Author: Mick Hartley

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It denies backing the Arab Janjaweed militias accused of mass rape, killing and looting.

Asked whether international focus on bringing to justice those accused of atrocities was distracting from the aid effort, Mr Egeland said that more pressure might be needed to solve the problems in Darfur.

An astute observation there from Mr Egeland.

Meanwhile, lobby group Human Rights Watch has urged the UN to take control of the peace mission in Darfur.

“A UN mission could help to stop the atrocious attacks on civilians in Darfur, but only if it is given the means to act aggressively,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director for Human Rights Watch.

“It needs a tough mandate, real resources and political support.”

So, no hope there then….

n led an uprising against the “illegitimate” caliph, but he was betrayed. On the plain of Karbala, on the tenth day of the month of Muharram, Yazid’s forces attacked Hussein and his entourage and killed them. Hussein’s corpse bore the marks of 33 lance punctures and 34 blows of the sword.

His head was cut off and his body was trampled by horses. Ever since, the martyrdom of Hussein has formed the core of Shia theology, and the Ashura Festival that commemorates his death is Shiism’s holiest day. On that day, men beat themselves with their fists or flagellate themselves with iron chains to approximate Hussein’s sufferings. At times throughout the centuries, the ritual has grown obscenely violent…..

Bloody excesses of this sort are prohibited in contemporary Iran, but, during the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini appropriated the essence of the ritual as a symbolic act and politicized it. He took the inward-directed fervor and channeled it toward the external enemy. He transformed the passive lamentation into active protest. He made the Battle of Karbala the prototype of any fight against tyranny. Indeed, this technique had been used during political demonstrations in 1978, when many Iranian protestors wore funeral shrouds in order to tie the battle of 680 to the contemporary struggle against the shah. In the war against Iraq, the allusions to Karbala were given still greater significance: On the one hand, the scoundrel Yazid, now in the form of Saddam Hussein; on the other, the Prophet’s grandson, Hussein, for whose suffering the time of Shia revenge had finally come.

The power of this story was further reinforced by a theological twist that Khomeini gave it. According to Khomeini, life is worthless and death is the beginning of genuine existence. “The natural world,” he explained in October 1980, “is the lowest element, the scum of creation. “What is decisive is the beyond: The “divine world, that is eternal.” This latter world is accessible to martyrs. Their death is no death, but merely the transition from this world to the world beyond, where they will live on eternally and in splendor. Whether the warrior wins the battle or loses it and dies a Martyr–in both cases, his victory is assured: either a mundane or a spiritual one. […]

It was this culture that nurtured Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s worldview.

A strange article in the Times this morning:

I felt like a criminal. “How did you get our name?” asked the woman on the other end of the phone suspiciously. I told her they’d been recommended, and asked how much the drugs would cost. “£80 each,” she replied.

I wasn’t doing something illegal, simply inquiring whether my daughter could get three individual vaccines to protect against measles, mumps and rubella. Such was the furore over the combined MMR vaccine three years ago, everyone felt under pressure; they still do. MMR is not only a medical issue, but also an emotional one — something that the Government stubbornly refuses to recognise. To get the option I wanted, I had to pay for it, and will do so again for my baby son. […]

I know that Andrew Wakefield’s research suggesting a link between MMR and autism and bowel disease has been discredited, yet it’s not enough to change my mind. It’s a question of heart versus head. So instead of dismissing us as mad (don’t we trust the science?) or bad (we’re responsible for new cases of measles), the Government must swallow its pride and try to understand us — even if it means offering three separate jabs rather than one.

Take-up of the combined vaccine has dropped to just over 81 per cent. More people have been infected with measles in the first three months of this year than in all of 2005; almost 100 cases were reported in Doncaster this week. “Reckless” parents are blamed.

But I am sick of reading how irresponsible parents are if they don’t give their children the combined vaccine. That underhand accusation takes no account of their lack of choice or those who have responsibly paid for vaccinations.

It’s hard to know where to start with that. She does such a good job of demolishing her own case…

From the BBC (via):

The British Transplantation Society says an accumulating weight of evidence suggests the organs of thousands of executed prisoners in China are being removed for transplants without consent.

Professor Stephen Wigmore, who chairs the society’s ethics committee, told the BBC that the speed of matching donors and patients, sometimes as little as a week, implied prisoners were being selected before execution.

Chinese officials deny the allegations.

Just last week a Chinese health official said publicly that organs from executed prisoners were sometimes used, but only with prior permission and in a very few cases.

But widespread allegations have persisted for several years – including from international human rights groups.

Professor Wigmore said: “The weight of evidence has accumulated to a point over the last few months where it’s really incontrovertible in our opinion.

“We feel that it’s the right time to take a stance against this practice.”

The emergence of transplant tourism has made the sale of health organs even more lucrative.

Patients increasingly come from Western countries, including the UK, as well as Japan and South Korea.

Professor Wigmore described this as quite widespread and growing. He and his colleagues, he said, had all seen cases of British patients who had considered going to China for transplants. He really hoped, he added, that people would think very hard about whether they should.

As someone who’s never owned an electric shaver, and uses those single-blade Bic disposable razors – what are they, about 50p for a pack of ten? – I can appreciate this essay in praise of the wet shave, but I’m not sure what Homer’s got to do with it (via ALDaily):

It will sound like madness to say it, but when I have rinsed the lather from my face and splashed it with intensely cold water, when I have patted my face dry with a towel and rubbed in the lotion to protect the newly exfoliated skin, smooth and supple—I have some sense of what Homer meant. On a good day, a good close shave is the Iliad and the Odyssey in one: the mastery of the dangerous blade, the return to the comforts of home. To shave well is to be a man, and to be a man is closer than Homer could ever have imagined to being like in appearance to the immortal gods—as Psalm 8 put it, “a little lower than the angels,” and as Genesis put it, made in the image of God.

Yet just as the Iliad is a very strange sort of poem about war, diffident about heroism even as it celebrates it, so the Odyssey is a very strange poem about homecoming, given how often and in how many ways Odysseus seems to defer his arrival. A modern reader cannot help but be troubled by the year Odysseus spends in the house (and the bed, and the bath) of Circe, and the way he pursues every possible detour, at great cost to his shipmates, on the circuitous path back to Ithaca. Even his return home brings delay after delay, long after the bath where he is recognized by his old nurse for the first time. Odysseus and his tragic counterpart Achilles are our archetypes of manhood, for better and for worse: our capacity for valor but also our tendency toward wounded depression and inward-turning rage; our longing for home, hearth, and bed but also our bent toward wandering and lingering far from home, prolonging our adventures while our wives and children wait for our return.

Every bath, vulnerable and naked, warm and wet, is a return home, but every man is Odysseus, prone to wander. Every shave, leaving our skin as smooth as it was before we became men, before the years crept in, before we were, alas, responsible for our own face, simultaneously restores us and reminds us that something has gone wrong. We are, if we are fortunate, more than we expected, but not quite what we hoped to become.

And sometimes a shave is just a shave.

red by al-Hilli”.

Besides likening unbelievers to filth, the al-Hilli text includes a chapter on jihad, setting down the conditions under which Muslims are supposed to fight Jews and Christians.

At the Toilet gallery in Kingston (opened, wouldn’t you know, by Gilbert and George), there’s an exhibition of images of people at the point of orgasm:

They are the work of Kingston photographer Derek Mossop who found his models by placing an advertisement in Time Out magazine two years ago. He said a variety of people responded, from pole dancers to a 76-year-old chorister.

He said the resulting images had an affinity with scenes of religious rapture by Renaissance artists such as Rubens, Titian and Michaelangelo.

“I hope the pictures raise more questions than they answer,” said Mr Mossop, a former Kingston College student.

Well yes, they do…like, what did he say to these people? – “Don’t mind me: just start wanking in your own time, and I’ll take a snap at the crucial moment”? And, given the gallery name, what other intimate moments might an enterprising photographer capture on film?

“They have a precedent in classical and religious imagery and aim to pose questions about issues of sexual identity and the nature of human existence.

“I am interested in how we define ourselves. The orgasm is such a powerful force, it is worth exploring, because during a brief moment of ecstasy, the world falls away and the mind is silent.”

Michael J. Totten’s now up to part V in his Back to Iraq series – this time from the city of Dohok. Well worth a read.

Will the people of Zimbabwe take any more?

The first time that Anna was arrested, two policemen confiscated her box of tomatoes, bananas, popcorn and a couple of cigarettes and ordered her to pay an on-the-spot fine of Z$250,000 (65p) for illegal vending.

When she refused to pay they took her Z$160,000 takings for the afternoon, put it in their pockets and left. Two days later Anna was caught by the police with her goods spread out on a sack. They told her to bring her goods with her to the police station.

On the way the police asked how much money she had. “Nothing,” she said. They said she could go. “No,” she said. “I want to go to the police station. I have done criminal things. Let’s go.”

“What’s your name?” they asked aggressively. She told them. “You are too cheeky,” they said. “Yes,” she said, “I am too cheeky.” She strode back to her corner, triumphant. Anna started trading on the street to pay her two children’s school fees. For millions of Zimbabweans, informal trading on a tiny scale has become the difference between life and starvation.

President Mugabe has declared the activity illegal. Every day thousands are arrested in police raids and lose their earnings and their goods, or have them smashed.

“I will be back there every day, selling,” Anna said. “They can come. I am no longer afraid of them.”

This is the reality of Zimbabwe as the country commemorates today the 26th anniversary of independence from Britain. Mr Mugabe has presided over the ruin of the country’s economy, once one of the strongest in Africa. The rapid impoverishment of Zimbabweans has been compunded by the destruction of the homes of nearly one million people, who have also been banned from making a living in his notorious “Operation Remove the Rubbish”, which continues after 11 months.

Last week the World Health Organisation said that Zimbabwean women had the lowest life expectancy in the world, at 34 years. The country has the highest inflation, at 913 per cent. The Consumer Council of Zimbabwe estimates that a family of six needs Z$35 million a month to survive. Six years ago Z$1 million dollars would have bought a whole block of luxury apartments.

State school fees have recently risen by 1,000 per cent. “Zimbabwean children are faced with some of the worst hardships confronting children anywhere in the world,” a Unicef spokesman said.

John Makumbe, a political commentator, said: “Life has become unbearable and unaffordable. These people are waiting to vent their anger through mass demonstrations. We are on the brink. The element of (ordinary Zimbabweans’) fear is overrated. That point is going to become clearer in the next few months.”

ething holy and infinitely worthy.

Indeed. It’s a kind of special dispensation, a secular sainthood, whereby whatever the artist touches becomes magically transformed into art. They’re different from you and me, these artists. And richer.