Author: Mick Hartley

According to a couple of German historians, the Nazis had plans to extend the Holocaust to Palestine (via Solomonia):

In 1942, the Nazis created a special “Einsatzgruppe”, a mobile SS death squad, which was to carry out the mass slaughter of Jews in Palestine similar to the way they operated in eastern Europe, the historians argue in a new study.

The director of the Nazi research center in Ludwigsburg, Klaus-Michael Mallman, and Berlin historian Martin Cueppers say an Einsatzgruppe was all set to go to Palestine and begin killing the roughly half a million Jews that had fled Europe to escape Nazi death camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau.

In the study, published last month, they say “Einsatzgruppe Egypt” was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942, attached to the “Afrika Korps” led by the famed desert commander General Erwin Rommel. […]

As they did in eastern Europe, the plan was for the 24 members involved in the death squad to enlist Palestinian collaborators so that the “mass murder would continue under German leadership without interruption.”

That shouldn’t have proved too difficult.

not be censored. Fortunately, we have 400 more songs that we can play so it’s not really an issue,” he said.

Not really an issue? Artists being told what they can and can’t play?

Iraq, do you feel you were right?

KM: I still think that in the long run history will judge this to have been a morally just war, one that will in time produce a better Iraq than the one ruled over by the Ba’ath Party. And yet I now realize I was wrong on a whole number of questions. I misjudged, for instance, the damage done to the Iraqi state and institutions by 13 years of sanctions.

And while de-Ba’athification and demilitarization were right in principle, they were mishandled in practice and that was partly because we in the Iraqi opposition did not think through the other side of dismantling enormous bureaucracies of repression. That other side was winning over the people who were in these institutions and reconciling them with the new order.

The Ba’ath party was hated, but it also turned out to be far more resilient and deep rooted in Iraq than we thought. Now, the answer to these misjudgments was not to leave the rot of Ba’athist Iraq in place. After all, the whole world—in the form of numerous United Nations resolutions imposing sanctions on Iraq following Saddam’s invasion, annexation and rape of Kuwait—was responsible for that rot. To just leave the situation to fester, as the Arab world and Europe seemed to want to do, was in my opinion more immoral than regime change, however badly this was handled by the United States government and the new class of Iraqi politicians who today rule over Iraq.

ian nuclear scientists wrote to then-President Muhammad Khatami, expressing concern that a hasty mixture of German and old Soviet designs and building methods might not be a good idea. They received no reply.

Second, there is, as yet, no agreement on how and where to treat the waste water produced by the Hellieh plant. Early plans to just let it flow into the waters of the Gulf could pose a major ecological threat – wiping out the region’s fishing industry and/or threatening the desalination plants used by many Gulf states to produce up to 80 percent of their water.

Nor is there yet agreement on what to do with the plant’s nuclear waste. […]

The world needs to put at least as much importance on the safety aspect of the Iranian nuclear program, which is readily manifest, as on its security aspect.

Building nuclear power stations, especially when designed by Russians and Chinese firms that are subject to no international scrutiny, on the world’s most active earthquake zone might not be the best of ideas either for Iran or its neighbors.

Given the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taleban, in the light of the prohibition on graven images promulgated by strict Islamists, I’d wondered what the attitude was in Egypt to all those statues and monuments from their pharaonic past. Well, maybe this is the way things are going:

A fatwa issued by Egypt’s top religious authority which forbids the display of statues has art-lovers fearing it could be used by Islamic extremists as an excuse to destroy Egypt’s historical heritage. Egypt’s Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, the country’s top Islamic jurist, issued the religious edict, which declared as un-Islamic the exhibition of statues in homes, basing the decision on texts in the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammad.

Intellectuals and artists argue that the decree represents a setback for art – a mainstay of the multi-billion-dollar tourist industry – and would deal a blow to the country’s fledgling sculpture business.

The fatwa did not specifically mention statues in museums or public places, but it condemned sculptors and their work.

Still, many fear the edict could prod Islamic fundamentalists to attack Egypt’s thousands of ancient and pharaonic statues on show at tourist sites across the country.

“We don’t rule out that someone will enter the Karnak temple in Luxor or any other pharaonic temple and blow it up on the basis of the fatwa,” said Gamal al-Ghitani, editor of the literary magazine Akhbar al-Adab.

ave whenever he or she wishes? Or presentable to the people who actually live there? I think the East Germans answered that question in 1989. Bitterly disappointed as many of them have been since, they still don’t want the Wall back.

Daniel Finkelstein in the Times on why Frank Ellis should be defended:

On Sunday, a group of academics wrote to a newspaper complaining about the disciplinary proceedings instituted by the university against one of its lecturers, Frank Ellis. Dr Ellis has been suspended for arguing that racial groups have different average IQ levels, and that those of blacks are inferior to whites. His defenders protested that some evidence suggested he was correct.

Yet the academics who suspended Dr Ellis and those who defended him are making an error. In fact, the identical error. They are confusing the correctness of Dr Ellis’s views with whether he should be allowed to continue his academic career. These are not the same thing at all.

In the autumn of 1906, as recorded by James Surowiecki in his excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds, the scientist Francis Galton visited the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. While there he found his eyes drawn to a guess-the-weight-of-an-ox competition. Butchers and farmers were taking part, but so were ordinary visitors without any expert knowledge. Galton was interested in how bad their guesses would prove to be.

Galton was to be surprised. The average of the 800 guesses during the day was almost exactly right and, crucially, much more accurate than any individual expert assessment. What he had discovered was something counter-intuitive — that even the wildest incorrect guess plays its role in helping to produce an accurate average guess.

Dr Ellis is a lecturer in Russian and Slavic Studies. He probably has as firm a grip on the study of IQ and ethnicity as he does on the study of ox-weighing. But his view is useful in both, regardless of its correctness. Allowing mistaken views to have a voice in the academy is a vital part of determining the truth.

ment of Iraq’s Shiite and Kurdish communities until the 2003 war, or the genocidal campaign now being conducted in Darfur by the government of Sudan and its allied militias. As for foreign policy in the Middle East, it too has been pursued by means of crude force, ranging from terrorism and subversion to outright aggression, with examples too numerous and familiar to cite.

Reinforcing these habits is the fact that, to this day, Islam has retained its imperial ambitions. The last great Muslim empire may have been destroyed and the caliphate left vacant, but the dream of regional and world domination has remained very much alive. Even the ostensibly secular doctrine of pan-Arabism has been effectively Islamic in its ethos, worldview, and imperialist vision. In the words of Nuri Said, longtime prime minister of Iraq and a prominent early champion of this doctrine: “Although Arabs are naturally attached to their native land, their nationalism is not confined by boundaries. It is an aspiration to restore the great tolerant civilization of the early caliphate.” […]

Whether in its militant or its more benign version, this world-conquering agenda continues to meet with condescension and denial on the part of many educated Westerners. To intellectuals, foreign-policy experts, and politicians alike, “empire” and “imperialism” are categories that apply exclusively to the European powers and, more recently, to the United States. In this view of things, Muslims, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, are merely objects–the long-suffering victims of the aggressive encroachments of others. Lacking an internal, autonomous dynamic of its own, their history is rather a function of their unhappy interaction with the West, whose obligation it is to make amends. This perspective dominated the widespread explanation of the 9/11 attacks as only a response to America’s (allegedly) arrogant and self-serving foreign policy, particularly with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As we have seen, however, Islamic history has been anything but reactive. From Muhammad to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of an often astonishing imperial aggressiveness and, no less important, of never quiescent imperial dreams. Even as these dreams have repeatedly frustrated any possibility for the peaceful social and political development of the Arab-Muslim world, they have given rise to no less repeated fantasies of revenge and restoration and to murderous efforts to transform fantasy into fact. If, today, America is reviled in the Muslim world, it is not because of its specific policies but because, as the preeminent world power, it blocks the final realization of this same age-old dream of regaining, in Zawahiri’s words, the “lost glory” of the caliphate.

If you can’t beat them, join them:

Five Saudi women have undergone sex change operations because they developed a psychologic complex in the male-dominated Muslim society, a newspaper reported on Monday.

Al Watan newspaper quoted psychology expert Mohamed Abdelmawjoud as saying the operations took place over a year’s period. Authorities did not bother any of them, according to the report.

An interior ministry official told the paper such cases are examined by religious authorities, and sometimes by psychologists, but never get arrested.

But a senior cleric said authorities have to fill a legal vacuum by issuing laws against sex change operations.

I imagine clerics are now engaged in a frantic search through the Koran and the hadiths to find some relevant quotation to justify a ban. How could the All-Seeing One not have seen this coming?

And on it goes:

Sudan has prevented the United Nations’ top humanitarian official from visiting the troubled Darfur region.

Jan Egeland told the BBC he thought the government did not want him to see the latest wave of “ethnic cleansing” against black Africans in South Darfur.

He said thousands of people had fled after 60 villages were attacked by pro-government Janjaweed militias.

More than two million people have sought refuge in huge camps following three years of such attacks.

The Sudanese government is trying to stop the UN from taking over the peacekeeping mission in Darfur from the under-funded African Union.

The United Nations Mission in Sudan has lodged a formal protest against the government’s refusal to allow Mr Egeland’s flight to land.

Sudanese foreign ministry spokesman Jamal Ibrahim said the government had asked Mr Egeland to delay his visit because it coincided with a holiday to mark the birthday of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

He said that in the light of the Danish cartoons row, it would not be sensitive or safe for a Norwegian such as Mr Egeland to visit.

Amazing, the contexts where those cartoons get invoked.