Author: Mick Hartley

Salman Rushdie (via AL Daily) demolishes the “Atheism Lite” proposed by Dylan Evans:

Evans has written an article for the Guardian of London deriding the old-fashioned, “19th-century” atheism of such prominent thinkers as Richard Dawkins and Jonathan Miller, instead proposing a new, modern atheism which “values religion, treats science as simply a means to an end and finds the meaning of life in art.”

Indeed, he says, religion itself is to be understood as “a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality and which only a child would reject for being false.”

Evans’ position fits well with that of the American philosopher of science Michael Ruse, whose new book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle, lays much of the blame for the growth of creationism in America — and for the increasingly strident attempts by the religious right to have evolutionary theory kicked off the curriculum and replaced by the new dogma of “intelligent design” — at the door of the scientists who have tried to compete with, and even supplant, religion.

A staunch evolutionist himself, he is nevertheless highly critical of such modern giants as Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson.

Evans’ “Atheism Lite,” which seeks to negotiate a truce between religious and irreligious world views, is easily demolished.

Such a truce would have a chance of working only if it were reciprocal — if the world’s religions agreed to value the atheist position and to concede its ethical basis, if they respected the discoveries and achievements of modern science, even when these discoveries challenge religious sanctities, and if they agreed that art at its best reveals life’s multiple meanings at least as clearly as so-called “revealed” texts.

No such reciprocal arrangement exists, however, nor is there the slightest chance that such an accommodation could ever be reached. […]

If religion were a private matter, one could more easily respect its believers’ right to seek its comforts and nourishments.

But religion today is big public business, using efficient political organization and cutting-edge information technology to advance its ends. Religions play bare-knuckle rough all the time, while demanding kid-glove treatment in return.

The NYT reports on the threat of famine in North Korea (via NK Zone):

To combat growing food shortages, the North Korean government is sending millions of city dwellers to work on farms each weekend, largely to transplant rice, according to foreign aid workers.

“The staff that work for us, the staff that work in the ministries, are going out to help farmers,” said Richard Ragan, director of World Food Program operations in Pyongyang, referring to North Koreans who work for the program. Speaking by telephone on Wednesday, he said that in terms of food supplies North Koreans “are inching back to the precipice.”

“It does happen every year,” he said of the mobilization of workers to the fields, “but the difference this year is that everyone is involved.”

Gerald Bourke, a World Food Program spokesman, said Wednesday that on a recent visit to the port of Wonsan, “We saw thousands of people who were marching out of the city.”

“Later, we saw them digging out irrigation canals,” he said, speaking by telephone from Beijing.

A decade ago, up to two million North Koreans starved to death in one of the rare peacetime famines of modern history. The famine was caused by a cutoff in Soviet aid, a collapse of North Korea’s industrial economy, and the reluctance of a highly xenophobic government to receive foreign aid.

Now, with worldwide opposition to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, foreign food aid is drying up…

The World Food Program, the largest foreign food supplier to North Korea, has received only 6 percent of the 230,000 tons it needs this year, Anthony Banbury, Asia director for the United Nations agency, told a news conference in Seoul last Friday, according to Reuters.

Referring to government rations, he said, “What the government is able to provide the people now, these 250 grams a day, is a starvation ration.”

For a discussion of the dilemma faced by aid agencies, knowing that vital humanitarian aid may prolong the life of a hideous regime and so bring more suffering in the long-term, see here.

—of moving ahead in a democratic fashion. The sanctions could not be removed before the regime was removed, and only then could the country pick itself up again. With the removal of the old regime and the elections, we have reached the beginning of a new era. Baathist ideology has, I believe, been dealt a deathblow in Iraq.

MEQ: On April 9, 2003, you watched the fall of Baghdad on television with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office. Can you describe your feeling?

Makiya: It was a wonderful moment. I think that the liberation of Iraq is a great historic achievement of the United States, and I think that it will go down in history as such. I am very proud to have been in that room on that day.

onal Council of Resistance of Iran is part of Mujahedin-e Khalq, a designated terrorist organisation which used to receive most of its funding from Saddam’s Iraq.

Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) is the largest and most militant group opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Also known as the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, MEK is led by husband and wife Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. MEK was added to the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist groups in 1997.

MEK was founded in the 1960s by a group of college-educated Iranian leftists opposed to the country’s pro-Western ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Although the group took part in the 1979 Islamic revolution that replaced the shah with a Shiite Islamist regime, MEK’s ideology, a blend of Marxism and Islamism, put it at odds with the postrevolutionary government. In 1981, the group was driven from its bases on the Iran-Iraq border and resettled in Paris, where it began supporting Iraq in its eight-year war against Khomeini’s Iran. In 1986, MEK moved its headquarters to Iraq where it received its primary support to attack the regime in Iran. During the 2003 Iraq war, U.S. forces cracked down on MEK’s bases in Iraq, and in June 2003 French authorities raided an MEK compound outside Paris and arrested 160 people, including Maryam Rajavi.

None of which, of course, is intended to cast doubt on the authenticity of the film.

The BBC has comments on the Dutch vote:

I live in Amsterdam and have done [for] the past four years. My girlfriend, a Dutch lawyer, was in the dressing room of a department store the other day when she overheard two shop assistants. One saying to the other “Which way are you voting?”. “I’m going to vote No” says the second. First: “Why?” Second:” Because everyone wants us to vote Yes”. This is the mentality we are dealing with here. Simon Goetzel, Amsterdam

The voters, like these silly shop assistants, have proved themselves unworthy of the high ideals of the politicians. They’ve forfeited the confidence of all right-thinking people, and should be dissolved.

ad al-Khaznawi’s sons had been called to a hospital in Deir al-Zour to identify the cleric’s body.

The sons said there were signs on his body that he had been tortured, the spokesman told the BBC.

The banned Yakiti Party is blaming the government for his death and is calling for an official investigation.

Syrian blogger Amarji wonders if this will turn out to be a turning point, like the assassination of Rafik Hariri in Lebanon:

Will the killing of Kurdish Sheikh Maashouq Al-Khaznawi prove a watershed of violent developments between Arab and Kurds in Syria? Perhaps. Kurdish popular reactions over the next few days will provide the answer.

Sheikh Maashouq began to play an increasingly prominent role in the Syrian Kurdish Community over the last couple of years both as an advocate or reconciliation with the Arab population and a spokesman for moderate Islam. His message of peace and reconciliation had attracted a lot of attention, support and admiration among Syria’s Kurdish population. Indeed, his sudden “disappearance” a short while ago drew thousands of Kurdish demonstrators to the streets in the Syria’s northernmost city of Qamishly.

But, and in contract to the tragic developments last year though, these demonstrations were pretty peaceful. The demonstrators, most of whom suspected that Sheikh Maashouq had been kidnapped by the local security apparatuses, merely urged the central authorities to find out the truth about his disappearance and to secure his release.

Instead, the authorities delivered to them his reportedly tortured and mutilated body. The Sheikh was killed by family members we are told. Can we believe that? Can Maashouq’s Kurdish disciples believe that? Will Maashouq prove to be Syria’s Hariri? Will he prove the hair that broke the camel’s back? Or, and as the Syrian saying goes, will the entire event prove to be just another fart against the marble floor?

ted, Cursed, and Hated Muhammad.

A couple of choice scenes: first, Jews laugh gleefully as a sorcerer sticks pins into a clay model of Muhammed.

Kinana: Here is the comb with Muhammad’s lock of hair. We kept it safe. This box contains the statue [made of dough] in the shape of Muhammad.

Labid: Well done. Well done, Jews. Now you’ve fallen into our hands, Muhammad. Now that you are in the hands of the Jews, we shall see whether there’s a god protecting you.

Kinana: What are you going to do, holy man?

Labid: What will I do? You will see what I’ll do. Muhammad will regret the day his mother gave birth to him.

Huyay: Can a Muslim fall into the hands of Jews and survive?!

Kinana: You don’t have to teach us who we are, uncle.

Labid: This is what I have in store for him. These are eleven needles. This needle goes into his heart.

Huyay: Ouch! You hurt me in the heart!

Labid: This one goes in his right eye. This one goes into his left eye. This one goes into his liver. And this one goes into his leg. Kinana, bring me the comb and the lock of hair. We should thread each hair through a needle and then tie them in a knot with this string here. Now we have eleven knots.

Kinana: Could you explain what you did, so we can understand?

Labid: I’ve appointed a demon to protect each knot. I have gathered them from all corners of the earth […]

Kinana: Anything else, Labid?

Labid: The most important thing – the dinars. The dinars for my work, Jews.

Then there’s the scene where Jewish leaders explain to Ibn Salam, a former Jewish convert to Islam, that although they know that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, they won’t accept him because if they do they’ll lose the revenues they collect from their people.

Old Jew: Then it is settled, Jews. We will not follow Muhammad.

Shas: How did you get us into this mess, Ibn Salam?

Ibn Salam: Shame on you. Your character as pigs is showing.

Old Jew: Ibn Salam, we know he is indeed the messenger of Allah, but if we believe him this quickly, we will lose the respect of our people, and we will lose the money we collect from them.

Shas: This means that the common people will stop paying us our share of the gold and silver, and we will become poor.

Reporting rape is damaging to the image of Sudan.

Sudan arrested one of the most prominent international aid workers in the country yesterday, for claiming that there was evidence of widespread rape in the Darfur region.

Paul Foreman, the country head of the aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Holland, has been charged with crimes against the state and faces three years in jail if convicted.

MSF Holland released the report in March, saying its doctors working in Darfur had medical evidence of about 500 rape cases over four-and-a-half months.

The Sudanese government, embarrassed by the attention drawn to its campaign of genocide in Darfur, has cranked up the pressure on aid agencies over the past six months.

The Oxfam country director was ordered out at the end of last year, and a number of aid workers, including Rafe Bullick from Edinburgh, have been killed.

Yesterday, Mohamed Farid, Sudan’s attorney-general, said the report was false and that the government had begun criminal proceedings because MSF should have consulted and co-ordinated with the governmental Humanitarian Aid Commission before publishing any such information.

He said: “These kind of false reports damage the image of Sudan. We need the organisation MSF to do its medical work in Sudan … and to be present here,” he said. “But it has to do its work in its specific capacity, and this is not within its capacity here.”

Meanwhile in China:

A journalist considered the doyen of China correspondents has been held in Beijing and could be charged with stealing state secrets after he tried to obtain a copy of interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist leader who was purged after the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong national who works for The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper, would be the first reporter for a foreign publication to face charges in China.

His wife, Mary Lau, said: “He told me that he expected to be shut up for a long time. It seems they suspect him of stealing state secrets.” Mr Ching, 55, was detained in the southern city of Guangzhou on April 22. He had been trying to obtain a copy of interviews with the late Zhao, who opposed the use of military force to suppress the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Untold hundreds died when troops moved in to break up the student-led demonstration. Zhao, who died in January, was deposed as general secretary and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Mr Ching’s detention is evidence of the tight state grip on the media in China, which last year, according to the New York-based Committee to Protest Journalists, was holding 42 journalists in its jails.

t this did not prevent him from being warmly accepted by France after his downfall.

Talk of an amnesty for North Korea’s elite will have its opponents, but it is a compromise solution that might help save lives and hasten the end of the regime: if the rulers in Pyongyang know that in spite of being on the losing side they will not face persecution, let alone die in jail, but will spend the rest of their days in relative safety and comfort, they might be more willing to throw in the towel. And if lower-level officials know that they will at least keep their personal freedom after unification, they will be far less ready to fight and kill.

t one of behavior, as Straw and his colleagues assume. The problem is with the nature of the Iranian regime.

Put in terms of practical power politics the problem is simple: The present global system is almost exclusively a Western creation. Francis Fukuyama’s theory of “the end of history” is true in the sense that there no longer is a major ideological challenge to the Western world, which is now opposed only by a few oddballs such as North Korea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and Cuba. The Khomeinist regime sees itself as the successor of the late Soviet Union as the principal challenger of the West’s global domination.

Talleyrand once said that there are powers that will not stop because they do not know how; they stop only when they are stopped. The experience of the past three decades shows that this is true of the Islamic Republic.

Hamid-Reza Asefi, the Foreign Ministry spokesman in Tehran, has already dismissed the package of concessions that the Europeans and, to a lesser extent, the Bush administration, have offered Iran, as “a joke.” He is not being frivolous. Almost half a century of Cold War with the USSR teaches at least one lesson: Your adversary will stop doing whatever it is that you don’t like only if you stop him. If you cannot, he won’t stop. Why should he?

If Iran has decided to get the bomb, it is not going to stop because Straw talks to a junior mulla. Nor would the promise of investment and trade persuade them to change course. As for the threat of “referring” them to the United Nations, then above-mentioned Asefi has already described it as “laughable”.

The European initiative is not only useless but could also be dangerous. By fostering Tehran’s illusion that the Islamic Republic could take the major powers for a ride, the European initiative strengthens the hands of those in the camarilla who believe, or pretend to believe, that their war of attrition against a “corrupt, cowardly and moribund West” is winnable. There are many ways of dealing with the Khomeinist challenge. The European imitative, now heading for another failure, is the worst.