Author: Mick Hartley

-North Korea, the U.S., South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia–have yet to reach even the most basic accord. Still, none of the governments committed to this exercise in conference diplomacy is willing to admit failure.

Meanwhile, the UN World Food Programme is predicting a crisis:

While the inhabitants of Asia’s last Stalinist state forage in the mountains for edible roots, the main supplier of food aid to North Korea is facing a shortfall in donations that could forestall efforts to prevent a rerun of the catastrophic famines of the 1990s.

“My sense is we have a crisis in front of us,” James Morris, executive director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), said yesterday.

The political situation in North Korea and humanitarian crises in southern Africa, Sudan, the Horn of Africa and Asia have distracted attention and funds from the WFP’s efforts in North Korea, Mr Morris said. The agency, which supports 6.5 million of the state’s 23 million people, faces a food shortfall of 140,000 tons.

It’s hard to believe that no one knows who he is, in spite of all the publicity. Then there’s that little detail about all the labels having been removed from his clothes. Strange.

The identity of the so-called Piano Man found wandering in a soaking wet suit in Kent may never be known.

Since he was found on Sheppey in April, the psychiatric patient who communicates only through his piano music has not spoken a word.

West Kent NHS Trust said on Monday it had checked through most of its leads.

A spokesman said health workers still hoped they could make progress, but it was possible that no-one would come forward with information about him.

The man was first taken to Medway Maritime Hospital where he drew a picture of a grand piano and was then taken to the hospital chapel.

Health and social workers said they were “stunned” when he proceeded to give them a virtuoso performance.

Theories put forward and later discounted included that the man – now in a secure mental health unit in Dartford – was a French street musician and a Czech concert pianist.

I imagine someone’s already working on the book/screenplay.

id the slippery slope to joining the BNP is to strangle any positive emotion you may feel for your country, that you can rise above it and smugly pronounce yourself a citizen of the world, wiser and better than those poor pathetic souls who wave union jacks and cheer for Ingerland – sorry, but count me out. It’s soulless and I don’t believe it, but if that is the way he feels, then he’s the one missing out.

a much wider struggle against a vicious and totalitarian ideology.

It never seemed to me that there was any alternative to confronting the reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge of implosion and might, if left to rot and crash, have become to the region what the Congo is to Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and misery that would draw in opportunistic interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.

How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of “missing” Iraqis, to support Iraqi women’s battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?

s clear. Since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq, 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the name of what Bush calls ‘liberating Iraq’. The Western world stood with the U.S. in this war. Since the Muslims are liberated in this manner, some Muslims may think that the English or other Western countries need to be liberated too. We think that it is the Westerners that need to be liberated. Al-Qaida with its actions is liberating the West. Also there is a concept of ‘payback’. Muslims today are exerting their ‘payback’ rights by attacking Western capitals. As a Muslim I think these attacks are normal, even necessary. It is not us but the infidel that started this war. This is the language the Westerners understand.

Tempo: But Al Qaeda kills innocent people who are on their way to work. Doesn’t the killing of innocent people disturb you?

Kaide: No, it does not. I do not consider those killed in the London attacks as innocent. Because those people paid taxes to the English government and elected Blair who is responsible for the killing of thousands of Muslims. Do they make that differentiation when innocent people are killed in Iraq and Afghanistan? […] When America kills it is called ‘[collateral] war damage’… Westerners started to rethink after London bombings. They are asking “what did we do wrong?” That means terrorism is not always harmful. There are benefits to terrorism too.

Tempo: So, does this mean that you were happy because of the attacks in London?

Kaide: Of course I was happy. Are Americans saddened by the death of children in Iraq, in Palestine? Also, one of Allah’s names is “vengeful’. Takes revenge. Those heroic fighters of Islam that blow themselves up in London [or] in Egypt are trying to earn ‘Allah’s name, ‘vengeful’. There are thousands of young Muslims preparing to blow themselves up. As long as Muslims are oppressed, Westerners will not have peace. The Koran says: ‘Fight them until evil disappears and all religion becomes Allah’s [religion]’. The suicide activists who blow themselves up, are carrying out the Koran’s commandment.

Tempo: Will these attacks be followed by more attacks, according to you?

Kaide: This fire was set by the infidels and not the Muslims. […] Every day our children and our women are dying under the U.S. bombs. […] Here, I am openly declaring this: As long as the suffering continues in the Islamic world, attacks against the Western capitals will increasingly continue. The Westerners will have much more of the taste of the pain the Muslims endure. We as IBDA [the Islamist Turkish terrorist organization “Great East Islamic Raiders Front”] see Iraq’s occupation by America as the Third World War. This is a war between the believers and the non-believers. Salih Mirzabeyoglu, Osama bin Laden, Shamil Basayev, Mullah Omar and Zarqawi are the honorable commanders of this holy war. We believe that these leaders will carry the world to more peaceful and happy days.

Chance would be a fine thing. From the Onion:

Terrorist cells in Baghdad are in mourning for suicide bomber Ahmed al-Khalaf, 19, who was killed by a car bomb Monday, 200 yards from an Iraqi police station, his intended target.

Sources within the insurgency said al-Khalaf was “on his way to becoming a glorious martyr” when he was struck down by the car-bomb explosion. Twenty-three other civilians were also killed.

“What kind of God allows the death of people who are on their way to kill innocent people?” insurgent leader Abdulwahid al-Tomizie said. “On the one hand, I am elated that the car-bomb explosion was successful, but the loss of the suicide bomber is a tragedy, as is the survival of all the innocent people he might have killed.”

According to al-Tomizie, al-Khalaf could have killed as many as 40 innocent people, had his life not been cut short.

“It is tragic that al-Khalaf died seven minutes sooner than he intended,” said Hassan Abdul Aziz, leader of a local cabal of Sunni separatists. “To think that he was just yards from his intended target. Our thoughts and prayers are with his terrorist cell.”

d challenge” for the Muslim community. However, this is the same Sacranie who, in 1989, said that “Death is perhaps too easy” for the author of “The Satanic Verses.” Tony Blair’s decision to knight him and treat him as the acceptable face of “moderate,” “traditional” Islam is either a sign of his government’s penchant for religious appeasement or a demonstration of how limited Blair’s options really are.

Sacranie is a strong advocate of Blair’s much-criticized new religious-hatred bill, which will make it harder to criticize religion, and he actually expects the new law to outlaw references to Islamic terrorism. He said as recently as Jan. 13, “There is no such thing as an Islamic terrorist. This is deeply offensive. Saying Muslims are terrorists would be covered [i.e., banned] by this provision.” Two weeks later his organization boycotted a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in London commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago. If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.

stirred controversy with televised comments, but they were carefully chosen to avoid appearing to incite violence. On Saturday, July 2 he had been more forthright.

Speaking to a group of teenagers and families, he declared it was imperative for Muslims to “instil terror into the hearts of the kuffar” and added: “I am a terrorist. As a Muslim of course I am a terrorist.”

The 30-year-old, who claims to have had military training in Pakistan, said he did not want to go to Allah while sleeping in his bed “like an old woman”. Instead: “I want to be blown into pieces with my hands in one place and my feet in another.”

This is the man who was musing last week about martyrdom as the perfection of human art.

he 1980s and ’90s.

The final pillar, the U.S. strategic partnership, is also crumbling. One sign of this came last month when Prince Bandar, a nephew of Fahd, quit his job as ambassador to Washington after a quarter of a century. The days when Bandar could buy influence in the U.S. establishment seem to be over, while American public opinion — focused on the kingdom since the 9/11 attacks — would be wary of “special relations” with a country where 15 of the 19 suicide-killers were born.