Author: Mick Hartley

A chilling echo of two weeks ago: three tube incidents and a bus explosion. Deliberate? A we-can-do-this-anytime message?

Clive Davis links to these articles about urban beaches. Thankfully we in London don’t need imported sand and unseemly displays of naked flesh. These chaps, spotted at the weekend on the Thames South Bank at low tide, show how it should be done.

From the Scotsman:

A dissident’s baby is shoved into a sack with a vicious cat; undercover agents throw a man to his death from the roof of a building; men tied to poles are shot in the head one by one.

Al-Iraqiya state television is reviving images of life under Saddam Hussein as a court prepares to announce the date for the start of his trial for crimes against humanity.

“I wish they were here to see the day when Saddam is finished,” a tearful woman who lost her relatives under the dictator told the station, which broadcast footage of abuses filmed by the same former security forces who committed them.

Grainy footage of senior officials, including Ali Hassan al-Majid – nicknamed Chemical Ali because his men allegedly gassed 5,000 Kurds in 1988 – shows them questioning Shi’ites after a failed rebellion in 1991.

In one chilling scene, Saddam’s men pump bullets into the heads of men tied to poles. “That one is still breathing,” says an officer in the footage. Another bullet is fired.

Stephen Pollard pours cold water on that 25,000 figure:

The figure was released yesterday by two organisations, Iraq Body Count and the Oxford Research Group. According to the BBC, the former “is one of the most widely-quoted sources of information on the civilian death toll in Iraq”. Indeed it is — because the BBC itself reports its propaganda as fact.

One of the leading lights of the IBC is Marc Herold, a professor of economics and women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire. Professor Herold has attempted this trick before, when he “revealed” in December 2001 that there were then 3,800 civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The now-accepted figure at the time was two thirds less — about 1,200.

The reason his figures were so wrong then, and are almost certainly wrong now, is that the IBC’s methodology is designed to come to as large a total as possible. The organisation simply adds up all reports of casualties, no matter what the source or how scant the evidence. Hardly surprising, since the IBC’s associates are a veritable who’s who of anti-war activism.

iting young people. We have been caught too much by a sense that we can just regard these clerics as being like English eccentrics at Hyde Park Corner. But the problem is that their audience has already been to training camps.

SPIEGEL: But isn’t the West providing the best advertisement for terrorist recruiters by being in Iraq and killing Islamic civilians, torturing Muslim prisoners a la Abu Ghraib and spreading pictures of the deeds around the world?

MCEWAN: I don’t think terror needs a breeding ground. I don’t buy the arguments in the Iraq war. What keeps getting forgotten here is that the people committing massacres in Iraq right now belong to al-Qaida. We’re witnessing a civil war that’s taking place in Islam. The most breathtaking statement was the one of al-Qaida claiming responsibility for the London bombings saying it was in return for the massacre in Iraq. But the massacres in Iraq now are being conducted by al-Qaida against Muslims. I also think it’s extraordinary the way in which we get morally selective in our outrages. When there was a rumor that someone at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a Koran down the lavatory, the pages in The Guardian almost caught fire with outrage, but only months before the Taliban had set fire to a mosque and destroyed 300 ancient Korans.

SPIEGEL: In your book, the Iraq war still hasn’t happened yet. And the day in which the book takes place, Feb. 15, 2003, is the day in which massive peace demonstrations took place in London. Henry’s daughter Daisy is among the protesters and he is full of ire and sarcasm about them. He doubts they can rightfully claim morality for themselves. Do these passages echo your own ambivalent views on the matter?

McEwan: Yes, it does. I never thought that in the run up to the war we were discussing simply the difference between war and peace. We were discussing the difference between war and continued torture and genocide and abuse of human rights by a fascist state. I missed any sense of that complexity in the peace camp. I certainly had the feeling that whatever the strong moral arguments were for deposing Saddam, the Americans would not be good nation-builders. But I had a moral problem with this view among the 2 million protesters that you should leave Saddam in power in a fascist state with 27 million Iraqis under him. The problem is that they felt good about it. I thought they should have opposed the war but also felt bad about it.

SPIEGEL: Do you think invading Iraq was a mistake?

McEwan: I think if Bush and Blair could press a button and we could all fast forward backwards, rewind the tape, they’d probably do this differently. But I don’t think they fully grasped, and even the anti-war (movement) could have never fully grasped the fantastic viciousness of the insurgency against its own people.

I haven’t seen that point made so clearly before: that the people claiming justification for the London bombing as revenge for the slaughter of Muslims in Iraq, are in effect the same people committing that slaughter. As the man says, breathtaking.

Well, I wouldn’t normally link twice in two days to MEMRI, but if they’re good enough for Galloway to smear on Any Questions (see here, under “That’s anti-Semitic”), then they’re good enough for me to cite. Anyway, it’s more wacky fun from the world of Arab TV, this time from Hizbullah’s Al-Manar channel. And the interviewee is a man of substance, as it were: retired Lebanese general and public relations expert Dr. Hisham Jaber, military commander of the Beirut region from 1997 to 2000. His grasp of history, and his conclusions, are by now wearily familiar – thanks in no small part to the work of MEMRI:

“The perpetrator [of 9/11 and 7/7] believes that he carried out an operation in retaliation for the oppression afflicted upon the world’s wretched people by Western policies, and especially by the U.S. and Britain. This is what he believes. In addition, I say that the actual perpetrator – the person who actually commits a suicide operation – is not a mercenary, but may have been tricked into it.

“So who is the planner? The planner who is behind him is the one who benefits from what happens. We all know that after 9/11 the persecution of Muslims began in the U.S. and Europe, but later subsided, to a certain extent. For three or four years, we have been concerned – in the wake of these painful events – about the possibility of some sort of annihilation, or perhaps an unbalanced civil war in Europe and the U.S. between Muslims and non-Muslims, or let’s say, the Westerners….

“It is global Zionism that stands to gain the most from this.

“Regardless of the logic of conspiracy, I would like to say something. We read history, and we know that since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Zionism has forged the New Testament – and by now, 60 million in the U.S. alone have left Christianity to become believers in the Torah.

“Global Zionism has tried to forge the Holy Koran, and has printed many copies of this forgery. It has been discovered that many extremist movements were backed by [global Zionism].”

Unfortunately the TV link at present is not to this, but to a Friday sermon on Al-Shariqa TV condemning the London bombings. You’d think if they can forge the New Testament, plan 9/11, and convert 60 million Christians in the US, these Jews could at least get their links right.

Update: here’s the correct link for the video (via Solomonia)

A couple of quotes from Mufti Zubair Dudha, who teaches primary school children, teenagers and young adults at his Islamic Tarbiyah academy in Dewsbury, and who tells parents that they betray their children if they allow them to associate with non-Muslims:

ON JIHAD: Today many of us are misled into believing that in our times jihad of the sword is not warranted. Most definitely, physical jihad is and will be needed to a large extent . . . No learned person and no true Muslim can deny the benefits, fruits and blessings of physical jihad for the course of Allah

ON YOUTH: It is due to the inconsistency of moral preaching we have plunged headlong into the bosom of the deplorable kufr [non-believer] culture. As a result Muslim youths have drowned into the cauldron of vice, drugs, alcoholism and immorality of all sorts. Along with its crushed moral values, the West has handed down its recipe for moral and spiritual destruction

He denies that he’s an extremist. Sadly, he may well be right about that.

t drought and global warming, and everyone complains about how unbearable the tube is.

Elegies for past English summers are such a feature of our culture, more surprising when you think how rare and unpredictable the perfect summer day is here. Well no, maybe that should be less surprising: they stand out, while all the grim overcast days get forgotten. Everyone’s childhood summers are full of days at the beach, long July evenings, picnics….

Having spent some time yesterday waiting at a small suburban station, I can’t resist quoting this, one of my favourite first paragraphs from a novel, from Elizabeth Taylors’s “A Wreath of Roses“, published in 1949:

Afternoons seem unending on branch-line stations in England in summer time. The spiked shelter prints an unmoving shadow on the platform, geraniums blaze, whitewashed stones assault the eye. Such trains as come only add to the air of fantasy, to the idea of the scene being symbolic, or encountered at one level while suggesting another even more alienating.

Well, as my name-sake wrote in the opening paragraph of another book about a childhood summer remembered, the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Mind you, I always thought that was a stupid quotation.

red from Britain’s humanist side since the turn of the century, since 1880 or 1881. Ever since, we have been suffering because of Britain. Britain uprooted the Palestinian people from its land and planted a Jewish entity. It brought over riffraff and gave them Palestine, uprooting children and women from their homes and their fields, without any food or clothing. Britain divided up the area and sowed the seeds of civil strife. It created mini-states which collaborated with it. Britain occupied Iraq. We are still suffering disasters because of Britain.” […]

“Britain caused infinite destruction to the Iraqi people. Now that the political and social map of Iraq has been completed, there will be no civil society there. He said that there was no civil society in the days of Saddam. Is there civil society now in Iraq?

“Today there are massacres, murder, car bombs, martyrdom-seekers, battles of attrition – there is total confusion. Is there civil society now? Have we lost our minds?! In the days of Saddam there was stability, calm; there was a government, a people, funding, a state, and institutions. All of this has been [taken away] by imperialism, in the guise of culture and humanism – while they are really the least cultured and humane in the world.”

Powerful stuff. Maybe he could get a job with the Guardian.

No mention of the Lancet’s 100,000:

Nearly 25,000 civilians have died violently in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003, a report says.

Based on more than 10,000 media reports, the dossier is the first detailed account of such deaths.

“The ever-mounting Iraqi death toll is the forgotten cost of the decision to go to war in Iraq,” said Professor John Sloboda, one of the report authors.

The Iraq Body Count and Oxford Research Group, made up of academics and peace activists, carried out the survey.

The Dossier on Civilian Casualties in Iraq 2003-2005 says 37% of all non-combatant deaths were caused by US-led forces.

Here’s the link to the report.