tly why some say it was meant to erase this image of mice from the minds of European children, and to show that the mouse is not dirty and has these traits. Unfortunately, we have many such cases in Hollywood shows.”
Bolkhari is a cultural advisor to the Iranian Education Ministry.
Amir Taheri looks at the strange history of Abu Hamza in the UK – a man who’s spent his life here breaking the law, with, till now, total impunity:
He fled Egypt and arrived in Britain on a tourist visa at the age of 22. The first question he might ask is: How come they gave me a visa when they knew I had a criminal record in Egypt?
His visa allowed a three-month stay. Those months came and went without anybody asking him to leave. Instead, he became a bouncer in a cabaret . . . without documents such as a work permit. Again he might ask: Why did no one bother to remind him he was breaking the law?
Next, his buddies advised him that he had to marry a British citizen if he wanted to stay in Britain permanently. This he duly did by wooing a naturalized Briton in whom he of course had no interest. Again, no one told him that arranging a fake marriage to obtain British documents was breaking the law.
Soon, he was granted his British passport — a document denied to millions of people who used to be citizens of the empire. Abu Hamza might have wondered why he could get a British passport while his fellow Egyptian Muhammad Fayed, the owner of the luxury shop Harrods, couldn’t.
Now a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, Abu Hamza suddenly discovered a passion for the most radical version of Islamism. And in those days, for anyone who wanted to build a career as a “Holy Warrior,” Afghanistan was the place to be.
So, our bouncer-turned-holy-warrior traveled to Pakistan to join the mujahedin in the fight against Soviet atheists. He might have wondered why the British authorities, who must have known what he was up to, never took an interest. After all, here was a British citizen going to a foreign land to kill people and then return home to have his teeth cleaned by the National Health Service, no questions asked.
His spot of jihad done, Abu Hamza decided to promote himself to the position of “Islamic scholar” and “Islamic cleric.” No one in Britain, this land of undreamt freedoms, ever asked him for his credentials. He must have wondered why you need a permit to work as a cab driver, but can pose as an “Islamic scholar” with no qualifications.
Soon, things got even better. Abu Hamza targeted the mosque in Finsbury Park for what might be called a hostile takeover: One day he turned up with a group of heavies and elbowed out the mosque’s board of trustees. When one or two trustees tried to resist the illegal takeover, Abu Hamza made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. The trustees complained to the police, but were told to take a walk.
It is not hard to guess what Abu Hamza might have thought: Here was a country where law enforcement was selective, to say the least. […]
With Britain a headquarters of Islamist terror, he must have concluded that, the term “Londonistan” (coined by the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere) was no mere token of Gallic pique.
Not surprisingly, Abu Hamza took his activities a notch further, organizing an attack on the British Embassy compound in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. His commandos failed to kill any British diplomats, but still caused quite a stir. Yet he continued his London life unmolested, with the police claiming insufficient evidence to bring him to court.
As this month’s trial showed, Abu Hamza believed he’d reached a tacit understanding with the British authorities, whereby he was free to plot every crime under the sun against other countries as long as “there is no blood on our streets.”
Prime Minister Tony Blair says that things changed with last July’s terror attacks in the heart of London.
Have they?
Well here’s a surprise:
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the United States and Israel on Thursday for the blowing up of a Shi’ite shrine’s golden dome in Iraq, saying it was the work of “defeated Zionists and occupiers.”
Speaking to a crowd of thousands on tour of southwestern Iran, the president referred to the destruction of the Askariya mosque dome in Samarra on Wednesday, which the Iraqi government has blamed on insurgents.
“They invade the shrine and bomb there because they oppose God and justice,” Ahmadinejad said, referring to the US-led multinational force in Iraq.
From the Times:
Faith schools are to be instructed to teach pupils about other religions besides their own.
Leaders from the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist faiths have signed a joint statement backing the teaching of an awareness of the “tenets” of other faiths in schools.The declaration, made jointly with the Department for Education and Skills, says that religious education enables pupils to “combat prejudice” and helps them to develop respect and sensitivity to others….
Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, said that the best faith schools promoted inclusion and appreciation of other faiths. She said: “This is part of the vital role that faith schools have played in education. By promoting core values, they have also strengthened communities and our society.”
I don’t think “naive” quite captures the stupidity of this, especially the bit about religious education enabling pupils to combat prejudice. What world are these people living in? And there’s that weasel word “communities” again. “Core values” will in many cases strengthen the community at the expense of society as a whole.
ut getting children, even very young ones, immersed in an old inherited ethos. It is also about helping children to develop the ability to reason about new decisions any grown-up person will have to take. The important goal is not some formulaic parity in relation to old Brits with their old-faith schools, but what would best enhance the capability of the children to live “examined lives” as they grow up in an integrated country.
Having done so well, comparatively speaking, we’re in danger now of making some serious misjudgements.
ion, not for delivering a lecture, however warped and horrible his opinion is. I still believe in the power of truth. And my belief in truth is what separates me from Irving.
The admirable author Deborah Lipstadt had it right when she destroyed Irving in the courts, challenging his methods as a historian, undermining his reputation, demonstrating his falsehoods and his distortions. It is always tempting to fear the liar and believe, as Mark Twain did that “A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on”. But I have more faith than that. I believe that by allowing free exchange, by allowing anyone to assert anything, the truth will triumph,provided that its friends are vigilant and relentless.
So, no, David Irving should not be in jail. We can do better than that. I wish I could tell you that the Irving trial is the only way in which my belief in the power of truth is being tested. But it isn’t. Across the Middle East now, Holocaust denial has become commonplace. It was not difficult last week to spot the banners reading “God Bless Hitler”. The President of the Palestinian Authority denied the full truth of the Holocaust in his PhD. I wish I could tell you that never again will anyone be able to kill millions of Jews, but as we speak Iran is well down the nuclear path and threatens to eradicate Israel.
David Irving is the least of our troubles. But through it all we must hold fast to this: that we must always be ready to meet force with force, but lies — lies we fight with truth.
d like that at the time, of course: he presented himself as a post-grad student who happened to meet this remarkable character Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian shaman in Northern Mexico, and was taken on as a disciple. It was brilliant stuff, perfectly tuned to the post-hippy age, and played beautifully on the myth of the ancient wisdom of Native Americans which young guilt-ridden whites could get hooked on. The drugs helped, of course, and no doubt a hefty proportion of the readership were almost as stoned as the protagonists. But as the books continued to pour out and the rumours started, it was no surprise when the whole thing turned out to be bogus.
This, linked to by a Metafilter commenter, is a review of a book, “Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities“, which discusses the phenomenon of charisma with the usual psychoanalytic blather, but always from the point of view of the one with the charisma. No doubt there’s a certain interest in what sort of person becomes a cult leader, though I’m not sure it gets much more profound than noting that they need a total obsessive belief in themselves – or Narcissistic Personality Disorder, as it’d be termed nowadays. After all, if Kim Jong Il counts as a cult leader, how profound can the psychology be? What’s much more interesting is why people become followers. In fact you could surely argue that there’s no more interesting or more pertinent question.
Nothing to do with cults – here’s something from the BBC on speculation that much of our sociability derives from our cooperation against predators:
Despite humankind’s considerable capacity for war and violence, we are highly sociable animals, according to anthropologists.
Where would we be without anthropologists? But yes, I’ve always disliked that glib 2001, Lord of the Flies stuff about man being somehow uniquely tainted with evil. As we discover more about our close relatives, like chimps, it becomes more and more clear that we are in fact remarkably friendly and sociable, and it’s only because violent incidents are so infrequent that we concentrate on them so much. Everyday we – most of us – have tens if not hundreds of encounters with other people, many of whom we’ve never met before, all of which are characterised by friendly gestures, thank yous, how-are-yous, and all the rest of it. The big fly in the ointment – and maybe it’s a necessary corollary of our extreme sociability – is this propensity to roll over and submit to big strong men: to take them at the same extremely high value that they take themselves. In that respect Castaneda was one of the better ones: he wasn’t trying to change the world, or exterminate the Jews, or cling onto power in some starvation-ridden African country, or found a new religion. He just let his imagination get carried away, and no doubt didn’t object when the pretty women started tagging along….
njaweed in Darfur. Chadian Arabs living along the border appear to enjoy immunity from attack by the Chadian rebels and the Janjaweed, although some have left their homes and taken refuge in Sudan, apparently in fear of local reprisals in this ethnically tense area.
From the BBC:
A curfew has been imposed in the city of Bauchi in northern Nigerian after 10 people were killed in a sectarian riot.
It began as an argument between a teacher and a pupil over the confiscation of a Koran in school.But rumours swept the town that the book had been desecrated and that was the cue for youths, some armed with machetes, to rampage through the city.
The violence comes just two days after protests against Danish cartoons in two northern cities left at least 25 dead.
Damned touchy, these Muslim chappies.
Cardinal Keith O’Brien, leader of Edinburg’s Catholics, on his recent visit to Darfur:
“The men had their ears cut off – cut right into the skull. One said he had been stripped and beaten. Another had also had his lips cut off, you could see the scars. He told me stories of other people who had had their lips padlocked. Man’s inhumanity to man is quite startling.” […]
While the outspoken Cardinal says his visit was “humanitarian, not political”, he has returned with a new rallying call for those in positions of power in Scotland, at Westminster and around the world.
“Bad enough, surely, to be hungry and thirsty, to be denied education and proper medical facilities, to have been raped, tortured and sent home as a ‘postcard’ to one’s own tribe from the perpetrators,” he says. “But to be utterly and completely ignored by the rest of the world – surely we can do more for these, our forgotten sisters and brothers?” […]
But the Cardinal believes there is hope, with projects run by Sciaf [Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund] and other charities providing crucial help to people whose lives remain devastated by the war.
He says: “I saw women getting their hair done and their feet painted by hairdressers who are also trained psychologists.
“It is only when they get a woman’s confidence when they are washing her hair that they can get her to communicate and reveal something of what has happened to her. These women have suffered multiple rapes, but under Sudanese law marital infidelity is a crime. Women also need four witnesses in any allegation of rape, and eight if the witnesses are women too.”