Author: Mick Hartley

According to this article in Time (via), it’s not forged banknotes, or drugs, or missiles, that are making the serious money for the North Koreans – it’s counterfeit cigarettes:

A confidential report compiled by investigators working for a coalition of major U.S., European and Japanese tobacco companies indicates that North Korea has developed a highly lucrative source of hard currency: counterfeit cigarettes. The 11-page document, a copy of which was obtained by TIME, outlines in unprecedented detail the inner workings of this illicit business and the extent to which it may have led North Korea’s rogue regime to ally itself with crime syndicates from mainland China and Taiwan.

Based on information from undercover agents, informants and industry insiders, the report, which is dated June 29, 2005, offers a unique glimpse of the scale and sophistication of North Korea’s illicit-cigarette industry, which has allegedly counterfeited a vast array of brands—from Marlboro to Davidoff. The report estimates that production from 10 to 12 North Korean factories in the counterfeiting business may total 41 billion cigarettes a year, generating annual revenues of $520 million to $720 million. It’s not clear how much of this money flows to the regime of dictator Kim Jong Il, whether in duties or payments “for protection,” but the report speculates that its share of the profits may amount to $80 million to $160 million a year. That would be quite a windfall at a time when the North’s economy is reeling and the U.S. is trying to pressure Kim to abandon his nuclear-weapons program by cracking down on his regime’s income from business exploits as diverse as trafficking drugs and counterfeiting $100 bills.

Amir Taheri looks at ethnic dissent in Iran:

In the past two to three years…Iran’s Kurdish-majority areas have witnessed an upsurge of political activity. One reason is the leading role that Iraqi Kurds have assumed in the new Iraqi system. Another is Ahmadinejad’s avowed devotion to the cult of the “Hidden Imam” and his claim of legitimacy on that score. The Kurds, however, do not believe in the concept of the “Hidden Imam” which they regard as “un-Islamic” and fear that the new cult may provide a cover for attacks against their own religious beliefs and culture.

Ahmadinejad would be wrong to dismiss or minimize the threat of ethnic dissent in the Islamic Republic. Iran’s ethnic minorities, including the Kurds, the Arabs, the Turkmen and the Baluch, account for at least 12 percent of the population.

Located along the country’s long and porous borders these communities could be open to manipulation by anyone who wishes to weaken Iran or pay back in the same currency the Islamic Republic for its machinations in neighboring countries. […]

In the meantime a word of warning is called for to all those who might think that playing the ethnic and sectarian cards against Ahmadinejad’s new militancy might help knock some sense into Tehran. Any attempt at encouraging secessionism in the Iranian periphery could only mobilize the mainstream nationalism of Iranians in support of a regime that, its feigned defiance notwithstanding, has lost much of its original support base.

Ahmadinejad’s so-called “second revolution” may have little in the way of positive creativity to offer inside or outside Iran. But it still has large reserves of negative energy that could be deployed in the service of a destructive policy in the region as a whole.

Fanning the fires of ethnic and sectarian resentment against Tehran is not difficult — especially at a time that Ahmadinejad seems determined to lead the nation into an unnecessary conflict with the rest of the world. A Yugoslav-style scenario for Iran may help speed up the demise of the Islamic Republic. But it could unleash much darker forces of nationalism and religious zealotry that could plunge the entire region into years if not decades of bloody crises.

The current fever provoked in Iran by Ahmadinejad and his pseudo-messianic message is little more than an epiphenomenon which, given patience and wisdom, could be contained and neutralized. Here is a monster that feeds and grows on crisis and conflict. The answer is not to lead it to a banquet table but to starve it.

From the BBC:

Newspapers across Europe have reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to show support for a Danish paper whose cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage.

France Soir, Germany’s Die Welt, La Stampa in Italy and El Periodico in Spain all carried some of the drawings….

Reporters Without Borders said the reaction in the Arab world “betrays a lack of understanding” of press freedom as “an essential accomplishment of democracy.”

In Berlin, the prominent daily Die Welt ran a front-page caricature of the prophet wearing a headdress shaped like a bomb.

The paper argued there was a right to blaspheme in the West, and asked whether Islam was capable of coping with satire.

“The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical,” it wrote in an editorial.

France Soir said it had reprinted the full set to show that “religious dogma” had no place in a secular society.

But not one paper in the UK, despite the government defeat last night…..

Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Zahar on Al-Manar TV:

Mahmoud Al-Zahar: “Palestine means Palestine in its entirety – from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River, from Ras Al-Naqura to Rafah. We cannot give up a single inch of it. Therefore, we will not recognize the Israeli enemy’s [right] to a single inch. That is one thing.

“The second thing is that if the right of return is an individual right, neither Mahmoud Al-Zahar nor ‘Abbas Zaki can relinquish it, because all these concessions will constitute a national catastrophe.

“The third point is that we can found a state on any piece of the land, and this will not mean we give up on any other part of the land.” […]

Interviewer: “Condoleezza Rice has demanded that Hamas recognize Israel’s right to exist. How do you respond?”

Mahmoud Al-Zahar: “Why should we recognize Condoleezza Rice… or Israel’s right to exist? In this region we have faced Roman occupation, Persian occupation, Crusader occupation, British occupation – they are all gone. The Israeli enemy does not belong to the region. It does not belong to the region’s history, geography, or faith. When you enter the land occupied in 1948, it is like entering an enclave. But when you go to Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, you feel at home. It is your homeland.”

Christopher Hitchens (via To the Tooting Station):

It’s agonizing to watch the Palestinians choose a leadership that is openly aligned with the moribund and vicious dictatorships in Iran and Syria. The time when the PLO called for a democratic secular state seems a very long while ago. But just look at the primeval propaganda of Hamas, which speaks of a land that is holy to one god and dedicated only to his fanatical supporters. Where has one heard that evil rubbish before?

Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, now based in Toronto, is currently visiting Israel. Here’s an interview in Haaretz:

Derakhshan has dreamed of visiting Israel for years. Now, at the height of the war of words between Israel and Iran, he feels that this is the right time to realize his dream and to share his experiences with readers of his blogs. During the week he spent in Israel, he met with Israelis who emigrated from Iran, lectured at Tel Aviv University on how young Iranian reformists are using the Internet for political purposes and sought mainly to see and speak to as many Israelis as possible. “The idea is to come to Israel as a civilian and a journalist, to contribute to the dialogue and perhaps to help a little to dispel the tension between the two countries,” explains Derakhshan. “Both Israel and Iran gain from this propaganda machine that portrays the other side as the bad guy, and our goal as civilians is to change this.

“I am trying to show Israelis that there are lots of people like myself living in Iran, with the same moderate ideas about Israel and the world. Most Iranians want normal relations with Israel, and do not view Israelis as bloodthirsty Jews who want to kill all Muslims, which is how the regime tries to portray them.”

More links at Metafilter.

At Arts & Letters Daily they link to a couple of reviews of “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville” by Bernard-Henri Lévy. Whether that’s the intention or not, they make an interesting contrast. Neither reviewer – Alex Beam in the Boston Globe, or Garrison Keillor in the NYT – likes the book, but that’s about all they have in common. Beam tries a bit too hard:

Sophisticated people everywhere — Tina Brown! Adam Gopnik! — are taking French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy’s new book, ”American Vertigo,” very, very seriously. BHL, as he is known chez lui, figuratively retraced the 1831 American journey of his countryman Alexis de Tocqueville, spinning out his impressions first in a series of Atlantic magazine articles and now in a book.

Color me skeptical. I can’t take Levy seriously at all. I stuck with his first Atlantic article until I tripped across the phrase ”Detroit, sublime Detroit.” I burst out laughing.

But Keillor gives a masterclass in how it should be done:

Any American with a big urge to write a book explaining France to the French should read this book first, to get a sense of the hazards involved. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a “partner-swapping club” in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair (“a festival of American kitsch”); Sun City (“gilded apartheid for the old”);a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz – you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World’s Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there’s nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You’ve lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don’t own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There’s no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

Now that the Danish cartoon affair has finally taken off and caught the attention of the MSM, no doubt politicians and other cultural commentators will feel the need to give us their opinions on the subject. It could be interesting – and depressing:

Bill Clinton, the former US President, added his voice, telling a conference in Qatar that he feared anti-Semitism would be replaced with anti-Islamic prejudice. He condemned “these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam”.

Yes, that’ll calm things down.

rrently enjoyed by secular leftwing ideologies in most of the Islamic world, this appears to be a clear case of political opportunism driven by ideological bankruptcy.

e can’t be accused of imperial ambitions whenever we publish an article.

Most of Irwin’s book is a rewarding and often amusing history of the study of Islamic culture, mainly Arabic. It’s worth noting that, as in many similar cases — Sir William Jones’s work on Sanskrit springs to mind — the serious study of the history of Islam and of Arabic was principally carried out by Western scholars, and we wouldn’t know as much as we do now about the subject were it not for the endeavours of orientalists. Irwin says, for example, that Arabic was being printed in Europe as far back as the 16th century, with the printing, in 1514, of a book of hours with an Arabic typeface. The first printing press in the Arab world, however, was the Bulaq press, established as late as 1822.

t intentional.

The Norwegian government, in contrast, has gone for all-out apology.

And, from Jan at Secular Blasphemy:

[T]he Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade and Islamic Jihad have spread flyers in Gaza threatening Danish, Norwegian and Swedish citizens to leave Gaza within 72 and 48 hours, respectively. There have been anti-Danish demonstrations in Gaza, where Muslims, ironically upset over having their holy symbols defiled, are burning and trampling on Danish flags.