Author: Mick Hartley

Iraqi reformist Dr. Abd Al-Khaleq Hussein, from the www.elaph.com website, and translated at MEMRI: the Iranian and Syrian regimes are fascist in the true sense of the word, and no stability, democracy, or economic prosperity are possible in the region as long as they exist.

“Some believe that describing the Iranian Islamic regime and the Ba’th Party’s Syrian regime as fascist is offensive, provocative, or, at the very least, exaggerated. In actual fact, there is no exaggeration. I call a spade a spade, in accordance with the scientific definition of the terms ‘Fascism’ and ‘Nazism.’

“Italian Fascism, like German Nazism, was a racist movement that discriminated among human beings on the basis of their racial or national affiliation, and had a totalitarian ideology which intervened in every aspect of one’s life…

“The common denominator defining an ideology or policy as Fascist or Nazi is discrimination among human beings for reasons that the victims can do nothing about… After all, I inherited my affiliation from my parents and from the environment in which I was raised; I did not choose it…

“Since both the Iranian and Syrian regimes discriminate among the various groups within their peoples on the basis of religion and ethnicity, they are no different from any other fascist or Nazi regime. These two regimes are therefore fascist in the true, literal sense of the word, not metaphorically…

“The Ba’th regime in Iraq employed various forms of the most despicable racial and sectarian discrimination among the different elements of the Iraqi people. The list of its crimes is long and is already known to all. [However,] despite the fact that, along with the Iraqi people [themselves], the Iranian and Syrian regimes are among those who stand to gain the most from the downfall of the Iraqi Ba’th party, they opposed its downfall because of their hostility to the democratic alternative in Iraq, [because of] their hostility to regional stability, and because it was America that helped the Iraqi people attain these two noble causes [i.e., democracy and stability]. They opposed the downfall of the [Iraqi] Ba’th party out of fear that their own regimes would suffer the same fate.

“For this reason, the Iranian and Syrian regimes made a strategic pact to oppose democracy in Iraq. The regimes made a pact to fight America, ‘the Great Satan,’ on Iraqi soil and with Iraqi blood, and to turn Iraq into ‘a new Vietnamese quagmire,’ in which, they said, the arrogant Americans would sink. [They made this pact] in order to spare [themselves] the fate of Saddam Hussein and his tyrannical regime.

Certainly Iran’s Ahmadinejad, with his hardline populist appeal, his anti-semitic rhetoric and the mad gleam in his eye, is the nearest we’ve seen for a long time to the fascist leaders of the Thirties.

A mass grave, probably dating from Saddam’s 1991 suppression of Shia rebels after the Gulf War, has been unearthed in the city of Karbala, south of Baghdad:

The remains were uncovered by workmen digging a new water pipe in the centre of the city known for its Shia shrine.

They called the police, who cordoned off the area. Clothing found with the bodies suggests they included men, women and children.

“The remains of dozens of victims were found in the pit – some 500 metres from the mausoleum of Imam Hussein,” Abdul Rahman, a Karbala police spokesman, told news agency AFP.

After a visit to Iran Tom Porteous paints a surprisingly upbeat picture:

Young women still get away with wearing minimalist and colourful hijabs, body-hugging thigh-length rupushes, make-up and nail varnish. The fashion for young men is longish hair parted in the middle and swept back with the help of copious handfuls of gel, a style that is designed to irritate the fundamentalists. Neckties too are back in fashion, precisely because they are frowned upon by the Islamists. Tehran’s parks are crowded with unchaperoned and unmarried couples. Vodka may not be available by the glass, but it is sold on the black market by the litre. Taxi drivers are more likely to make their passengers listen to rock music or slushy Iranian pop than the Koran. Even Tehran slang has been reshaped to reflect the general contempt for the backwardness of the Islamist regime.

Ahmadinejad’s new team have indicated that they want to reverse all this and return to the Islamic strictures of the 1980s. But the pragmatist conservatives in the regime know that there is no point exacerbating Islamism’s unpopularity by reimposing tedious rules on an unwilling and rebellious youth.

Precisely because it has had its Islamic revolution and been subject to Islamist rule, Iranian society is now more secular than other Muslim states, especially in the Arab world. There is little of the popular Islamist (and anti-western) fervour that seethes in the Arabian peninsula, the Levant and north Africa. Mosques are not well attended. As far as I know, there are no Iranian “terror suspects” held in US secret prisons. After 25 years of Islamist government, Iranians want less Islam, not more.

He points out the intensifying conflict between the hardline zealots around new president Ahmadinejad and the old guard round Rasfanjani who see him as a threat to their political and economic power. But he draws some strange conclusions:

[A] comparison between Iran and Arab states demonstrates the dilemma for those who would like to see more political freedom in the middle east. Iran is certainly closer to achieving real political liberalisation than any other Muslim state in the region, apart from Turkey. But this is partly because it has already had its Islamic revolution. The route to political freedom in Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Syria may well lie through the same dangerous terrain.

Iran is closer to real political liberalisation because of its Islamic revolution? Only in the sense that after two and a half decades of theocracy most Iranians are heartily sick of it.

And this:

Ahmadinejad’s recent moves on the international and regional fronts, including his hostile statements on Israel, have been interpreted by some as signs of incompetence and inexperience. But they may in fact be part of a plan to provoke an escalation of the regional conflict in order to strengthen his precarious domestic position.

What if Ahmadinejad isn’t playing some astute political game? What if he’s exactly what he appears? – a small-minded fanatic and demagogue who actually means what he says.

Good news for the accused under sentence of death in the Benghazi AIDS case:

Libya’s Supreme Court has overturned death sentences imposed on five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor for infecting children with HIV.
It has also ordered a retrial in a lower court.

The six were sentenced to death by firing squad in May 2004 for infecting 426 children with the HIV virus in the port city of Benghazi.

The nurses and doctor say they are innocent. Bulgaria, the US and the European Union urged their release.

If you’re struggling with this year’s King William’s College quiz, check out Metafilter, where considerable progress has been made….

calls on Chadians to mobilise themselves against Sudanese aggression.

Relations between the two states have deteriorated since Chad accused Sudan of being behind Sunday’s attack on Adre, which left about 100 people dead.

The strong language in the statement will alarm observers who have already warned that tensions along the Chad-Sudan border are nearing breaking point.

In the aftermath of Sunday’s attack, Chad accused Sudan of being directly involved in helping to support the Chadian rebels.

But the statement issued by Chad’s government on Friday afternoon is the most aggressive yet.

It claims that not only was Sudan behind the attack on Adre, but it also accuses Sudanese militia of making daily incursions into Chad, stealing cattle, killing innocent people and burning villages on the Chadian border.

Sudan has some form in supporting rebels in neighbouring countries, having for years provided arms and refuge to Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

There’s more here:

Chad has accused the Sudanese government of directing Sunday’s twin assaults against Adre by Chadian rebels of the recently formed Rally for Democracy and Liberty (RDL) group, which has vowed to topple Deby.

The Chad rebels include army deserters and former comrades in arms of President Deby who helped bring him to power in a 1990 rebellion. But they now say he is corrupt and vow to remove him from the leadership of Africa”s newest oil producer.

Chad says its forces repulsed the assaults, killing about 300 of the attackers, pursuing the rebels over the border into Sudan and destroying their bases there.

The RDL rebels reject this government version of the battle for Adre. They say they only lost nine men and that more than 70 government troops were killed. They also say they destroyed two helicopters and several tanks and other vehicles.

There has been no independent confirmation of either version. […]

Chad urged the United Nations Security Council on Thursday to help stop conflict in Darfur and the border area spreading.

It said on Friday it welcomed condemnation of the attacks on Adre by the U.N. and by foreign governments like France and urged the African Union (AU) and other regional bodies to do the same.

Following the Adre attacks Chad has made clear it objects to Sudan hosting a scheduled summit of AU heads of state in Khartoum next month [see here]. It has also called on the AU not to allow al-Bashir to become the next chairman of the continental body.

Eastern Chad is now home to hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees driven from Darfur by the government-backed Janjaweed militias. There are tragic echoes here of the Rwandan genocide, with the fleeing Tutsis housed in camps in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, and the resulting descent of that country into a prolonged and bloody war (the deadliest conflict since World War II, according to Wikipedia) which still rumbles on despite numerous peace initiatives.

For the Darfur refugees, it just gets worse and worse.

ious challenge to Darwin’s apostasy.

It’s difficult to know where to begin, except to say that I’m glad I’m not one of his students.

(via Crooked Timber, where Daniel – dsquared? – makes the classic comment that Darwin has “been built up into a scientific demigod mainly for reasons of US politics IMO”.)

now and again I hide behind it. Occasionally I dance on it.” That may not sound like a call to arms, but in a country where the music is dying it may be the harbinger of revolution.

Iranian political analyst Dr. Hasan Hanizadeh shares his historical expertise on the subject of the Jews and the six million killed in the Holocaust with his Iranian TV audience:

“First of all, this figure is greatly exaggerated. The number of Jews in the world does not exceed 12 million. Only now, 57 years later, has it reached this figure. Clearly, at that time, considering the dispersion of the Jews, there could not have been six million Jews in Europe alone. In any event, the Zionist lobby and the Jewish Agency use this issue as a club with which they beat and extort the West.

“Unfortunately, the West has forgotten two horrendous incidents, carried out by the Jews in 19th-century Europe – in Paris and London, to be precise. In 1883, about 150 French children were murdered in a horrible way in the suburbs of Paris, before the Jewish Passover holiday. Later research showed that the Jews had killed them and taken their blood. This event caused riots in Paris back then, and the French government found itself under pressure.

“A similar incident took place in London, when many English children were killed by Jewish rabbis. These two incidents still haunt the minds and souls of the Europeans, but due to the growing influence of the Zionist lobby in Europe – or to be precise, the influence of the Jews – these two incidents are, unfortunately, never mentioned.”

ary under an enlightened and coherent reading of national and international law. GRASP’s mission is to expand the modern legal understanding of fundamental rights to life, physical integrity, land and freedom, so that the concept of fundamental liberty rights will transcend human-racism.

The purpose of GRASP is to create “new legal rights and protections for the non-human great apes”, and they aim to achieve this by extending the concept of personhood from its current humans-only meaning. My purpose isn’t to discuss the rights and wrongs of this: I imagine it’s a cause which will generate more and more momentum as part of the general rise of animal rights issues. There does seem to be a feeling growing, in the West at least, that we need to update our moral attitudes to the great apes alongside our increased understanding of our close evolutionary relationship with them. My interest in this is the way it’s presented, as a redefining of a term, person, to achieve moral/political aims, and I can’t help seeing a parallel in the way same-sex marriage advocates propose that marriage be redefined.

So, the Peter Tatchell line on this would be, I imagine, that it’s only prejudice in the form of speciesism, or human-racism as GRASP term it, which prevents our granting personhood to the great apes. The equivalent of Norm’s argument would be that it’s a matter of convention. What are the reasons for confining personhood to humans? The possession of morality? Not all humans are moral. Language? Not all humans can speak. Lack of body hair? Plenty of humans are hairy all over. The ability to breed with other humans? Not all humans breed. So, a humans-only personhood is merely a convention which will change over time.

My view, however, would be that the concept of person is defined such that it only refers to humans: great apes by definition can’t be people. The aims of GRASP might be better achieved by campaigning openly for better treatment of the great apes, without trying to twist our understanding of a perfectly decent word which already has a clear meaning.

Are the personhood and same-sex marriage arguments comparable? Well, the analogy’s not perfect – like all these things, there’s a gradient between convention and meaning (yes, might as well throw in Wittgenstein’s “Meaning just is use” here) – but it does seem to me to be useful as a way of thinking about the issues involved.