Author: Mick Hartley

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Can we finally admit that Muslims have blown out of all proportion their outrage over 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad published in a Danish newspaper last September? In the latest twist, last week both the Organization for the Islamic Conference and the Gulf Cooperation Council condemned a Norwegian newspaper for reprinting the drawings – a decision the publication defended as protecting freedom of expression.

The initial printing of the cartoons in Denmark led to death threats being issued against the artists, demonstrations in Kashmir, and condemnation from 11 countries. What did any of this achieve but prove the original point of the newspaper’s culture editor, that artists in Europe were censoring themselves because they feared Muslim reaction? He commissioned the cartoons after hearing that Danish artists were too scared to illustrate a children’s book about the prophet. […]

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was right not to intervene, insisting the government has no say over media – the argument used by Arab leaders when they are asked about anti-Semitism in their media, by the way. But in a New Year’s speech, Rasmussen condemned “any expression, action or indication that attempts to demonize groups of people on the basis of their religion or ethnic background.”

What should have remained a local issue turned into a diplomatic uproar that Muslims otherwise rarely provoke when fighting for their rights around the world. Perhaps the Muslim governments who spearheaded the campaign – led by Egypt – felt this was an easy way to burnish their Islamic credentials at a time when domestic Islamists are stronger than they have been in many years.

bid by raising questions about the nation’s commitment to freedom of speech.

Coming just days before the EU is to begin a review of Turkey’s much-criticised justice system, the court decision was a sign that the long-desired goal of joining the wealthy EU was slowly forcing the government to embrace European norms of freedom and democracy.

“The court dropped the case,” Haluk Inanici, the author’s lawyer, said. “This case should not have been opened in the first place.”

Olli Rehn, the EU enlargement commissioner, said in a statement that the decision to dismiss charges was “good news for freedom of expression in Turkey” but warned that Turkey “needs to fill properly the loopholes” in its penal code, which he said limit freedom of expression.

But there’s still a way to go:

Turkey is still not off the hook, however, as dozens of people are still facing charges similar to Pamuk’s. The nationalist lawyers behind the charges have vowed to continue prosecuting those who allegedly break the law by insulting Turkey.

Kemal Kerincsiz, a board member of the Turkish Lawyers’ Union, said yesterday that he would appeal against the Pamuk decision.

“It is a scandal,” Mr Kerincsiz said. “Orhan Pamuk must be punished for insulting Turkey and Turkishness, it is a grave crime.”

t us look at our attitude to animals more generally. In the 36 hours that we worked to free the northern bottlenose from the toxic claustrophobia of the Thames, thousands of other animals were suffering the cramped, artificially lit and sadistic conditions of the nation’s battery farms. All for the sake of a few pence off the price of produce….

The answer demonstrates the fuzziness of our moral thinking. Most of us feel a sense of obligation towards the animal kingdom but this is almost impossible to reconcile with our tolerance of legalised cruelty. What better way to absolve our collective conscience than with an overblown gesture to a solitary whale? After all, £100K is a drop in the Thames compared with the serious money required for ethical consistency in our approach to animals.

But why should ethical consistency in our approach to animals require that we treat all animals the same? It seems to me entirely reasonable to have different attitudes to different animals. Personally I like cats, but don’t like rats: an inconsistency which doesn’t bother me in the least. Cats are beautiful and make nice pets; rats are horrible and spread diseases. A Martian might find my attitude very odd given how both are furry mammals, but then I’m not a Martian. Our ethics aren’t imposed on us from above: they evolve as part of our relationships as human beings – pet-lovers and, for the most part, carnivores – with other animals. And yes, a whale is something special.

Much worse, it seems to me, are those who’d try and impose some supposedly consistent ethical approach, treating all animals the same, against all our moral intuitions.

….and blows himself up. Muhammad Shazzaf Al-Shehri is, or rather was, a TV comedian turned suicide bomber. At MEMRI TV there’s some old footage of him, leading a rousing Jihadi singalong (clip 1004):

Get up and shake off your slumber, because Islam is back. We have come for the sake of Allah, and we have declared Jihad. We have returned with sub-machine guns. We have the leadership today. We have awakened our generation, individually and as a whole.

Perhaps it loses something in translation.

And then there’s this chant:

We treat the woman like a protected pearl. In the West, the woman is degraded. We treat the woman like a protected pearl. In the West, the woman is degraded. A hidden pearl, a protected pearl.

It’s something of a bete noire with Islamists, this supposed degradation of women in the West, where they’re allowed to roam free, do what they want, and even – the wicked temptresses – flaunt their bodies. As Salman Rushdie argues, it’s important to realise the extent to which Islamic extremism is rooted in men’s fear of women’s sexuality:

Rushdie told German weekly magazine Stern that his latest novel, “Shalimar the Clown”, dealt with the deep anxiety felt among many Islamic men about female sexual freedom and lost honor.

When asked if the book drew a link between “Islamic terror and damaged male honor”, Rushdie said he saw it as a crucial, and often overlooked, point.

“The Western-Christian world view deals with the issues of guilt and salvation, a concept that is completely unimportant in the East because there is no original sin and no savior,” he said, in comments printed in German.

“Instead, great importance is given to ‘honor’. I consider that to be problematic. But of course it is underestimated how many Islamists consciously or unconsciously attempt to restore lost honor.”

When asked why he probed the issues in his new novel in the context of a love triangle, he said: “It has a lot to do with sexual fear of women.”

Rushdie, 58, said that much of the anger toward the West was provoked by that split on sexual issues.

Of all the corruptions from the decadent West that concern the Islamists – democracy, liberalism, commercialism – feminism probably offers the greatest threat.

The Washington Post’s weekly magazine Parade on Sunday has published its 2006 list of the world’s worst dictators (via):

This present list draws in part on reports by global human-rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International. While the three worst from 2005 have retained their places, two on last year’s list (Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan) have slipped out of the Top 10—not because their conduct has improved but because other dictators have gotten worse.

It’s a tough competitiion: Kim Jong Il can’t even make it to no. 1, and there are a couple of promising high performers moving up into 4th and 5th place….

Jeff Jacoby talks to Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia and chairman of its largest Muslim organization, the 35 million-member Nadhlatul Ulama (via Solomonia):

”I have been called ‘Chrislam’ because I am so close to Christians,” Abdurrahman Wahid is saying. ”When I was criticized by a certain Muslim preacher for not being harsh enough against the ‘kaffir’ [infidels] — for being too close to Jews and Christians — I told him to read the Koran again. Because when the Koran speaks of ‘infidels,’ it means idolaters,” not monotheists.

Wahid, the former president of Indonesia, is speaking to me by phone from his office in Jakarta. With him is C. Holland Taylor, an American entrepreneur who fell in love with Indonesian culture en route to making a fortune in the telecom industry. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Taylor created the LibForAll Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting Islamist extremism by promoting a culture of liberty and tolerance in the Muslim world; Wahid is the foundation’s patron and senior adviser. […]

Taylor argues that because of Indonesia’s long tradition of pluralism, and because of Wahid’s great following, Indonesia is the ideal base from which to launch an intellectual and cultural assault against the jihadists’ ideology. The ”essence” of Islam, he and Wahid maintain, is summed up in the words of the Koran (Sura 109:6): ”For you, your religion; for me, my religion.” But whether such a message will resonate in the Arab world remains to be seen. After all, jihadists quote the Koran too, and the verses they cite are as intolerant and supremacist as Wahid’s is pacific and humane.

But there is no doubting Wahid’s commitment to interfaith harmony. He tells Indonesian Muslims that they can learn from Christianity and Christian life, and has dispatched armed members of Nadhlatul Ulama to protect Christian churches from Islamist violence. Not long ago, one of Wahid’s Muslim adherents was killed when he discovered a bomb in a church and used his body to shield the Christian worshipers from its blast. That stunning act of selflessness is a powerful reminder that Muslims no less than non-Muslims have a great deal riding on the defeat of the Islamofascists, and that we will not win the war against radical Islam without Muslim allies like Wahid.

Via EastSouthWestNorth: a collection of Chinese photojournalism, and a three-year-old boy.

ristian circles in the US Congress and the Zionist lobby of influencing the US Congress against Sudan.

Al-Bashir asked foreign powers not to interfere in the Darfur conflict pointing out that there was no genocide there.

Meanwhile, with the African Union summit opening in Khartoum tomorrow, the Sudanese government is bidding to head the organisation:

Sudan says it has East Africa’s backing in the AU, where nations tend to work in blocs. But diplomats said southern, central and western African states were still undecided.

“This risks dividing Africa,” said one West African government official. “One of the options that the regional bodies could propose is asking Sudan to withdraw its candidature.”

Sudan is the only country to have nominated itself for the position so far, and a Sudanese official said his government would not withdraw.

“Sudan is definitely going to win the support of the African heads of state,” said Ali Tamim Fartak, adviser to President Omar al-Bashir. […]

The United States, which has pressured Sudan to end fighting in Darfur, said there would be “certain contradictions” if Sudan was chosen when the AU force was trying to protect Sudanese citizens “in part from the government of Sudan”.

wrung our hands afterward and offered the lame excuse that it all happened too fast, or that we didn’t fully comprehend the carnage when it was still under way.

And now the same tragedy is unfolding in Darfur, but this time we don’t even have any sort of excuse. In Darfur genocide is taking place in slow motion, and there is vast documentary proof of the atrocities. Some of the evidence can be seen in the photo reproduced with this essay, which was leaked from an African Union archive containing thousands of other such photos. And now, the latest proof comes in the form of two new books that tell the sorry tale of Darfur: it’s appalling that the publishing industry manages to respond more quickly to genocide than the UN and world leaders do.

In my years as a journalist, I thought I had seen a full kaleidoscope of horrors, from babies dying of malaria to Chinese troops shooting students to Indonesian mobs beheading people. But nothing prepared me for Darfur, where systematic murder, rape, and mutilation are taking place on a vast scale, based simply on the tribe of the victim. What I saw reminded me why people say that genocide is the worst evil of which human beings are capable.

re and more common, so is the use of overwhelming force to put them down. A major threshold was crossed early last month in the village of Dongzhou, about two hours from here by car, where residents estimate that as many as 30 people were killed by paramilitary security forces that fired on demonstrators. […]

The strands that come together in Panlong are so typical of rural protests as to be very nearly generic.

There are small people dispossessed of their land to make way for industries or development projects.

There are fruitless efforts to seek help, from city hall to the provincial administration and all the way to the capital. There is environmental destruction on a huge scale and the loss of long-held livelihoods.

When a spark ignites the people’s discontent, there are police state tactics to suppress the protests and enforce a silence over the details. Ultimately there are brass knuckles, jail and, lately, death for those who refuse to take the hint and desist. […]

As with so many recent rural protests, Panlong’s problems began with land. Many villagers told stories of having been deceived by corrupt local officials who they said had enriched themselves by selling off rights to the villagers’ farmland.

“Two years back, one day some villagers were asked to attend a routine meeting,” said a 42-year-old farmer who gave his name as Fang. “They went and they paid 10 yuan for participation fees, and they signed in as usual. Later, when we discovered our land was being sold, we asked the village committee to explain what’s going on, and they answered that we had signed the contract. Suddenly we remembered that meeting, and everyone understood that we had already been cheated.”