Author: Mick Hartley

He must be getting desperate: from an interview which Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad gave to French TV’s Channel 3, aired on Syrian TV on December 5.

I do not understand how France can place all its efforts into investigating the assassination of Prime Minister Al-Hariri – something I understand and support – while it does not say a word about the assassination of President Arafat, who was assassinated in the Palestinian territories and who died in a French hospital. This event passed by without us knowing anything about it. Why these double standards? This is not characteristic of French policy. This is one of the things I don’t understand, and I don’t know if I can expect an answer soon.

Some hints to help Bashar out here: one, an old man, died in hospital after a lengthy illness: the other was blown up.

This is an interesting webpage: The Principal Agglomerations of the World. It lists the largest cities in the world, but looks at whole urban areas rather than just counting within arbitrarily defined city limits. So, in UK terms, Birmingham (pop. 2.6m) is not just the city of Birmingham, which according to the World Gazetteer has a population of 984k, but the whole West Midlands conurbation. Similarly for Manchester and Glasgow. Leeds leaps from 455k to 2.15m by including Bradford and (presumably) most of West Yorkshire.

Agglomeration is defined as “a central city and neighboring communities linked to it (e.g.) by continuous built-up areas or commuters”. I don’t know if that’s a common usage, or just a usage decided on by the site owner (one Thomas Brinkhoff from Germany), but it makes sense. The Ruhr, for instance, moves to its rightful place as Germany’s largest urban area with a population of 5.8m, ahead of Berlin on 4.2m. Strange, though, to include Malmo within Copenhagen (yes I know there’s a bridge now). And it would be good to know how the London figure (11.95m compared to a World Gazetteer figure of 7.4m) was arrived at. Does that include all the Home Counties? It puts London as the second largest European city behind Moscow (13.75m) but ahead of Paris (9.9m).

Overall, Tokyo is a world-beater with a massive 34.1m, and New York (21.85m) is fourth behind Mexico City (22.65m) and Seoul (22.25m).

As I say, interesting…..if you like this sort of thing. The site also has other related stats: for instance, population and area of every country.

To be an art critic nowadays, you’ve really got to master the language. Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the Times clearly deserves her position. On the Turner Prize:

This obvious ridiculousness is part of each project’s pleasure. But it is also an important part of their point. To labour one’s way on some improvised electric bicycle whose only by-product is water across a baking desert and then use the collected waste to paint a picture of the supremely efficient cactus, is to point out a ludicrous gap between human effort and natural simplicity. This is more than an absurdly convoluted demonstration of futility. It begs important questions about the ways that we negotiate our planet.

A series of platinum prints showing the vast quantities of ore mined to produce five little images illustrates the gross disparity between a production process and its end product. And is this really so odd, in a week when the world’s largest artificial ski slope, complete with tons of manufactured “snow”, has just opened in the desert state of Dubai?

Art nowadays, eh? If it doesn’t subvert our preconceptions, then you can be pretty sure it’s begging important questions. I would suggest that for the overwhelming majority of people, the important questions raised by these artworks aren’t about the way we negotiate our planet, but concern the way a self-selecting group of subsidised artists make a living. As for “the gross disparity between a production process and its end product”, why should artists be exempt here? I’d imagine the resources and finance involved in the construction, presentation and promotion of the Turner Prize exhibits are pretty comparable with the costs of constructing the ski slope in Dubai. At least in Dubai they’ve got a ski slope to show for it at the end. All we get is a bunch of self-righteous people feeling pleased with themselves.

Starling’s work has a visionary quality. He stands as an inheritor of the cranky but quintessentially British tradition of William Blake or Samuel Palmer — or maybe even James Bond. At his most ambitious, he entwines complex ideas with a sharp political point.

All this, from a shed?

The artist has said that his works are “the physical manifestation of my thought process”. Tate curators hailed the shed as “poetic . . . a buttress against the pressures of modernity, mass production and global capitalism”. They added: “For each project, he has learnt particular skills — model-making, boat-building, engineering … but always stopping short of complete mastery. We can sense, in the visible fissures and joins of his works, the signs of a paradoxical ‘amateur professionalism’.”

I can sense, in the visible fissures and joins of his works, the signs of a complete…

Ah, what’s the point?

It’s difficult not to agree with David Aaronovitch:

[Y]ou can see that it could sometimes be true that torture gets results. For every ten duff confessions you might get a really useful admission, just as for every five detainees you might be holding one very dangerous terrorist. Who knows? You won’t find, I would suggest, anywhere in history a torturer — deploying any of the San Gimignano devices — who didn’t think that he was doing it for the best.

Good old-fashioned disastrous realpolitik would suggest that we turn aside while torture happens. If, in the short term, we have a chance of extracting a few key names, places and plans, then lives may be saved and we should let the renderers rend. It is precisely the same logic that led to us trade smiles and Sandhurst places with Middle Eastern dictators for years. It seemed more politic for us to support our bastards — and never mind the democracy.

But as McCain puts it now, we are in “a war of ideas, a struggle to advance freedom in the face of terror in places where oppressive rule has bred the malevolence that creates terrorists”. And we fight it — always, always, always — by being as little like those oppressors as we can possibly be. Even if torture works.

Apart from the (overwhelming) moral considerations against the use of torture, there’s also the simple point that in democracies with a free press, the use of torture is always, eventually, going to be exposed, and the damage from that exposure will always outweigh any supposed benefits from information extracted under pressure. Plus, it will always create a gap between government and governed: no regime is going to come out and admit, yes we use torture, yes, this piece of information was obtained from an individual who had been subjected to repeated waterboarding. It’s like capital punishment, in that it’s always going to poison everyone involved. But at least the debates about capital punishment, and in the US the procedures that lead up to it, are conducted in the open. Torture by its nature is always going to be clandestine, so it poisons trust as well. No democratic society is going to have signs up in its prisons: this way to the Physiotherapy Unit, this way to the canteen, this way to the Forced Information Extraction Unit. So…we shouldn’t do it.

And you thought nationalist chauvinism was a European disease (via):

China and Japan, which are at each other’s throats over any number of issues, finally seem to agree on one thing: Hollywood’s latest release is a cultural dud.

The Hollywood movie Memoirs of a Geisha, which had its world premiere in Tokyo on Tuesday, has triggered consternation in Japan because none of the three lead actresses are Japanese; two of them are Chinese and another is an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia.

Citizens polled about the matter in Tokyo questioned why Hollywood chose Chinese actresses to portray geishas, quintessentially Japanese women trained in traditional arts of singing, dancing and accompanying wealthy men.

If there’s dismay in Japan, there’s outrage in China, but for a different reason: Many Chinese are beside themselves that the film’s star, Zhang Ziyi, China’s best-known actress, is depicted in the movie as having sexual relations with a Japanese man.

“She deserves to be chopped into a thousand bits,” said one Internet user, one of more than 1,000 people who posted on the subject at the Tianji (Sky’s Edge) Web portal.

“Zhang is a shameless prostitute,” another posting said. “She should be deprived of Chinese citizenship.

The fuss about those Danish cartoons of Mohammed has, predictably, escalated (via Brussels Journal):

Demonstrations in Pakistan have escalated into death threats against Danish illustrators who drew pictures of the prophet Mohammed.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has warned Danish travellers to Pakistan of increased hazard after a Danish newspaper’s decision to publish cartoons of Muslim prophet Mohammed escalated into a bounty being placed on the heads of the cartoonists.

Daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoon drawings of Mohammed in September, sparking angry reactions from Denmark’s Muslim population and a number of Muslim countries.

A bounty of DKK 50,000 had been put on the head of the cartoonist responsible for the drawings, daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende reported on Friday. The Pakistani group offering the reward mistakenly believes that the 12 cartoons were created by just one person.

Danish Ambassador to Pakistan Bent Wigotski said the bounty had been promised by religious party Jamaat-e-Islami and its youth organisation, which had also demanded Danish representatives expelled from the country.

From the BBC:

An anti-war envoy is continuing to meet Sunni Muslim groups in Iraq in a bid to secure the release of kidnapped Briton Norman Kember and three other men.

Some have already called for their release and Iraq’s largest Sunni party, the Iraqi Islamic party, said it tarnished the image of Islam.

“The kidnapping will have a grave negative effect among those who call for ending occupation,” it added.

Envoy Anas Altikriti was sent to Baghdad by peace and Muslim groups [the Muslim Association of Britain, Stop the War Coalition and CND].

His visit follows the screening of a video showing the peace campaigners in captivity and threats by their captors to kill them if Iraqis were not released from prison by Thursday.

Newspapers, meanwhile, have published appeals from other Islamic groups, pointing out the fact that the four hostages were working for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

Unlike the occupation troops, busy rebuilding the infrastructure of a country ruined by decades of Baathist tyranny, who, of course, are not “working for the benefit of the Iraqi people”.

“The kidnapping will have a grave negative effect among those who call for ending occupation”. The slaughter of thousands of men, women and children being blown up by the jihadists doesn’t bother them, but these kidnappings …hmm, that’s a mistake.

and Kuwait.

Dr Allawi is resorting to theatrics and dirty tactics before the elections as he is desperate to win favour with the Iraqi people. But he seems unable or unwilling to understand that such tactics will backfire and he will remain sidelined by voters who do not trust him due to his Baathist connections. Furthermore, Dr Allawi is using childish scaremongering rhetoric in a bid to win further support from Bush and Blair and sideline the current government.

“Childish scaremongering rhetoric” indeed. It still made the Observer front page though. I wonder why.

y been written: “Bob Dylan, best known as a protest singer from the 1960s, died yesterday…” The media loves a simple idea. No matter how famous you are, when you die you get one idea, and one only.

Which is surely nonsense: Dylan long ago transcended his beginnings and moved up into the category of Great American Artist.

But then….why on earth is Dylan resurrecting these old songs? I checked through the set lists of his recent European tour: yes, Masters of War does feature, but not that often. Only once in the UK (Nottingham) but more frequently in Europe (Brussels, Berlin, Munich…) Can there have been anyone in the audiences in Germany or Belgium who didn’t think the song was directed at Bush and the neo-cons? So what’s going on? Is Bob just giving ’em what they want?

Really, who knows? This is Bob Dylan we’re talking about.

Update: RWB has an excellent post about a talk he went to at Columbia University back in March, featuring Greil Marcus and Christopher Ricks, on Dylan. Apparently Marcus gave much the same speech – on Masters of War – as above, and was duly criticised by Ricks.

Hitchens on Ramsey Clark:

From bullying prosecutor he mutated into vagrant and floating defense counsel, offering himself to the génocideurs of Rwanda and to Slobodan Milosevic, and using up the spare time in apologetics for North Korea. He acts as front-man for the Workers World Party, an especially venomous little Communist sect, which originated in a defense of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

I was wondering when Clark would pop up in Baghdad, and there he was last Monday, presenting his credentials to the judge in the Saddam Hussein case and being accepted at his face value as a defense spokesman. He lost no time in showing what he is made of.

The first charge being brought against Saddam Hussein is that in 1982, after his motorcade came under fire near the mainly Shiite town of Dujail, he ordered the torture and murder of 148 men and boys. It’s a relatively minor item in the catalog, but there it is. The first prosecution witness in the case, Wadah al-Sheikh, has actually testified that he knows of no direct link between Saddam and the killings. The defense team has to hope that it can prove the same, or perhaps suggest that no such massacre occurred. Not so Ramsey Clark. In a recent BBC interview, he offered the excuse that Iraq was then fighting the Shiite nation of Iran:

“He (Saddam) had this huge war going on, and you have to act firmly when you have an assassination attempt.”

Just go back and read that again. Ramsey Clark believes that A) the massacre and torture did occur and B) that it was ordered by his client and C) that he was justified in ordering it and carrying it out. That is quite sufficiently breathtaking. It is no less breathtaking when one recalls why Saddam “had this huge war going on.” He had, after all, ordered a full-scale invasion of the oil-bearing Iranian region of Khuzestan and attempted to redraw the frontiers in Iraq’s favor. Most experts accept a figure of about a million and a half as the number of young Iranians and Iraqis who lost their lives in consequence of this aggression (which incidentally enjoyed the approval of that Nobel Peace laureate Jimmy Carter). And Ramsey Clark says that the aggression is an additional reason to justify the massacre at Dujail.