, Greater Manchester, discovered an Oscar fish which appeared to have the word Allah on one side and Mohammed on the other.
Update: and don’t miss the amazing lion of Baku which (in a clear refutation of Wittgenstein) says the name of Allah (via Tom).
her that municipal workers had taken them away.
She went to Ankara’s largest refuse dump, Mamak, where she found one of the strays with hundreds of other dogs. “They were all dead, stacked in large pits,” she said. “We also found 10 dead puppies in a bound plastic bag. There is a myth among pious Muslims that dogs are unclean.”
Animal rights campaigners who accompanied Miss Isikalp last week said that at least two of the dogs had been sexually abused.
The mayor of Mamak, Gazi Sahin, of the ruling pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party, has denied responsibility.
At least, I think it’s sloppy editing. Maybe the mayor has a history of this sort of thing.
egan to change my life”?? A chilling insight into the cultural desert that is North Korea.
Jeff Jacoby looks at America’s increasing support for israel, as Europe in general – and the LRB in particular – head off into Zionist conspiracy land:
A Gallup poll released last month puts American support for Israel at near-record levels. When asked for their views on the Middle East, 59 percent of Americans say they sympathize with the Israelis, while just 15 percent favor the Palestinians. Pro-Israel sentiment rises with increased knowledge — 66 percent of those who follow international affairs ”very closely” support Israel, compared with 52 percent of those who don’t pay close attention to foreign news. […]
In short, solidarity with Israel is an abiding feature of American public opinion. Because the American people are pro-Israel, the American government is pro-Israel. And because Americans so strongly support Israel in its conflict with the Arabs, American policy in the Middle East is committed to Israel’s defense.
Only someone far outside the American mainstream, then, would insist that ”Israel’s past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.” Or that US policy is engineered through a Zionist ”stranglehold on Congress.” Or that ”neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel,” leaving only one possible explanation: ”the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby.”
Those aren’t the words of American neo-Nazi David Duke — though Duke has ringingly endorsed them. They aren’t the words of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the granddaddy of Islamist radicalism — though a top Brotherhood official praises them. They aren’t the words of the PLO — though the PLO is actively distributing them.
The source of those words, and many more like them, is a bitter anti-Israel screed masquerading as academic scholarship. Co-authored by Stephen Walt, academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, ”The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” was released last week as a ”working paper” on the Kennedy School website. But so slipshod is the paper’s research and so extreme its bias that within days the Harvard and Kennedy School logos were stripped from the title page. ”It clearly does not meet the academic standards of a Kennedy School research paper,” said Marvin Kalb, one of the school’s best-known scholars. […]
If the truth be told, it isn’t hard to understand why America’s ardent support for Israel might strike some people as odd, or even suspicious. In so much of the world — Europe, the Middle East, the UN General Assembly — Israel is despised. Even if Americans don’t share the anti-Semitism that is rife in other lands, wouldn’t it be more practical for them to stop taking Israel’s side? After all, there are 500 million Arabs in the world, and they control one-third of the world’s oil supply. Why should Americans alienate them by continuing to support Israel, a country with no oil and just 6 million people?
As a matter of plain economic common sense, the United States has every reason to turn against the Jewish state. What accounts for its refusal to do so? If it isn’t an ”Israel Lobby” pulling hidden strings, what on earth can it be?
Something more powerful than economics: the kinship of common values.
Homo sapiens, is thought to have died out 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
The cranium dates to a time about which little is known — the transition from African Homo erectus to modern humans. The fossil record from Africa for this period is sparse and most of the specimens poorly dated, project archaeologists said.
mit’s agenda, describing issues to be discussed as urgent and critical that need summit resolutions to back it up through joint Arab action to meet the aspirations of the Arab Nation. Supporting the Palestinian cause will always be one of our key concerns until the extorted Arab rights are restored and lands in Palestine, Golan Heights and South Lebanon are liberated from the Israeli occupation, he said. The Sudanese Minister renewably stressed on the Arab nation’s adherence to the Arab Peace Initiative as an adequate solution towards achieving just, comprehensive and sustainable peace in the region. He also appealed for international community to exert pressure on Israel to abide by UN resolutions, cease building settlements and the separation wall, respect the Palestinian People’s choices and not to intervene in their internal affairs……
Ah well – so much for the March for Free Expression:
At the outset, we said that displays of the Danish cartoons would be welcome on Saturday. No, let me rephrase that: At the outset, I, Peter Risdon, said the cartoons would be welcome. I am going to take full responsibility for this. I now think that was a mistake.
In practice, Muslims who wholeheartedly endorse our statement of principle, as quoted below by Peter Tatchell in his superb essay, who abhor the threats made against Danish cartoonists and believe people should have the right to publish things they themselves find offensive or abhorrent would be UNABLE to come to our rally on Saturday, because to be surrounded by these cartoons, now, in the present context when the BNP are using them as a rallying point, would be intolerable.
So I now appeal to people not to bring the cartoons on T-shirts or placards.
So, free expression, as long as Muslims aren’t offended. But I thought that was what the march was meant to be against…
An insight into Kim Jong-Il’s people’s paradise:
North Korea has no people with physical disabilities because they are killed almost as soon as they are born, a physician who defected from the communist state said on Wednesday.
Ri Kwang-chol, who fled to the South last year, told a forum of rights activists that the practice of killing newborns was widespread but denied he himself took part in it.
“There are no people with physical defects in North Korea,” Ri told members of the New Right Union, which groups local activists and North Korean refugees.
He said babies born with physical disabilities were killed in infancy in hospitals or in homes and were quickly buried.
The practice is encouraged by the state, Ri said, as a way of purifying the masses and eliminating people who might be considered “different.”
(Thanks Dom)
Forbes magazine have put together a list of the 20 most important tools of all time (via Metafilter).
There’s one massive gap there. They don’t list arguably the greatest tool ever: the computer. How weird. In response to this guy, who wants to nominate writing, they define tools as “handheld objects that could be physically manipulated to complete a task”. Reasonable enough, but as they include a lathe in their top 20, it can’t be the bulk of a pc that rules it out. Anyway, what about laptops?
You can vote for the most important tool you use at work: the list includes e-mail, software, and the Web. But those aren’t tools. e-mail’s an application that your computer, your tool, allows you to use; the Web is, well, whatever it is – a resource? – and software’s what enables you to use your computer in so many different ways (the various blades, as it were of your pc Swiss Army knife), but the basic tool in all this, surely, is what’s sitting on (or under) your desk: your computer. Why don’t they see that?
Galloway debates Richard Perle on Abu Dhabi TV (clip 1080):
George Galloway: Now even amongst the crazed Zionist Crusader fundamentalists who got us into this war, Richard Perle is an extremist. In fact, most of the neo-con Zionists who talked Bush into this war have now begun to admit that this has been a terrible catastrophic mistake. Unfortunately, it is not their blood, which has been shed. It has been the blood of entirely innocent people, whose lives have been destroyed.
So nobody serious, outside the lunatic asylum of Richard Perle’s circle, any longer believes that the invasion of an Arab Muslim country by hundreds of thousands of Crusading soldiers has done anything to make the world a more peaceful place.
And that’s why Bush, in November, will pay a very high political price, and Mr. Blair will be out within a few weeks. I assure you, anyone who studies the politics in London knows that Mr. Blair is in his last days in Downing Street. And when they come to write his obituary – the word Iraq will be engraved at its heart. […]
In Iran, 17 million people voted for the President, Ahmadinejad, and ten million voted for his opponent Rafsanjani. Those 27 million are determined to exercise their right to nuclear power. The response of Bush and Perle is to threaten them with invasion.
These are the people who murdered Salvador Allende, the elected president of Chile. These are the people who have overthrown elected governments all over the world, and he come on your program to prattle about democracy. These people don’t want democracy, they want slave governments. If it’s a slave dictatorship – that’s fine. If it’s a slave elected government – that’s also fine. The only thing that matters is that the government is a slave government. That’s why they will never invade Egypt. They will never invade Saudi Arabia. They only invade countries or threaten to invade countries, who stand against them and who refuse to be slaves to them. That’s why they hated Iraq, that’s why they hate Iran, that’s why they hate Syria.
Of all the faults of all the three regimes in these three countries – they were never slaves to the United States, and that’s why they were attacked. […]
Richard Perle: Let me just say, having listened to George Galloway, that I am not going to insult the intelligence or waste the time of an audience that has tuned to this channel in the hope that they will hear an interesting discussion, by responding to his ad hominem and scurrilous personal attacks. This is what he’s good at. It’s a talent from the gutter, and I’m not going to engage in this.
George Galloway: Show us the shekels.
Richard Perle: I’m not going to engage in it.
George Galloway: Show us the shekels, Richard.
Richard Perle: Needless to say… what he’s had to say deserves no serious comment, and so I’m not going to make any comment about his personal attacks.
But I do find ironic his comment on the absence of democracy in the Muslim world, when the only Arab country to have voted in a free election in living memory is the Iraq that was liberated by the United States, the United Kingdom, and a number of other countries acting in this coalition.