enemies will be rubbing their hands. From Amir Taheri:
Many mullas worried about Ahmadinejad’s thinly disguised intention to drive them back to the mosques, are using their pulpits to pour invective on him. Last week they went as far as calling for his impeachment and removal from the presidency on unspecified charges. An Iranian website is even taking bets on Ahmadinejad being forced out within less than a year.
Somewhat in the spirit of Banksy, “Signs of Life“. The BBC website has a few examples (via).
ina to allow access to the refugees, and funding organizations willing to help, including North Korea Free Radio and others that relay the truth about the outside world to North Koreans.
Despite the collusion between the Chinese and North Korean governments to prevent North Korean defections, it is clear from the testimony of Cha, Ma and others involved in the North Korean “underground railroad” that neither government is able to stem the flow of the desperate people who seek to escape nightmarish North Korea, where millions starve and 200,000 languish in gulags.
It is possible, even likely, that aiding the outflow of North Korean defectors and spreading the news of the outside world — thereby encouraging a mass exodus — would do far more to bring down the repugnant North Korean regime and resolve its nuclear threat permanently than any amount of futile diplomatic talk with the regime could achieve.
This deserves some publicity:
The French Government tried to blame the 1985 sinking of the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior on MI6, according to official documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The campaign of “misinformation and smears” — suggesting that MI6 bombed the ship in New Zealand and framed French secret agents, or that MI6 knew in advance of the French mission — infuriated Margaret Thatcher’s Government. Malcolm Rifkind, then a Foreign Office minister, told British diplomats in Paris to demand an end to the stories in the media, but they continued to appear.
Sir John Fretwell, the British Ambassador in Paris, wrote of French officials’ “desperate attempts to find answers which will somehow satisfy public opinion while keeping the president [François Mitterrand] above the mêlée”.
Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, said he was “disturbed” that stories still appeared after he complained to his French counterpart.
Sir Geoffrey Howe, “disturbed”? Phew!
Stephen Pollard is all worked up about Paul McCartney:
On today’s BBC Six O’Clock News, the former Beatle and his wife, Lady Heather, are shown watching gruesome footage from China of cats and dogs being killed and then stripped for their fur. The practice is indeed sickening and no decent person could be other than horrified.
Where Sir Paul’s moral indignation becomes simply warped, however, is in his next sentence. “I wouldn’t even dream of going over there to play, in the same way I wouldn’t go to a country that supported apartheid . . . It’s against every rule of humanity.” Sir Paul and his wife then call for a worldwide boycott of all Chinese goods. “If we can hit them in their pockets, maybe they’ll do something to stop this.” […]
Sir Paul has worldwide fame. He could do untold good campaigning for his fellow human beings. Instead, he chooses to try to save a few animals. Go figure.
On the contrary, what perplexes me is the way people get so outraged about those who campaign against animal cruelty – and we’re not talking about animal lib nutters here, just cases like this where we can all agree that unnecessary cruelty is involved. What’s the problem? It’s not a zero-sum game, where any outrage against animal cruelty automatically detracts from campaigns against people cruelty. I’ve no doubt that were Sir Paul to see gruesome pictures of people being killed and then having their skin peeled off while some were still alive, to sell as leather coverings for handbags, he’d be as horrified as the rest of us. The difference would be that thousands of others would be horrified too, to the extent that it would hit the headlines across the world, and there’d be no need for Sir Paul to speak out.
Do we really want another celebrity giving us all the benefit of their opinion on every political topic? Stephen forgets that Sir Paul may not share his views: to judge from the political pronouncements of other rock stars, he almost certainly wouldn’t. Just be glad that he isn’t campaigning for troops out of Iraq now, or a boycott of Israel.
Here’s a surprise:
Liverpool, Manchester City and Leeds United’s managers have expressed regret at the failure by fans at their games to observe a one-minute silence for George Best.
Calls from the Premier League and Football League for the silence in memory of Best, who died on Friday, were honoured by fans at virtually every professional game over the weekend.
But Leeds coach Kevin Blackwell was furious after his team’s fans, who have a longstanding rivalry with Manchester United, failed to respect the silence for the former Old Trafford idol in Saturday’s second division game at Millwall.
“We have got magnificent fans. They were let down by just a few, but it is always the few that seem to get all the headlines,” he told Sky Sports….
The silence was similarly cut short on Saturday at the City of Manchester stadium between City and Liverpool — to the disappointment of both managers.
Leeds, Liverpool, Man City fans failing to respect the silence? Oh yes, I’m really shocked. I mean, what did they expect? I can understand a minute’s silence at Old Trafford….but every ground?
Seems to me it’s another of those Princess Di moments, when everyone goes completely over the top. That, plus the fact that he’s been dying for so long that all the obituaries have been up and ready to roll for weeks (years?) and no one was going to let all that effort go to waste.
mparable “genocide” of the Palestinians.
Western children of the Sixties like this sort of talk. They look for a narrative based on the American civil rights movement or the struggle against apartheid. They care little for economic achievement or political pluralism. They are suspicious of any society with a Western appearance, and in any contest between people with differing skin colours, they prefer the darker. They buy into the idea, now promoted by all Arab regimes and by Muslim firebrands with a permanent interest in deflecting attention from their own societies’ problems, that Israel is the greatest problem of all.
Well, some will say, that is the way it is: Israel has abused power, and is reaping the whirlwind. I don’t want to argue today about the rights and wrongs of Israel’s actions, though I think, given its difficulties, it stands up better than most before the bar of history. All I want to ask my fellow Europeans is this: are you happy to help direct the world’s fury at the only country in the Middle East whose civilisation even remotely resembles yours? And are you sure that the fate of Israel has no bearing on your own? In Iran, the new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes the link. The battle over Palestine, he says, is “the prelude of the battle of Islam with the world of arrogance”, the world of the West. He is busy building his country’s nuclear bomb.
Actress Helen Mirren has a piece in the Times about the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.
Films are now so violent that it’s hard to imagine that real life could be even more brutal. But when I visited Uganda last year, I met some children who had been through an ordeal that would seem implausible even in a film script. Now living in one of many rehabilitation centres in northern Uganda, these traumatised teenagers are the victims of one of Africa’s longest-running wars. Almost 20 years of fighting between the Ugandan Government and the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army has killed half a million people. Many of the dead are children.
I’ve posted before about the LRA, and certainly wouldn’t want to play down the scale of the horrors they’re responsible for, but this is the first time I’ve seen a figure of half a million people killed, and find it hard to credit. This Wikipedia article, which seems fairly comprehensive to me, gives a figure of “up to 12,000 people” killed: quite a difference.
A few months ago, the Foreign Secretary was good enough to listen to me and Oxfam about this humanitarian crisis. The British Government has a stake in Uganda, having given about £740 million in aid to the Government there in the past two decades, which has helped to build up the country’s health and education systems.
So we are asking the British Government to speak up for almost two million people in northern Uganda, who desperately need help and support. They must use the presidency of the UN Security Council to help to protect the people of northern Uganda and to work towards ending the conflict, so that the generation of children who have grown up since the war began can taste peace and security for the first time.
Sounds good, but it’s not clear what the UN Security Council could achieve, short of completely militarising the north of the country. The government in Kampala has been engaged for years in a struggle with the LRA, and have become bogged down in accusations that their counter-insurgency troops are as bad as the rebels they’re fighting against. There are no easy answers. As I wrote earlier, how do you negotiate with a group of crazed millenarian cultists? The top five LRA leaders have recently been indicted as war criminals by the International Criminal Court, so perhaps some progress is being made.
Personally I think the efforts of the UN Security Council would be more appropriately directed towards states which are guilty of persecuting their own people – a prime candidate being Uganda’s neighbour to the north, Sudan.
One of the more interesting recent books on psychology was Paul Bloom’s “Descartes Baby“. The title comes from Bloom’s belief – backed by an impressive range of experiments on infants – that we’re pretty much hard-wired to react differently to animate and inanimate objects. We expect objects we see as inanimate to behave in certain ways, but have entirely different expectations for objects we believe to have intentions and purpose. So, in effect, body-soul dualism is a function of the way our minds work – and modern philosophy of mind consists of increasingly convoluted attempts to get our minds – sorry, our brains – to think differently.
In this long article (via) Bloom sums up his position on the question of religious belief. It’s not exactly a revolutionary theory, but Bloom writes well, and makes a powerful argument:
Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry.
Today, International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women, UNICEF are releasing a study on female genital mutilation. From the Scotsman:
Three million women and girls undergo female genital mutilation each year, a higher number than previously believed, and the age at which it is carried out is getting lower in some countries, UNICEF said yesterday.
Nearly half of those cases are in Egypt and Ethiopia, it reported.
“In the 28 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East where female genital mutilation is performed, some 130 million girls and women have been victims of this practice,” it said.