Author: Mick Hartley

At Metafilter, links to some wonderful old videos on YouTube including Son House, Bill Monroe, Skip James, et al: enough to keep you off the streets for an evening or two. Howlin’ Wolf – from the Ed Sullivan show?? – is introduced by a very young and very English-sounding Brian Jones. Whatever you think of the Stones, they were always scrupulous about acknowledging their blues heroes, and making sure they got recognition.

Update: it’s not difficult to get hooked on this. I couldn’t resist searching for the Louvin Brothers, and found this. It’s still amazing, even though the sound is out of synch. And then there’s this, excerpted from the BBC series on country music from a few years back. You know…if you like that kind of thing….

Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, writes at the Guardian’s comment-is-free site about that “never again”, and how hollow it sounds in the light of what’s happening in Darfur:

There’s a genocide going on in Darfur. That much is widely accepted. And although there is a lot of room for disagreement about what, exactly, to do about it, I’m rather puzzled at the large number of people who seem to think that no one should do anything at all. […]

[T]he legitimacy of the United Nations and the entire post-second world war international apparatus was in large part based on that “never again” oath. Given that no one seems willing to follow up on that, what role remains for these organisations? And given that they’ve failed at perhaps their most important mission, how can they be trusted with any others?

If you have a strong stomach, you might feel like looking at the comments.

Muammar Gaddafi has called on Pope Benedict XVI to convert to Islam immediately, dismissing last week’s apology from the pontiff for offending Muslims.

“If this person were really someone reasonable, he would not agree to remain at his post one minute, but would convert to Islam immediately,” Mohammed Gaddafi told an awards ceremony on Monday evening for an international competition to memorise the Qur’an.

“We say to the pope – whether you apologise or not is irrelevant, as apologies make no difference to us.”

Gaddafi junior also hit out at “those Muslims who look for comfort in the words of a non-Muslim”.

He said Muslims “should not look for charity from the infidel… but should fight Islam’s enemies who attack the faith and the Prophet Muhammad”.

Clear enough?

ers and mothers is simply not realistic. If the message they hear from us is that the necessary condition for being European is to abandon their religion, then they will choose not to be European. For secular Europeans to demand that Muslims adopt their faith—secular humanism—would be almost as intolerant as the Islamist jihadist demand that we should adopt theirs.

Where are these people who demand that Muslims abandon their faith – these so-called enlightenment fundamentalists? Hirsi Ali certainly isn’t one: she’s made it plain that she thinks Islam can exist peacefully in the West, but that to do so it needs a reformation. As an Amazon reviewer notes:

Although Ms. Ali is herself a Muslim apostate and even an atheist, she maintains that it is possible for Islam to reform itself (indeed, she believes it must, to avoid a state of perpetual war). To this end, the book includes a short interview she conducted with Ugandan-born Canadian author Irshad Manji (her book, “The Trouble With Islam” is available on Amazon). Although Manji is completely westernized–no head covering, a feminist and even an open lesbian–she still considers herself a proud and faithful Muslim. Many readers may accuse them of not having a “true” knowledge of the religion, but that is part of their point. How many Christians know the details of the bible, yet still maintain faithfulness? Thus, they seek to reconcile Islam with secularism, by placing each in its own realm. Though Ms. Ali has rejected religion entirely, she doesn’t expect anybody to follow her.

So as well as patronising her, Garton Ash totally misrepresents her views.

good, reaching out to Muslims and helping them win the battles for ideas against the extremists, he has created division and fuelled fanaticism.

The chances of dialogue look pretty thin if any criticism of Islam is greeted with riots and threats of violence. You can’t have a discussion with those who have no intention of shifting from an absolute belief in their rightness and everybody else’s wrongness, and who appear only to be interested in the degree of offence that they believe has been caused them.

And how is this business of the Pope “reaching out to Muslims and helping them win the battles for ideas against the extremists” meant to work exactly, if he’s not allowed to utter one word which might cause offence to those extremists? It limits his options somewhat. Surely the relationship between Islam and violence is a topic of genuine concern, and one that the Pope might reasonably be expected to comment on. It seems to me – and presumably seemed to the Pope – a less confrontational way to introduce the topic, to quote a source dating back several hundred years, and use that as a point of departure, rather than to state upfront the obvious truth that many Islamic clerics nowadays embrace violence with relish. So – an opening for dialogue. There was, and still is, an opportunity for Muslims to take up the dialogue, but it’s hardly the Pope’s fault if that opportunity’s been turned down in favour of the easier option of outrage. It seems clear enough that, on one side at least, there’s no interest whatever in dialogue: merely an interest in being offended.

Other letters are so stereotypical as to make one wonder if they’re parodies (but then so much that’s been written on this topic over the past few days has that feeling, not least the contributions from Guardian regulars Madeleine Bunting and Karen Armstrong). We get an Imam explaining that “Islam is a religion of peace” (so all those instances of violence in the name of Allah are doctrinally impossible, and therefore didn’t happen) and further contributions on how wonderfully tolerant Islam was in Spain, and, that old favourite, how it’s “as well for us to remember the contribution that Islam has made to Western civilisation.” That last – but of course – from a Reverend.

The Hungarian PM sets a fine example to other politicians with some abrasive honesty:

Hungary’s prime minister has admitted saying that his party lied to the public to win April’s general election.

Ferenc Gyurcsany’s admission came after Hungarian radio played a tape of a meeting he had with his Socialist MPs a few weeks after the election.

On it he says the party had lied to the public and his “boneheaded” government failed to introduce any real policies. […]

A brief excerpt was played on Hungarian state radio and others appeared on web sites. It is not clear how they were leaked.

In the excerpts, Mr Gyurcsany says harsh economic reforms are needed.

“There is not much choice. There is not, because we screwed up. Not a little, a lot. No European country has done something as boneheaded as we have.

“Evidently, we lied throughout the last year-and-a-half, two years. It was totally clear that what we are saying is not true.

“You cannot quote any significant government measure we can be proud of, other than at the end we managed to bring the government back from the brink. Nothing. If we have to give account to the country about what we did for four years, then what do we say?”

Mr Gyurcsany thanks “divine providence, the abundance of cash in the world economy and hundreds of tricks” for keeping the economy above board.

In a speech sprinkled with obscenities, he says: “We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening.”

Here we go again:

Turkey’s faltering hopes of European Union membership look set to be dealt a blow this week when Elif Shafak, one of the leading members of a new generation of Turkish female novelists, faces charges under the country’s draconian restrictions on freedom of speech.

Shafak, 34, is being tried under article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which makes it an offence to insult “Turkishness”. Her alleged crime is that a character in her latest bestselling novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, describes the massacres of Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire as a genocide — an interpretation which, although widely accepted internationally, is still vigorously denied by the Turkish state.

Although other Turks have faced charges for referring to the events of 1915-16 as a genocide, Shafak is the first writer to be prosecuted for words spoken by a character in a work of fiction.

Nor do the authorities seem concerned by the fact that, nine months pregnant, Shafak is expected to give birth to her first child at the same time that she is due in court.

Shafak is determined to appear to face the charges. “I don’t think the case has affected my health so far,” she said. “But of course it has made me anxious.”

The charges against Shafak come from the Union of Jurists, a group of ultra-nationalist lawyers led by Kemal Kerincsiz. “Shafak’s novel is not a work of literature. It is Armenian propaganda,” said Kerincsiz. “Initiating the case against Shafak was not just what we wanted to do, it was our duty.”

One segment of Peter Tatchell’s piece on Darfur (excerpted at Harry’s Place) rings false for me:

If these massacres were happening to white people in Surrey or Sweden, you can be sure there would be swift intervention to halt the killing. One cannot help wonder whether the global indifference to the slaughter in Darfur has anything to do with the fact that the victims are black.

This is such a tired line. The most significant feature, surely, is that the killings are taking place in an avowedly Islamist state. If there was a Christian, or secular, regime in Khartoum – and certainly if it was Western-backed – the uproar from the Muslim world would be deafening, and the Left would have mobilised in force by now in countless demonstrations and conferences. As it is, any feasible ending to the suffering – in terms of UN action – is opposed by Khartoum as neo-colonialism, and would almost certainly be greeted by violent condemnation across the Muslim world as yet another crusade by the West against Islam. Muslims being killed is only a problem if the perpetrators are non-Muslims.

For much of the Western Left Darfur simply doesn’t push the right anti-American buttons. Mind you, I see from the comments to Tatchell’s article that strenuous efforts are being made to incorporate Darfur into a more familiar story:

The UN fact-finding commssion that exhaustively investigated the situation in Darfur, as opposed to pulling things out of your bum as you are doing, explicitly stated that there was NO GENOCIDE and gave several reasons why this was not so.

It said yes, most of the rights violations were committed by the government forces but these were committed in the context of counterinsurgency warfare, such as the far more egregrious atrocities being committed by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not with any sort of genocidal intent.

The reason for the suffering in Darfur is the Western-armed and -financed insurgency whose only purpose is to grab Sudan’s vast oil wealth away from China and hand it to Chevron.

The insurgency in the south, fomented by US christian evangelists in Uganda, started for the same reason. As soon as Khartoum solved that, the US started one in Darfur and another one in the north, with French and Israeli help, using Chad and Eritrea for training and supply bases.

Phew – it is the West’s fault, after all.

al excess. They question the wisdom of his decision-making, as they wryly ridicule his claims of victory. A poll conducted in Lebanon in late August revealed that two thirds of the non-Shi’ite public believed that Hizbullah had actually been defeated in the war.

Hugo Chavez thinks it’s plausible that the US government was involved in 9/11 (via):

The Venezuelan leader, an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush, was reacting to a television report investigating a theory that the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives after hijacked airplanes crashed into them in 2001.

“The hypothesis is not absurd . . . that those towers could have been dynamited,” Chavez said in a speech to supporters. “A building never collapses like that, unless it’s with an implosion.”

“The hypothesis that is gaining strength . . . is that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world,” Chavez said.

“Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq.”

Clearly, then, just the sort of person Ken would want to do business with:

Details of the deal under discussion emerged in a memo seen by the Guardian that described the progress of meetings between the mayor’s most senior officials, embassy officials and figures from PDV UK, the Venezuelan state oil company.

It said London would receive an unspecified amount of oil as part of the 1.3m barrels needed to run the buses each year. In return the mayor’s aides would promise to “actively and efficiently promote Venezuela’s image in the UK” by highlighting the oil deal’s benefits for London’s poor and by boosting tourism with advertisements on buses.

It surely won’t be long before we get “9/11 – tell us the truth” slogans on London buses.