Author: Mick Hartley

Amusing interview with Tom Stoppard in the Telegraph:

When Harold Pinter was lobbying to have London’s Comedy Theatre renamed the Pinter Theatre, Stoppard wrote back: “Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?” His liking for Lady Thatcher appears to have a theatrical as well as ideological dimension, for he saw in her radicalism the seeds of great drama. “In the period before the arrival of Mrs Thatcher,” he once said, “politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and said exactly what she thought. Everyone’s eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping, and I really enjoyed that.”

For all this, it might be fairer to call Stoppard a libertarian than a Conservative. In the 1970s, when the big names of British theatre – all of predictably uniform Leftist sympathies – reserved their denunciations for the United States and its supposedly nefarious doings in places like Nicaragua, Stoppard was quietly active among the dissident groups of the Eastern Bloc. In part this was attributable to his roots, but it speaks, equally, to the maturity of his thinking. […]

He went to boarding school in Yorkshire, but showed only limited aptitude for learning, and left at 17 to become a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol. He enjoyed the job, and later applied for a bigger one on the London Evening Standard. The editor, Charles Wintour, a chilly Fleet Street veteran, quizzed him sternly: “I gather you’re interested in politics,” said Wintour. “Who’s the Home Secretary?”

“Look,” blustered Stoppard, “I said I was interested, not obsessed.”

ngs, rape and pillage, people might have been expected to rejoice.

Instead, a small crowd of teenagers hoisted banners and chanted slogans denouncing the agreement. But their cries went unnoticed by the diplomats, whose convoy steered well clear of the shantytowns housing the victims. The awkward truth is that the accord, signed on May 5, has failed to stop the violence in Darfur and, in many areas, has made it worse. […]

Swapping their chamber in New York for a tent crowded with aid workers, the 15 Security Council ambassadors, including Sir Emyr Jones Parry, of Britain, heard that disputes over the pact have already led to clashes between the two main rebel factions. “The split between the two has intensified. It’s resulted in new attacks, in new displacements,” Cate Steains, the UN official in charge of protection for people in Darfur, told them. Minni Arcua Minnawi, who has signed the deal, leads the most powerful faction of the Sudan Liberation Army rebel group in terms of fighters.

But Abdel Wahed Mohamed al-Nur, the leader of the other faction of the group, commands the loyalty of much of Darfur’s biggest tribe, the Fur, whose assent will be crucial in making any agreement work. He says that the accord does not do enough to tackle the political marginalisation that prompted rebels to take up arms in 2003 or adequately compensate war victims.

Hardliners are loath to accept UN troops, reflecting suspicions that the UN is a cloak for Western countries opposed to President al-Bashir, who pursued Islamist policies after seizing power in a coup in 1989.

While many observers expect Sudan to accept a UN deployment, albeit grudgingly, the size, composition and mandate of the force remain unclear. “The clear message that any force will only be with the consent of the Government of Sudan has, I think, been very reassuring,” Sir Emyr said. He also said that any UN force is unlikely to be up and running before early next year — less reassuring words for people who are still too scared to go home.

Very reassuring? That any force will only be with the consent of the Government of Sudan? If that’s not Sir Emyr’s idea of a joke (and I don’t think it is) then it’s a fairly clear indication as to why all this is more about being seen to be doing something than a realistic attempt to stop the killing.

yself after a Saturday afternoon in January watching Doncaster Rovers.

* Football’s a team game. It’s not just about individual effort. Yes, the Olympics do have a few team games, but they’re silly ones like curling or hockey.

* I am second to none in my anti-anti-Americanism. Great country and all that. Where would we be without them? But I can’t help seeing it as a plus that the US basically don’t give a shit about football. I can imagine a number of alternative worlds – where the Nazis won the Second World War; where Iran had a Zoroastrian woman president; where string theory made sense – but imagining a world where the US are soccer-crazy: nope, can’t do it.

* Um, that’s about it. Iran have just equalised! Must get back to my seat in front of the telly.

rom conflict and displacement in the Horn of Africa. He was transformed into a fanatic at Feltham Young Offender Institution, West London, where Somalis are one of the largest minority groups.

Omaar contrasts Yassin’s life and beliefs with those of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former member of the Dutch Parliament. From a well-off family of dissenters, Hirsi Ali had a traditional but relatively privileged life in Somalia. To obtain Dutch citizenship, she claimed to have arrived directly from the violence and chaos of Somalia, omitting details of her family’s comfortable residences in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya.

In the Netherlands, she converted to liberal secularism. She joined Pym Fortuyn’s right-wing VVD party, flirted with neo-fascism, declared Islam to be a “barbaric” religion, and fought to stop Muslim immigration.

Through her statements, Omaar shows that Hirsi Ali acted as a handmaiden of hate and played a crucial role in the dehumanisation of [the] Muslim community. Both she and Yassin are zealots, albeit of different kinds. Why is it, Omaar asks, that we rightly condemn one form of zealotry but put the other on the pedestal?

So here we are, a couple of voices of moderate liberal Islam, and they can’t see any moral difference between a man who plans to murder infidels in the name of Allah, and a woman who’s spoken out forcefully and with great courage against the treatment of women in Islam. Indeed it’s quite clear where their sympathies lie: poor Yassin, a victim of circumstances with no real responsibility for his actions – “transformed into a fanatic at Feltham Young Offender Institution” – and Hirsi Ali, “a handmaiden of hate”, who’s played a crucial role “in the dehumanisation of [the] Muslim community”.

Hirsi Ali’s crime (apart from her “conversion” to liberal secularism, an interesting way of describing her decision to leave Islam) has been to speak the truth: something, apparently, that these moderate liberal Muslims can’t tolerate.

Update: Christopher Hope isn’t impressed with Omaar’s book:

Never have books explaining Islam been more needed. And you might have expected much from a Somali-born, Oxford-educated Muslim and leading BBC journalist, especially when his book is the second in a two-book deal for which Penguin paid around £600,000. Unfortunately, Rageh Omaar’s book on growing up a Muslim in Britain, interspersed with asides about his homeland, the Iraq war and the general Wickedness of the West, is a crushing disappointment: bland, platitudinous, muddled, lazy, factually unreliable and morally reprehensible. […]

Most shocking of all, though, is a chapter in which Omaar lumps together Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the celebrated Somalian feminist and anti-Muslim polemicist who was until recently a Dutch MP, and Yasin Hassan Omar, one of the failed July 21 suicide bombers. While both are driven by identical “bigotry and hate”, argues Omaar, Ali is protected by something called the “liberal fascism” of the West. To draw moral equivalence between a woman who has only ever used words to attack what she views as a repressive and outmoded ideology, and a man who set out to kill and maim as many innocent people as he could, is frankly a disgrace.

There’s something inexorable about the downward spiral of Darfur, despite increasing international attention, and the recent Nigeriian peace agreement:

Aid workers in Sudan’s Darfur region have told visiting UN ambassadors that the situation has worsened there since the signing of May’s peace deal.

They warned that the camps for the 2m people displaced in the crisis faced a potentially explosive situation.

Rebel factions in favour or opposed to the agreement have been attacking each other’s supporters and women were being increasingly targeted by rapists. […]

The 15 ambassadors from the UN Security Council are visiting Darfur to get backing for the peace agreement signed last month.

The BBC’s Mark Doyle, who is travelling with ambassadors, says briefings by aid workers and human right activists painted an alarming picture of deteriorating conditions in the camps.

The ambassadors were told it was too dangerous for them to visit the camps in case those who rejected the agreement mounted demonstrations.

If diplomats with armed guards are not safe in the camps, the situation of vulnerable civilians is far worse, and the partial peace agreement could become even more fragile if tensions in the camps boil over, our correspondent adds.

Human rights lawyers said the government was acting with impunity, arresting and torturing people on the basis of their tribe.

Nidra Poller on the Ka tribe, the new black separatist movement in France (via Solomonia):

On the last Sunday of May, 30 angry black men stormed into the heart of the old Jewish quarter, terrorizing residents, shopkeepers, and Sunday strollers. The self-styled militia of the Ka Tribe, a black separatist group originally connected to the no-longer funny black comic Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, embodied the worst fears of a Jewish community exposed, since January 2006, to a new rise in anti-Semitic attacks.

Three months after the torture-murder of Ilan Halimi, the intimidating incursion of the Ka militia into the narrow “Jewish” street of the Marais looks like an ominous sign of worse to come. The Ka Tribe is the lunatic fringe of a broad anti-Semitic movement originally inspired by Dieudonné, who has become a hero to a segment of black French society by focusing resentment on Jews. But Dieudonné, with a French mother and Cameroonian father, was not black enough for Stellio Capochichi, the Tribe’s leader, whose origins are Haitian and Ivoirian.

A self-serving interview with the college-educated leader, who calls himself Fara (pharaoh) Kemi Saba, appeared on the Ka website until the government shut it down two days after the rue des Rosiers incursion. Deftly manipulating the terms and gestures of French intellectual discourse, Kemi Saba, flanked by two husky bodyguards, lays out his latter-day ideology of “negritude,” a rehash of the worst of Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, born-again Africanism, and Malcolm X, served up with the nastiness of the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam. Though Kemi Saba preaches total separation from leucodermes (anything less than 100 percent pure blacks) and rejects both Christianity and Islam, he has a soft spot for Islamism. In a communiqué attacking “Sarkkkozy the Jew,” the Fara’s spokesman lashes out at “[whites] who make caricatures of the prophet of Islam.”

Kemi Saba’s resentment is all-embracing: the injustice that rankles him began with the very origins of humanity. The kémites (the term replaces leucoderm words like blacks, Africans, or Antilleans) are the true chosen people, destined to rule the world. Victims of oppression of mythical proportions, they will liberate themselves by returning to original sources of spirituality and social organization. Ka males—medzatones—are noble warriors; the females—Aset—are sublime beauties and perfect mothers; the children learn to be true kémites in the “School of Hor” (Horus). […]

Outside the ORT school, where the minister met with residents, a dapper gray-haired shop owner said, with dignified regret, “It’s over for Jews in France.” And added, “The police told me . . . they said it’s over for us . . . they can’t handle this problem. . . . It’s too late.”

From the Kuwait News Agency:

Iraqi citizens took to the streets celebrating Abu Musaab Zarqawi’s death on Thursday.

Joy filled Baghdad’s hot streets, as gun shots sounded through the air, and cars packed with overjoyed Iraqi’s roamed the streets. Iraqis were sharing sweets with people outside their homes.

Civil organizations paraded as they condemned violence chanting “death to Zarqawi and Saddamites.” Thursday’s celebrations could be compared to the jubilation in Baghdad’s streets the day Saddam Hussein was captured.

Iraqis hope Zarqawi’s death would bring an end to the series of terrorist operations on Iraqi streets.

Iraqi MP, Mahmoud Othman, said Zarqawi instigated sectarianism in Iraq and bloodied its streets.

He said he expected that the number of terrorist attacks will decrease dramatically and the new government will be able to stabilize Iraq. As a result, MNF troops will be able to leave Iraq sooner.

A MEMRI report on the revival of cultural life in Iraq:

The fall of the Saddam regime in April 2003 has brought with it unprecedented cultural vitality, despite an environment affected by constant acts of violence and terrorism, often directed against those who want to lead Iraq out of the dark tunnel of the past. Indeed, and ironically, it is partially the chaotic climate associated with weak or absent state institutions that has permitted the unprecedented freedom of cultural and artistic creativity. Although many writers, thinkers, novelists, artists and intellectuals fled or were forced into exile during the Saddam regime, many remained. Now, after years of being kept silent, the varied political, nationalist, and ethnic groups, are able, finally, to express themselves without restrictions or censorship but, regrettably, not entirely without fear.

Despite the impressive range of the new cultural explosion, the old Baathist totalitarianism is in danger of being replaced by a new religious intolerance:

The fall of the Saddam regime has released an enormous amount of intellectual and artistic energy that was suppressed or misdirected for almost four decades. The suppression was secular and political in nature. There is a looming danger of a different kind of suppression carried out by religious militias whose tolerance for liberal and secular culture goes no further than the muzzle of their gun.

Branches of the national libraries have been looted and privately owned bookstores in many parts of Iraq do not dare to offend the armed religious militias that prowl the streets in complete freedom. Cinemas, one of the most popular forms of entertainment for the vast majority of Iraqis, are almost extinct because of threats against what is narrowly perceived as lewd films or because people are afraid to congregate in one building which could be blown up at will. This is the case also with regard to other artistic events-a problem which is only exacerbated by the unreliability of the electrical supply.

It is true that the press is relatively free, but editors exercise self-censorship when it comes to criticizing the likes of the young radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who will not hesitate to unleash the fury of his militia against any journalist who might dare to criticize him. Other militias are also known for enforcing their own version of the law, including the use of extreme measure against individuals and institutions, particularly secularists.

nawi’s “unity” conference was little more than a coup, a grab for power portrayed as a move toward “democratization.”

Mohammadayn was not the first to be killed by Minawi’s men and, unless Minawi puts his house in order, he will not be the last. Tur al-Hadi Mohammad Abdel-Rahman, a notable of the Tunjur tribe, another tribe that has rallied to the SLA, was shot dead in front of a crowd that included his own nephew. One of those who witnessed the execution – a security officer in Minawi’s faction – says there were killings “every sunset” in the weeks he spent in Minawi’s headquarters. Most were accused of being government spies, but some were simply “educated people” – possible rivals to Minawi.

Amnesty International warned last week that Suleiman Marajan, an SLA commander well-known to the international partners attending the Darfur peace talks, has been arrested by Minawi and is “at risk of execution.” The seizure of Marajan, a popular commander who enjoys widespread support in both factions of the SLA, has pushed many of those who were sitting on the fence into open opposition to Minawi. Equally importantly, it has captured the attention of Western governments that were, until relatively recently, not unsupportive of the self-proclaimed “secretary general” of the SLA. Marajan, unlike Mohammadayn and Tur al-Hadi, is not an unknown to the international community. His death, perhaps just his continued imprisonment, will cause much blood to flow in Darfur. It will also guarantee that international sympathy for Minawi, already waning, withers and dies.

(via Sudan Watch)

In a review of Shirin Abadi’s “Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope“, Vali Nasr looks at the paradox of modern Iran – the most literate and culturally dynamic society in the Middle East, ruled over by religious fanatics – and finds little sign of that democratic revolution from within that we’ve all been waiting for:

For close to a decade now, Iran has been tantalizing and baffling the West. No other country in the region is so close to and so far from democracy. With its youthful, literate, and Web-happy population, with thousands of activist NGOs, with more women in universities than men, and with a measure of cultural dynamism that is unique in the Middle East, Iranian society has stood in sharp contrast to the clerical leadership that is suppressing it. Persian is today, after English and Mandarin Chinese, the third most popular language online, where one can surf tens of thousands of Iranian blogs. Offline, hundreds of widely read newspapers, magazines, and periodicals host thinly disguised intellectual and political debates. Iranians also get their news and views from a myriad of international sources. The BBC’s Persian website at one point received 450,000 hits a day. On satellite television, Iranians watch everything from CNN to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

There are lively discussions about Western thought. Full-page debates over postmodernism often adorn the pages of popular dailies, while seminars and lectures regularly discuss Western thinkers from Hegel to Samuel P. Huntington. Iran’s spirited book market has for many years now dwarfed the oft-repeated statistics showing the paltry quantity of translations in the far larger Arab world. Foreign tomes that seem as if they might be helpful in prying open Islamic orthodoxy are particularly popular. There have been more translations of Kant into Persian in the past decade than into any other language, and these have gone into multiple printings. (One is by the current conservative speaker of the Iranian parliament.) In some areas of mathematics and physics, such as string theory, Iranian research centers rank among the best in the world. Iranian cinema has in recent years become a powerful force at home and abroad.

What this dynamism signals is that the revolution is over. Such a conclusion is inescapable. But it is not all that one needs to know. It does not follow that this new cultural energy will lead to a new political energy. The expectation that a democratic opening must follow this cultural revival has turned to disappointment. Iran’s youthful cultural dynamism has not only failed to produce democracy; it has failed even to produce a credible pro-democracy movement. […]

What, then, of the search for democracy in Iran? It seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once. There is no other country in the region more suitable for the nurturing of the sapling of democracy. Iranians want democracy, and they cherish democratic practices. But there is no simple and straight path to democracy in Iran. The battle lines are unclear, and as the elections last year showed, open political contestation has favored populist authoritarianism over democracy, albeit through the ballot box. Talk of democracy in Iran is rife, especially in the West; but the reality is that Iran now has a stable authoritarian regime, and there is no obvious way to dislodge it.