Author: Mick Hartley

As today’s Times editorial argues, the release of the Mohammad Sidique Khan video at least serves to dispel the myth that the bombers were innocent dupes. It also strengthens the evidence that these attacks were, contrary to Adam Curtis et alia, coordinated and planned at a high level. But mostly what’s striking about the video is how poorly Khan comes across. We’re used to Islamist videos of impassioned speakers chanting praise to Allah and death to the infidel in the appropriate Middle Eastern language, hoisting their rifles defiantly in the air. You can see how that might be inspiring if you were that way inclined, but to see this guy reading woodenly from a script in a mild Yorkshire accent, clearly nervous, and far from impassioned, is an entirely different matter. He comes across as a buffoon, an idiot. There’ve been criticisms about the wisdom of giving this so much publicity, but really, is any Muslim youth in Britain going to be inspired by that performance? Embarrassed, more like. If anything it makes the point – not emphasised enough, perhaps – that you’ve got to be some kind of moron to swallow all this Islamist bull and believe you’re off to paradise after you’ve murdered loads of innocents in cold blood.

Ooooh….the Belgians don’t like us. From Brussels paper De Morgen (translated from the Flemish by Paul Belien at The Brussels Journal), under the title “Waarom wij de Britten zo haten” (Why we hate the British so much):

The Huns are back, and they speak English with a variety of invariably common accents. No other nation manages to spoil other people’s holidays so thoroughly as the British. They do that all through the summer everywhere the sun shines with their unique mixture of wantonness and arrogance, their pathetic addiction to drink, their bad taste, and actually just their ugliness and thickheaded presence. There, that is a relief.

With melancholy we think back to the days when the Dutch were most in evidence, with their caravans, their noisy children and their legendary stinginess. Or the Germans, who once on holiday, seemed to forget who had lost the war. Our northern and eastern neighbours are discerning aesthetes compared with the born hooligans from the other side of the Channel.

Luckily it is easy to recognise a Brit on holiday. A clean shaven head with a much too big and cheap pair of sunglasses; a sunburnt bull’s neck; a set of disgusting tattoos across his torso if it is not covered with a football shirt of Manchester United, Chelsea or Celtic Glasgow; a half liter of beer always on hand. The lady in the company divides her attention between the whining children and the curtain that she got mixed up with the tops in her wardrobe while packing. Anyone who has seen a British couple on holiday understands why the English papers are filled with dramatic stories about binge drinking, obesity and teen-age pregnancies.

Rob Verreycken, a member of Vlaams Belang, the right-wing successor party to the banned Vlaams Blok, is lodging a complaint of racism – mostly, it seems, as a way of getting back at De Morgen after they applauded the banning of Vlaams Blok for supposed racism.

Imagine if someone of the Vlaams Belang were to write a similar text entitled ‘Why we hate Muslims so much’ with similar stereotypes about the behaviour of Muslims and how their women dress. Picture the outcry and indignation of the Leftist crowd, led by De Morgen.

It’s difficult to get too offended: you could read similar sentiments in any of our broadsheets, reflecting middle-class horror at the antics of the lower orders. Not nice though, and not easy to pass off as an attempt at humour.

New Orleans dominates the news. What seems extraordinary is that the whole tragedy was so predictable, yet the city was so ill-prepared: a city situated in reclaimed swamp, below sea-level, in an area where hurricanes are regular events. At least if they didn’t strengthen the levees, why didn’t they have better evacuation procedures? Easy to ask these questions in hindsight, of course, but Bush doesn’t look like he’s going to come out of this too well, even if the nastiest smell comes from those who can’t help seeing this in quasi-religious terms, as just desserts:

[T]he intellectual looters have busied themselves with plundering half-truths and false analyses to advance one of their most precious agendas: global warming.

The German Environment Minister, Jurgen Trittin, was first, with a claim that this was a real-life version of the shock-flick, The Day After Tomorrow. Sir David King, Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser, weighed in, saying global warming was increasing the risk from hurricanes. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, self-designated leader of the American environmentalist cause, said the US was reaping the failure to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol. And, of course, Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother of a US soldier who leads the antiwar campaign and any other left-wing cause that wants her, noted President Bush was “heading to Louisiana to see the devastation that his environmental policies and his killing policies have caused”.

Best of all, though, was the contribution of Jon Snow, enthroned as the objective voice of British media at Channel 4 News, who chortled: “How ironic that the world’s No 1 polluter is now reaping the ‘rewards’ that so many have warned would flow.”

That Islamists should claim Katrina as “one of the soldiers of Allah” is equally predictable.

No other city of comparable size can come close to New Orleans in terms of its cultural significance. Ben MacIntyre mourns:

New Orleans holds a unique place in the American imagination because, in truth, it is a place apart from America. In a country inclined to puritanism, the Big Easy is the almost Mediterranean enclave where America came to drink and eat too much, to stay up late and behave badly. No American city, with the exception of New York, has such a vivid mythology; no city, including New York, is more conscious of its own romance. The normal rules do not apply here. New Orleans is famed for its jazz and blues, but it also has what so many American cities lack: soul. Corrupt, voluptuous and profoundly literate, New Orleans marches to the beat of a different drummer….

hangover would linger 15 years past the first free elections. Even now, as economic problems are gradually solved, as once-shabby cities are rebuilt and repainted, and as Eastern Europeans join Western institutions, the perception of failure, personal and national, has remained. A survey of “happiness” recently quoted in the Economist revealed that despite their rising incomes, Poles still say they feel gloomier than they used to.

In part, this is because the adjustment to a new system itself was traumatic. Even if they make more money, people now have to work harder and longer than before. Even if standards of living are rising across the board, some people’s standards of living are rising a lot faster. In the communist era, everyone seemed equal on the surface: Privileges, such as access to foreign goods and travel, were mostly invisible. When your neighbor buys a Mercedes, on the other hand, it’s hard not to notice. It is also true that democracy, if you aren’t used to it, isn’t always a pretty sight. In Warsaw recently, a friend described to me a new TV talk show, in which (sound familiar?) participants of various political convictions all shout at each other. He rather liked it, he said, but most of his friends don’t: “They think it’s ‘uncultured’ when politicians disagree.”

There were also ways in which the transition was genuinely unjust. Many of the early beneficiaries of economic change were not striking shipyard workers but their communist bosses, who converted political influence into private property and then used their money to win back political influence. A series of seemingly endless scandals over the past several years has reminded people that not everyone is in politics because they want to improve the lot of ordinary people. Because their official representatives — the government, the cabinet ministers, the members of parliament — hardly seemed worth admiring, many Poles didn’t think much of their country either, whatever its economic growth statistics.

The festivities in Gdansk may not mark the end of this post-transition gloom, or of the resentment of politicians. But they do show that some kind of corner has been turned — or at least that some Poles have found some blessings to count at last. To mark the anniversary, 100,000 people turned out for a pop concert on the grounds of the shipyard. Across town, dissidents from Burma to Belarus converged to discuss how they might foment their own peaceful revolutions at home. However much they disparage it, the generation that witnessed their country’s transformation is finding that it’s become a source of pride for their children and a symbol of hope around the world. It’s been a long time coming — take note, Iraq-watchers — but despite themselves, Poles are starting to feel that Poland is a success.

An anti-rape device from South Africa (via Metafilter):

A South African inventor unveiled a new anti-rape female condom on Wednesday that hooks onto an attacker’s penis and aims to cut one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world.

“Nothing has ever been done to help a woman so that she does not get raped and I thought it was high time,” Sonette Ehlers, 57, said of the “rapex,” a device worn like a tampon that has sparked controversy in a country used to daily reports of violent crime.

Police statistics show more than 50,000 rapes are reported every year, while experts say the real figure could be four times that because they say most rapes of acquaintances or children are never reported.

Ehlers said the “rapex” hooks onto the rapist’s skin, allowing the victim time to escape and helping to identify perpetrators.

“He will obviously be too pre-occupied at this stage,” she told reporters in Kleinmond, a small holiday village about 100km (60 miles) east of Cape Town. “I promise you he is going to be too sore. He will go straight to hospital.”

The device, made of latex and held firm by shafts of sharp barbs, can only be removed from the man by surgery, which will alert hospital staff, and ultimately, the police, she said.

It also reduces the chances of pregnancy or HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases from the attacker by acting in the same way as a female condom.

Vagina Dentata with a vengeance. It’s one of those things you think first off, hey, why didn’t anyone think of this before, great idea….and then after a while you realise, no, it’s absolutely horrible.

As a minor pedantic aside, the poster at Metafilter mentions the horrific rape statistics from South Africa, “though Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, has refuted the findings”. No he hasn’t; he’s questioned them. “Refuted” means “proved that they’re wrong”. I wish people wouldn’t misuse that word.

Ariel Dorfman grew up believing Einstein was famous for being a violinist rather than a scientist, and gets rather carried away with the idea:

And, yet, now that we are well into a new century, now that we celebrate 100 years of that moment when the young Einstein reached his epiphany of E = mc^2 which still haunts us, I have started to wonder if my first intuition about the great Albert was not correct after all. I wonder if those early violin lessons in 1885 – for a boy who had not yet really started to enunciate words, who was a tardy speaker of German – were not the sweet fire where his mind was forged and tempered. If it was not in the mass of that wooden musical instrument filled with a baffling energy that resonated inside every electron of his being, if it was not there where and when and how he first conjured up the laws of cosmology. I wonder if the design of the universe was not contained in the emotion he wrested from those strings. And if it was not a heart tuned by Mozart that gave birth to his certainty that the quantum leap of the imagination is always more important than the dreary accumulation of knowledge. Can it not be – my final wonderment – that Einstein’s theory of relativity owes more to an aesthetic revelation than to his overwhelming mathematical intelligence?

Well, the connection between music and cosmology goes right back to Pythagoras and the music of the spheres, but of course we have to look to a greater source than that – a source that Dorfman unaccountably omits – for the Einstein-as-violinist myth:

Now you would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row

long as it looked like it was the Israelis. When it turned out to be a fake, they lost interest, leaving Israel between libel and silence.

And then certainly during the first Intifada when there were points when the Israelis wouldn’t let the press in, so the media would give cameras to the Palestinians while the Western reporters sat back at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem drinking their drinks and getting their story that way. Middle East reporters are under tremendous pressure for a story a day — that’s enormous. They weren’t very well going to turn around and say, ‘No, I can’t use this.’ They made do. That’s one of the ways standards started to slip.

est economy and the strongest military in the Muslim world; it sits atop vast pools of rapidly appreciating oil wealth. The only other Muslim country capable of rivaling it—Turkey—has decided to abandon the Muslim world and join the European Union.

The stage is thus set for a confrontation with the United States. Iran is confident it can win, and history hasn’t given it much reason to fear otherwise. Student radicals like Ahmadinejad watched in 1980 as the United States did nothing but issue feeble diplomatic protests over the seizure of its embassy. They saw Ronald Reagan fulfill Ayatollah Khomeini’s notorious dictum—”America cannot do a damned thing!”—when Lebanese suicide bombers recruited by Tehran killed 241 Marines near Beirut in 1982. Bill Clinton talked sanctions but then apologized for unspecified “past wrongs.”

Even George W. Bush’s war on terror, which initially worried the mullahs, has turned to their strategic advantage. Enemies on either side—the Baathists in Baghdad and the Taliban in Kabul—are now gone. The expulsion of Syria from Lebanon under U.S. pressure has left Iran as the major foreign influence in the country. Bush’s advocacy of democracy has undermined Washington’s traditional allies—and Iran’s rivals—like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. “The Americans have their so-called Greater Middle East plan,” Supreme Leader Ali Hoseini Khamenei said in a speech recently. “We, too, have our plan for the region.”

in the States, and had come back with the idea of doing some teaching in his home country. He’s appalled at the deterioration since he’d left. Theroux asks him what he thinks of the charities and aid agencies – the “agents of virtue”:

“The donors aren’t contributing to development. They maintain the status quo. Politicians love that, because they hate change. The tyrants love aid. Aid helps them stay in power and it contributes to underdevelopment. It’s not social or cultural, and it certainly isn’t economic. Aid is one of the main reasons for underdevelopment in Africa.”

“You said it, I didn’t,” I said. “There’s an awful lot of aid agencies here.”

“All those vehicles – everywhere you look.” he said, which is precisely what I had felt.

“So how will things change for the better?”

He said “Change will involve all the old men dying off. Or it might take another forty years.”

“What if all the donors just went away?”

“That might work.”

her children who attempt to escape, and are repeatedly told that they will be killed if they try to run away.
To avoid LRA abduction, every night as many as 40,000 children flee their homes in the countryside to sleep in the relative safety of towns. They seek refuge overnight at churches, hospitals, bus stations and temporary shelters before returning home again each morning.
This video spotlights a society living under the constant threat of having its children abducted and shows the world that a crisis that the United Nations has called a “crime against humanity” can no longer be ignored.

This isn’t just an internal Ugandan matter. Ten years back, supposedly in retaliation for the Ugandan government’s support for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the Sudanese regime in Khartoum started supplying the LRA with arms, making them a much more formidable force.

Sudanese backing has dried up, but the struggle goes on. The dilemma for those Ugandan forces battling the LRA is that the child soldiers they face are victims as well. They can’t win by force without destroying the people they’re meant to be saving…..and all efforts at negotiation have collapsed. After all, how do you negotiate with a group of millenarian cultists?