h Parliament. She is entitled to expect the same kind of protection that Salman Rushdie once had in the years after the publication of Satanic Verses. Instead, she finds herself today abandoned by her political colleagues and forced into exile. She intends to go to America, where she has been offered work and where she will be given the security that she no longer has in the Netherlands.
It is a squalid tale….
Hugo Chavez, in London as a guest of Ken Livingstone, is shocked into silence – for a moment:
Mr Chavez’s news conference with Mayor Ken Livingstone seemed to be all about fighting “American imperialism”. Even talk about tackling traffic congestion somehow ended in a dig at the “American way of life”.
His praise for the sun-lit City Hall contrasted with remarks about New York’s twin towers, which he said “consumed more electricity than several African countries”.
A skilled orator who is known for his marathon TV speeches, Mr Chavez becomes even more animated when he starts talking about the Bush administration.
So, when a journalist from the BBC’s Spanish-American service asked him whether he was behaving a bit like his arch-enemy George W Bush by taking a “you’re with us or against us” attitude, his pause electrified the audience.
As the guests – many from the UK groups which have enthusiastically expressed their support for him – held their breath, Mr Chavez looked truly aghast.
“It is the first time I have been offended this way in public – to be compared to the biggest perpetrator of genocide the world has known,” he said in a low voice.
Ken wasn’t arguing:
Livingstone, standing next to the radical Venezuelan leader, said: ‘I sometimes have views on George Bush – not too dissimilar from yours.’
This time Allah, abandoning Liverpool, has chosen a tuna caught off the coast of Kenya:
A tuna fish caught in the Indian Ocean this week has excited Kenyan Muslims who are flocking here by the hundreds to see a Koranic verse apparently embedded in its scales.
Dubbed the “wonder fish” by locals in this port city, the 2.5-kilo (5.5-pound) tuna has attracted so much attention it has been placed in the custody of the National Fisheries Department for safekeeping, officials said.The otherwise ordinary fish caught the attention of fishmonger Omar Mohammed Awadh who pulled it out of a catch when he noticed what seemed to be Arabic writing among the scales near its tail, they said.
Arabic scholars examined the fish and determined the writing was a Koranic verse meaning “God is the greatest of all providers,” said Hassan Mohamed Hassan, an education officer with the National Museums of Kenya in Mombasa.
“This has been confirmed as a verse from the Holy Koran,” said Sheikh Mombasa Dor, the secretary-general of the Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya.
ge just a few kilometers north of her own. “One woman was killed. I was raped.”
Officially, the cease-fire in the Darfur region went into effect May 8.
That was three days after the government and the largest rebel group signed a broad peace agreement, creating hope for an end to the brutal assaults that have left more than 200,000 dead and have driven two million from their homes – a campaign of government- sponsored terror against non-Arab tribes in Darfur that the Bush administration has called genocide.
The reality was on grim display in this crossroads town, near where Moussa and other villagers were attacked Thursday as they rode home in a truck from Shangil Tobayi.
The Arab militiamen who attacked them killed one woman, wounded six villagers and raped 15 women, according to witnesses and victims.
The attack played out like so many others in this vast, lawless region. Three men with machine guns stopped the truck on the road and fired into its cabin, hitting the driver and blowing out the tires.
They ordered the people on the truck, about 50 men, women and children, to take the goods they were transporting – sacks of millet, two cows and five goats – to where their camels and the rest of their men were waiting in a dry riverbed a kilometer or two off the road. Once that was completed, the raiders set upon the women, raping them in turn, witnesses said.
“They told us,” said Hussein Ahmed Abdulla, who stood by helpless as the women were raped, “‘You are slaves, we will finish you. We will not allow you to move from Menawashei, not one kilometer.’”
In case you’ve missed it, here’s the video of the cab driver interviewed by the BBC in the belief that he was Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net. Something of a classic. And here’s the real Kewney’s take.
Update: not a cabbie apparently, but a job applicant – Guy Goma, from the Congo.
Ian Buruma on Hugo Chavez and his Western supporters:
When the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape to the US in 1980, after years of persecution by the Cuban government for being openly homosexual and a dissident, he said: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”
One of the most vexing things for artists and intellectuals who live under the compulsion to applaud dictators is the spectacle of colleagues from more open societies applauding of their own free will. It adds a peculiarly nasty insult to injury.
Stalin was applauded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Mao was visited by a constant stream of worshippers from the West, some of whose names can still produce winces of disgust in China. Castro has basked for years in the adulation of such literary stars as Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Even Pol Pot found favour among several well-known journalists and academics.
Last year a number of journalists, writers and showbiz figures, including Harold Pinter, Nadine Gordimer, Harry Belafonte and Tariq Ali, signed a letter claiming that in Cuba “there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959 . . .”
Arenas was arrested in 1973 for “ideological deviation”. He was tortured and locked up in prison cells filled with floodwater and excrement, and threatened with death if he didn’t renounce his own writing. Imagine what it must be like to be treated like this and then read about your fellow writers in the West standing up for your oppressors.
None of this is news, and would hardly be worth dredging up if the same thing were not happening once more. Hugo Chavez, the elected strongman of Venezuela, is the latest object of adulation by western “progressives” who return from jaunts in Caracas with stars in their eyes.
Inflation in Zimbabwe has topped 1000%:
A loaf of broad now costs between Z$80,000 – Z$110,000 (79 US cents – $1.08) up from about Z$7,500 (7 US cents) last year, when the price was controlled by the government.
A carton of orange juice costs about Z$500,000 and a kilo of beef up to Z$1m….
In January, the government introduced a Z$50,000 “bearer cheque” worth 49 US cents, to become the highest value currency note.
It is not enough to buy a copy of the daily Herald newspaper at Z$80,000.
Housing, education and transport costs also have jumped, while the unemployment rate means that almost two out of every three Zimbabweans are out of work.
January 2003 the police raided the mosque seeking evidence in connection with a plot to manufacture poisons and explosives, and the murder of Detective Constable Stephen Oake. The key evidence — a photocopier used to make copies of recipes for ricin and cyanide — was recovered, but police found much more besides. Hidden in the mosque was a stash of military equipment including knives, air pistols, gas masks, chemical protective clothing and radios. All of it had been used for training would-be Mujahidin. Also found were hundreds of fake and stolen passports, credit cards and European ID cards — essential paraphernalia of terrorist fundraising and identity fraud.
Scotland Yard wanted to put the haul on display. But Crown lawyers said that to do so would prejudice a series of forthcoming trials. So the truth of what was found in Abu Hamza’s fortress remained secret for three years, and counter-terrorist agencies were vilified for raiding a place of worship.
Kamel Bourgass, who lived in the mosque, was found guilty of the poison plot and the murder of DC Oake in 2004. But still no mention could be made of what had been found in the mosque or Bourgass’s links with Abu Hamza. It was not until the end of Abu Hamza’s trial in February that it could be disclosed how the cleric had turned a London mosque into an al-Qaeda training facility that produced the likes of Bourgass, shoebomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be 9/11 hijacker.
The three-year information vacuum was filled by ill-informed pundits blithely pronouncing that there was no al-Qaeda network or terror threat to Britain, that armed police on our streets were a political ploy, the ricin plot was a confection, Bourgass was a mad loner and Abu Hamza nothing more than a cartoon fanatic.
July 7 proved them all wrong. Britain’s first suicide bombings were perpetrated by Britons who had heard the preachings of Abu Hamza and other extremist clerics, and who were plugged into a wider terror network. But the extent of their terrorist connections is something that you, the public, are still not allowed to know.
Martin Walker, editor of UPI: “The BBC pro-Israeli? Is the Pope Jewish?”:
The official report for the governors of the BBC on its coverage of the Palestine-Israeli conflict found predictably that there was “was little to suggest systematic or deliberate bias” but then went on to list a series of measurements by which the BBC could be said to be biased in favour of Israel.
This produced mocking guffaws in my own newsroom, where some of the BBC’s greatest hits — or perhaps misses — remain fresh in the memory. There was the hagiographic send-off for Yassir Arafat by a BBC reporter with tears in her eyes and that half-hour profile of Arafat in 2002 which called him a “hero” and “an icon” and concluded that the corrupt old brute was “the stuff of legends”.There was Orla Guerin’s unforgettably inventive spin on the story of a Palestinian child being deployed as a suicide bomber, which most journalists saw as a sickening example of child abuse in the pursuit of terrorism. Guerin had it as “Israel’s cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes”.
There was the disturbing case of Fayad Abu Shamala, the BBC Arabic Service correspondent, who addressed a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, and was recorded declaring that journalists in Gaza, apparently including the BBC, were “waging the campaign shoulder to shoulder together with the Palestinian people”. Pressed for an explanation, the subsequent BBC statement said: “Fayad’s remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC.”
There was the extraordinarily naive coverage of the London visit of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, the predominant imam of Mecca, to open London’s largest new mosque. He was described as a widely respected religious figure who works for “community cohesion”, and a video on the BBC website was captioned “The BBC’s Mark Easton: ‘Events like today offer grounds for optimism’.”
The BBC must have missed his sermon of February 1, 2004, that said “the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels . . . calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers . . . the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs . . . These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption . . .”
These are isolated examples, but they stick longer in the memory because they are reinforced by a broader pattern of coverage that seems to play down that Israel is a democracy that elects Israeli Arabs to the Knesset and which does not engage in systematic terrorism and suicide bombing of civilians. […]
The report on which the governors will now rely to develop new guidelines for BBC coverage tends to skate over some of the professional problems that make even-handed reporting difficult in Gaza and in the West Bank. Journalists have been kidnapped and cameras stolen, and their sources are often intimidated.
By contrast, Israeli politics are easily followed in Israel’s free press, where critics of the occupation and of Israeli military tactics abound and where the Israeli media does sterling work, including the kind of combative investigative reporting that is virtually unknown in the Palestinian press.
photographer. The activity is not prohibited, but taking pictures in public, particularly of women, is taboo. Yet the British Council chose photography for its first art exhibition in Saudi Arabia, and in the most religiously conservative city, Riyadh. The show by British photographers is called Common Ground, but the candid picture it gives of Muslim life in contemporary Britain has little in common with this strict society.
The westernised dress and open lifestyle in Jagtar Semplay’s shots of Asian youth culture in Britain show a Muslim community in a state of flux between tradition and modernity. Suki Dhanda captures the relative freedom enjoyed by Shopna as she and her young friends play pool, or eat chips in a café. In pictures by Rehan Jamil, the only Muslim photographer, primary school children at the East London Mosque are taught unsegregated; elsewhere, a project worker scours a car park for Muslim heroin addicts.
It took six months of negotiation with ministries to convince them that there was no hidden agenda beyond a desire for cross-cultural bridge-building. In the event, the religious authorities censored two images containing crosses….
At the women-only private view last month, Baroness Uddin, the first Muslim woman to enter the House of Lords, urged other women to keep pushing the boundaries. The men’s private view the following evening was opened by Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi Foreign Minister, and Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary, in Riyadh for bilateral talks. While Iyad Madani, the Minister of Culture and Information, spoke of the exhibition as providing “an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and experiences among photographers in the two countries”, and the prince sought “human understanding” between the two kingdoms, Straw spoke to the Muslim community in Britain. We are two religions but with one common ground, one civilisation, he said.
Two religions – but they won’t even allow images containing crosses. A fine example of human understanding, Saudi style.