Author: Mick Hartley

Over at Pootergeek, commenter Jeet provides a lesson in how to answer those who think it’s just “common sense” that Islamist violence is a response to Western foreign policy. An excerpt:

Islamist violence has, on religious grounds, long targeted non-Muslim peoples in Nigeria, Sudan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, et al. Yet Westerners seem largely unaware of this, resulting in the mistaken conclusion that Islamist violence is a response to the West.

but the whole argument is worth a read, including the interesting information that Hizb-ut-Tahrir (of Guardian fame) denounced the Sudanese regime as un-Islamic for signing the peace agreement that finally ended the civil war in the south earlier this year.

to window level.

Up to a million Zimbabweans have had their homes demolished during a two-month blitz on poor quality housing, which has provoked international outrage.

From Arab News, via Butterflies and Wheels:

A statement that has warned against the dangers of allowing women to drive in Saudi Arabia was released on the Internet on Friday. More than 100 sheikhs, imams, judges, Islamic scholars, Islamic university teachers, several heads of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice centers in the Kingdom, as well as some teachers at the Grand Mosque in Makkah and the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah signed the statement.

The problem – isn’t it always? – is with the enemies of Islam, who have..

portrayed the image of Muslim women being without rights and having “a broken wing,” saying that their homes are prisons, their husbands mistreat them, and their hijabs are a sign of backwardness.

It said that they have come up with the terminology of “injustice for women” in our country and have used it in the media lately introducing the fact that they are not allowed to drive as a sign of injustice. […]

The statement also said that those who say allowing women to drive would be beneficial in some ways forget the ruling in Islam that if the act derives more misdeeds, then it is ruled as not permissible.

The statement added that though it acknowledged that foreign drivers are an economic burden on the country, their presence does less damage than the economic burdens of allowing women to drive which are: The multi-ownership of cars in one family instead of just one being used by the driver; the replacement of a car by another one since women are known to like everything new and the burden of the government having to open special female sections in all Traffic Departments.

This (via The Marmot’s Hole) is strange:

A 72-year-old deputy in North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly in May applied for political asylum in South Korea from a third country, the Monthly Chosun reported. The magazine’s August edition published Sunday said the parliamentarian, who is using the alias Kim Il-do, is being questioned by the National Intelligence Service on his inside knowledge of the North’s weapons development.

Kim reportedly told investigators North Korea had 4 kg of plutonium and manufactured a one-ton nuclear weapon, but added that North Korean scientists were doubtful about ability of the developed nuclear weapon. That was why, he said, the Stalinist country had been trying to make a miniaturized nuclear warhead weighing 500 kg, the magazine reported.

Kim testified he himself visited Taiwan to sell North Korean-built missiles, the monthly said.

Is there some clever spin going on here? If there’s anything likely to kick China into doing something about North Korea, it’s the possibility that the Koreans might be selling weapons to the Taiwanese. Or is it, as one of Marmot’s commenters suggests, the Chinese being clever and implying that the North Koreans are out of their control.

This has an unpleasantly familiar ring:

The sun rises over several hundred tents next to blue lakes. At the stroke of 7am, large speakers blare Soviet-era patriotic songs and bright-eyed youths emerge for another day of physical and ideological instruction.

This is the first summer-camp of Nashi (Ours), a youth organisation set up by the Kremlin this year to support President Putin. It has assembled 3,000 teenagers from across Russia for two weeks of fun, training and political indoctrination.

The organisers have spared no expense. They pay for all travel expenses, the rent of the idyllic location 200 miles north of Moscow, the tents, sailing and motor boats, hundreds of bicycles, ping-pong tables, a weights room, an internet café, an art studio, a twice-daily newspaper, a camp radio service, and concerts by some of the most popular Russian pop acts, such as Zemfira and B2.

The head of Nashi, Vasili Yakemenko, a former Kremlin bureaucrat, says the camp cost “far, far more” than $500,000 (£285,000) and was paid for by donations from big business. “We ask them to support the creation of a new political and managerial elite for the country. If they refuse, it’s considered unpatriotic,” he adds.

Between the ping-pong and aerobics, the youngsters receive ideological instruction from Kremlin advisers. Gleb Pavlovsky, the Kremlin spin doctor who advised Viktor Yanukovych on his failed election campaign in Ukraine, tells them that the Orange Revolution there was a foreign plot, and that President Yushchenko was poisoned by his supporters to win sympathy.

He tells them that Russia’s foreign and internal enemies will try to instigate a similar revolution here. “A revolution is a coup. They (the US) have tried it before, and soon they will try it here, perhaps as early as the Moscow Duma elections this autumn. Your job is to defend the constitutional order if and when the coup comes.”

The excellent Irshad Manji in the Sunday Times (via Instapundit):

No wonder Irshad Manji has received death threats since appearing on British television: she is a lipstick lesbian, a Muslim and scourge of Islamic leaders, whom she accuses of making excuses about the terror attacks on London. Oh, and she tells ordinary Muslims to “crawl out of their narcissistic shell”. Ouch.

Manji is a glamorous Canadian television presenter whose book, The Trouble with Islam, has made her so famous in America that she won something called the Oprah Winfrey Chutzpah award. Even at a conference in Oxford last week she felt unsafe — despite extra security — with police sifting through “disgusting e-mails” and threats after her appearance on Newsnight.

Doesn’t the violent Muslim minority show Islam is flawed? “I ask myself the same question,” she grimaces. Far from regarding Muslims as oppressed they have a “supremacy complex — and that’s dangerous”. This, she contends, is true even among moderates. “Literalists” who consider the Koran the “perfect manifesto of God” have taken over the mainstream; and far from misreading Islam, as Tony Blair and the Muslim Council of Britain insist, terrorists can find encouragement for murder in the Koran.

The underlying problem with Islam, observes Manji, is that far from spiritualising Arabia, it has been infected with the reactionary prejudices of the Middle East: “Colonialism is not the preserve of people with pink skin. What about Islamic imperialism? Eighty per cent of Muslims live outside the Arab world yet all Muslims must bow to Mecca.” Fresh thinking, she contends, is suppressed by ignorant imams; you can see why she has been dubbed “Osama’s worst nightmare ”.

“The good news,” she insists, “is it doesn’t have to be like this.” She wants a reformation in Islam, returning it to its clever, fun-loving roots. “The world’s first ‘feminist’ was an 11th-century Muslim man. Baghdad had one of the first universities in the 9th century; the Spanish ‘Ole!’ comes from ‘Allah’; Islam even gave us the guitar.”

But now it gives us the suicide bomber: why? She does not rule out alienation and all those Muslims-as-victims explanations, but thinks the Muslim Council of Britain is negligent for “not even acknowledging religion might also have played a role”. Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, said terrorists could not be Muslims but Manji hits back: “The jury is out on what Islam is.”

In a changing and confusing world, there’s always one thing you can rely on: Mary Liddell providing her familiar warm bath of liberal pieties every Sunday in the Observer. Today she boldly suggests that “understanding all our vulnerable young, not just Muslims, has become a priority as never before”:

Think of two mothers. The first, Marie Fatayi-Williams, stood near Tavistock Square last week and mourned her missing son, Anthony. Her lament echoed the grief of women from Niobe, who saw all her children murdered, to those who suffer now. ‘How many mothers’ hearts must be maimed?’ she asked.

In a Leeds suburb, another woman weeps. Hasib Hussain’s mother, Maniza, rang police at 10.20pm on the night of the explosion to report her 18-year-old son missing. On Friday, she saw the CCTV picture of the child she had last watched dozing on a sofa. Now he was marching through Luton station laden with the bomb that would slaughter 13 innocent people on a No 30 bus. Anthony Fatayi-Williams was among them.

Mothers of murderers evoke many emotions: pity, suspicion, blame, rage, fear. As the dead go to their graves, so do our certainties….

There are many issues for the women who raised these ordinary tyrants and the society which incubated them…. How to make bad children good is one of great preoccupations of this century….

Once, zealotry was just the province of Wahhabi training camps. Now the focus is on British suburbs where Muslim mothers, and fathers, may find their angry sons are strangers whom they love but cannot discipline or comprehend.

In Bend it Like Beckham, the heroine slips out, unbeknown to her strict parents, to play for a football team. But what if children have more sinister dreams and darker secret lives?…

Religion, simultaneously the panacea and the root of evil, offers no safe passage to good societies…

Among abused children, the 35 per cent with no loving figure to turn to are likely to be violent or disturbed. Temperament and biology matter. Violent children have a low resting heart rate and a slow reaction to danger, as if their emotional cues are imperfect. Racism and lack of police protection trigger a ‘deadly petulance’ in which minor slights induce a murderous desire for revenge.

Shame, depression and powerlessness are all part of the lethal outsider [?] who sees no future and believes he will not live long…

Providing other remedies means thinking more broadly. As the American high-school killings showed, Islam has no freehold on suicide attacks. And behind al-Qaeda are the foot soldiers whose motives are barely explained.

Disenchantment may be part of it, but pique is not the trigger for mass slaughter. Iraq may be a factor, but boys with no GCSEs do not become lords of destruction because of the inadequacies of foreign policy. The capacity to be an ordinary monster lies less in a tick-box checklist than in a short circuitry of nature and nurture that warps the human soul.

At some level, the particularity of jihadism meets something more universal. Seeking to understand Hasib Hussain is not to excuse his brutishness in any way. We need to know what drove him, for our own sakes. Why this boy and not the next? Why one family and not another? Exploring the answers we already have and seeking more is not only a shield against Islamo-fascism. It is also a key to comprehending all our children, of whom too many are pitched somewhere on the long spectrum between enlightenment and darkness.

There will be new laws to protect us, some good, some bad. There will be banning orders, some justified, some not. But understanding what corrupts the vulnerable is the means of ensuring that fewer mothers’ hearts are maimed.

Well, who could possibly disagree with that?

Another movement bent on world domination, originating in Munich. What is it with that city? (via David T at Harry’s Place)

revenge and collective punishment has arrived in London. And it has its own rationality. Don’t give me the nonsense about why do they hate us. They don’t.

The response to the neo-colonial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq should surprise no one. Islamist extremism and terrorism, unknown in Iraq before occupation, now fights side by side with the more measured Iraqi resistance.

He’s right of course: Islamist terrorism was pretty much unknown in Saddam’s Iraq (though terror, on the other hand, was its defining feature). Same for Afghanistan under the Taliban: absolutely zero Islamic terrorism. There’s clearly a moral there for us all, and it’s one the Guardian and the Islamists can happily agree on.

Jan Raath visits the only camp provided for the millions thrown out of their homes by Mugabe:

The densely-packed camp occupies about five acres of steeply sloping land bulldozed to clear the bush. The Government has provided no water, no electricity, no sanitation – nothing except the land, which it seized from a white farmer.

Shacks made from ropedtogether plastic sheeting, plywood, corrugated iron or any other scrap material — even an upside-down boat — stand against each other in unequal rows.

Around each shack are wardrobes, lounge suites, mattresses and other possessions salvaged from the demolitions, bundled up in plastic and piled high. There are heaps of firewood and broken building material. Cooking fires smoulder. When the wind blows, sand gets into everything.

“At night you hear the children coughing,” said Partson Mkondo. “You breathe in dust and smoke while you are sleeping. The toilets are messy, and there are people with diarrhoea.”

The camp has 44 pit latrines, one for every 114 people. The only sources of water are large green bowsers supplied by the United Nations Children’s Fund, along with blankets and plastic sheeting for shelter.

The children have no schools and few of the displaced men have work. Aid agencies are the main source of food.

It’s a familiar story, from Sudan to North Korea: Western aid is all that prevents disaster on an epic scale; clearing up after the ruthless policies of leaders for whom all that matters is holding on to power and the elimination of opponents. Feed the starving, and thereby play along with a brutal regime, or ignore what’s happening and – maybe – encourage the regime’s overthrow. No choice really: we know it, and so do the Mengistus and Mugabes and Kim Jong Ils.