land warmed up. However, between 180,000 and 60,000 years ago they vanished completely.

During that time Britain had periods of Mediterranean warmth when wildlife abounded. Early humans would have thrived — but there are no signs of them.

Nick Ashton, a senior curator at the British Museum, said that the flood and the resulting giant river valley could be the explanation.

“This giant river would have been a complete barrier to the Neanderthal peoples found in Europe at that time,” he said.

me to 40,000, but it has been ransacked so often by the government-backed Janjaweed militia that its dusty streets now lie empty.

After a bombing raid on September 11, many inhabitants moved to the African Union base on the outskirts, where 200 Rwandan peacekeepers are stationed. All around the barbed wire perimeter fence are makeshift homes built with dried grass and plastic tarpaulins.

More than 20,000 people live by the base and more arrive seeking refuge every day. Hassania Abubakar was in the nearby village of Tina when it was attacked. “We were farming as the children played in the water hole,” she said, surrounded by her four children. Suddenly Russian-built Antonov bombers used by the Sudanese government to attack villages appeared. “We grabbed our children and ran,” Abubakar said.

Two other children were wounded in the explosions that day. Their parents carried them six miles to the African Union base, from where they were taken to hospital. According to the peacekeepers, Sudanese troops then moved into the emptied village. Everything left behind was looted.

The Sudanese government has denied undertaking the continuing bombing raids and claims its military actions are in self-defence against rebels who will not sign last May’s peace deal.

The government of President Omar al-Bashir is refusing to admit 20,000 UN peacekeepers who were intended to replace the African Union’s contingent of 7,000 troops by the end of this week. Amid fears of a potential bloodbath, the African Union’s mandate has been extended until the end of the year.

“The best that can be said about the presence of the African Union is that they are witnesses,” said Roberta Cohen, an expert on Darfur at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Their mandate is so weak that all they can do is monitor and report the violence.”

dings of Prof. Bryan Sykes’ group, as I understand it, with the large proviso that they differ with respect to the Celtic contribution – or what counts as Celtic:

Everyone has heard of Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. And most of us are familiar with the idea that the English are descended from Anglo-Saxons, who invaded eastern England after the Romans left, while most of the people in the rest of the British Isles derive from indigenous Celtic ancestors with a sprinkling of Viking blood around the fringes.

Yet there is no agreement among historians or archaeologists on the meaning of the words “Celtic” or “Anglo-Saxon.” What is more, new evidence from genetic analysis (see note below) indicates that the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, to the extent that they can be defined genetically, were both small immigrant minorities. Neither group had much more impact on the British Isles gene pool than the Vikings, the Normans or, indeed, immigrants of the past 50 years.

This is odd, though:

The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands.

This implies that there were two separate geological processes involved – the melting of the ice-caps, and the movement of the land-masses. But the latter – tectonic plates and all that – occurs over a much larger time-scale than a few thousand years. All that’s been happening as far as Britain’s connection to the European mainland is concerned, in the time-scales we’re talking about, is that the sea-level’s varied according to the state of the ice-caps.

Whatever, it’s interesting stuff – including the idea that the pre-Roman population of Britain may not have spoken a Celtic language, as is generally assumed:

So who were the Britons inhabiting England at the time of the Roman invasion? The history of pre-Roman coins in southern Britain reveals an influence from Belgic Gaul. The tribes of England south of the Thames and along the south coast during Caesar’s time all had Belgic names or affiliations. Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large Celtic tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the home counties north of the Thames. Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul “the language differs but little.”

The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people, as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.

prevent unauthorized vehicles from approaching the facility.” Like in Amish country.)

It’s these conflations of Hamas with the “global left” or Wahhabis with the Amish that are truly lazy. In contrast, the Islamism-fascism comparison has ample and even distinguished academic precedents. Younger scholars and students should seize the moment to explore it further, with intellectual rigor and without fear.

I posted about the Benghazi Aids case last week. Now here’s an editorial in Nature (via Secular Blasphemy):

International diplomacy, dealing as it does with geopolitical and economic realpolitik, by necessity often involves turning a blind eye. But its lack of progress in response to the medics’ case in Libya is an affront to the basic democratic principles that the United States and the European Union espouse. Diplomacy has lamentably failed to deliver.

The principles of law and science have the common aim of discovering the truth. A previous assessment of the case by two prominent AIDS researchers, Luc Montagnier and Vittorio Colizzi, concluded that the charges are false, that the medics are innocent, and that the infections resulted from poor hygiene in Libya’s hospitals. It was not a plot orchestrated by the CIA and Israel’s Mossad, as President Gaddafi alleged in 2001 — an allegation that has driven a popular thirst for vengeance in Libya.

The case is politically embarrassing for Gaddafi. Finding a scapegoat is easier than having to admit that the infection of the children was an accidental tragedy. But the most likely diplomatic compromise — that the medics will be condemned to death, with this being commuted to a life sentence — is unacceptable. They are innocent, and the law and science can prove it, if they get the belated opportunity.

That is why scientists should lend their full support to the call by Lawyers without Borders — a volunteer organization that last year helped win the freedom of Amina Lawal, who had been sentenced to death in Nigeria for having a child outside marriage — that Libya’s courts should order a fully independent, international scientific assessment of how the children were contaminated.

In 2004, an Editorial in this journal stated, with respect to the medics’ case, that “Gaddafi has a chance to show the world that he now understands that true leadership means embracing justice, compassion and a respect for scientific evidence” (Nature 430, 277; 200410.1038/430277a). Two years on, we are still waiting, and Lawyers without Borders is right to hold President Gaddafi and the international community to account.

The scientific community has also been relatively silent on the case, perhaps in the hope that it would be sorted out by diplomacy. But the latter has not proved to be the case, and scientific leaders need to use all their influence urgently, as the fate of the medics will be sealed in the coming weeks. It is time not only to save the doctor and nurses, but also to defend a common vision of science and law in establishing the truth, above all other imperatives. Meanwhile, Gaddafi has the opportunity to put this affair behind him by giving the six an immediate pardon.

Apparently it’s a myth that we English are Anglo-Saxon stock who drove the Celts out to the far corners of Scotland and Wales. We’re 64% Celts ourselves – and we all came from Spain:

A major genetic study of the population of Britain appears to have put an end to the idea of the “Celtic fringe” of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

Instead, a research team at Oxford University has found the majority of Britons are Celts descended from Spanish tribes who began arriving about 7,000 years ago.

Even in England, about 64 per cent of people are descended from these Celts, outnumbering the descendants of Anglo- Saxons by about three to one.

The proportion of Celts is only slightly higher in Scotland, at 73 per cent. Wales is the most Celtic part of mainland Britain, with 83 per cent. […]

“If one thinks that the English are genetically different from the Scots, Irish and Welsh, that’s entirely wrong,” he [Prof.Bryan Sykes, human geneticist at Oxford] said.

“In the 19th century, the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority was very widespread. At the moment, there is a resurgence of Celtic identity, which had been trampled on. It’s very vibrant and obvious at the moment.

“Basically the cornerstone of Celtic identity is that they are not English. However, to try to base that, as some do, on an idea that is not far beneath the surface that Celtic countries are somehow descended from a race of Celts, which the English are not, is not right. We are all descended from the same people.

“It should dispel any idea of trying to base what is a cultural identity on a genetic difference, because there really isn’t one.”