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Nick Cohen on what Livingstone should be apologising for: his support for Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

There has always been something of the American city boss about Livingstone. He pays the necessary pieties to ethnic and sexual blocs and collects their votes. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that he’s not just a grubby machine politician but is sincere when he declares that he is defending Qaradawi to the hilt because, ‘I have a responsibility to support the rights of all of London’s diverse communities and to maintain a dialogue with their political and religious leaders.’

He doesn’t seem to realise that this bland formulation is cover for a deeply reactionary manoeuvre which is being practised across the Western pseudo-left. First they define ‘communities’ by their religion. Then they assumed that misogynist and anti-democratic practitioners of that religion are the true leaders of their communities. The inevitable consequence is that liberals, socialists and feminists in the poor world are betrayed. They look to the Western homes of liberalism, socialism and feminism and are greeted with indifference or spite.

Last year Iraqi, Jordanian and Tunisian writers organised a petition to the United Nations by 2,500 Arab intellectuals which condemned ‘individuals in the Muslim world who pose as clerics and issue death sentences against those they disagree with. These individuals give Islam a bad name and foster hatred among civilizations.’ Prominent in their list of the ‘sheikhs of death’ was one Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Just as the British anti-war movement chose to turn its back on the eight million Iraqis who defied the murderers and voted, Livingstone has chosen to ignore the Arab left and offer comfort to its enemies.

You find this pattern time and again. The dominant voices in the rich world’s left are consistently on the wrong side. You have to go back to the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 to find a similar accommodation with the dictatorial right.

As inevitable as betrayal is award-winning hypocrisy. In the name of anti-racism, Livingstone perpetuates the stereotype of the Muslim as a death-obsessed, woman-hating, queer-bashing cheerleader for suicide bombers. In the name of multi-culturalism, he talks as if something in the water supply of the Islamic world, or maybe an obscure genetic mutation means that one billion people actually want to be ruled by priests.

The joke of it all is that if the British government or a European or North American government were to recommend the execution of homosexuals or the enforcement of Christian belief by death sentences on apostates, Livingstone would be taking to the streets to protest. But when the same policies are proposed by brown-skinned leaders he shakes them warmly by the hand and invites them into city hall.

Journalist Jan Raath, after 30 years in Zimbabwe, is finally forced out:

At 11.30am on Wednesday I completed my flight from Zimbabwe. After 30 years in Harare, and a final, frantic overnight drive to the border, I had left the sad, wrecked country that I love, and I don’t know if I will return.

For years President Mugabe’s regime had been making it increasingly difficult to work in Zimbabwe as a journalist, and of the foreign press corps I was one of the last survivors. But this week it become obvious that with an election looming, and Mr Mugabe wishing to steal it with a minimum of prying by the outside world, my time was up as well. […]

When Mr Mugabe was first elected in 1980, he was unlike any African leader. He spoke with a plummy accent and won my heart with his policy of reconciliation between whites and blacks, and between the two sides of the seven- year guerrilla war against the minority rule of Ian Smith’s colonial regime.

But gradually, as in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the new regime grew more repressive and authoritarian than the one it replaced. In 2000, Mr Mugabe was challenged for the first time, and very nearly beaten. Since then his Government has become blatantly tyrannical, determined to stamp out any opposition, and a byword for misrule.

Most white farms have been seized in the name of land redistribution, and left to rot. Millions of black Zimbabweans now live in hunger and abject poverty, with the country’s dwindling food supplies used as a political tool to reward supporters.

Unbridled inflation has left the currency worthless. The independent media has been silenced. Those who can have abandoned the country in droves.

There has been no joy in recording Zimbabwe’s steady descent into a subsistence economy.

Carl Zimmer – the web’s answer to Stephen Jay Gould? – has a two-part post on the eye and evolution. The first part, “Opening Up the Russian Doll“, looks at the evolution of sight. It’s a topic that attracts evolutionists, like Richard Dawkins, because at first glance it would appear to be a hard one to explain with the standard gradualist approach: what use is half an eye? Zimmer looks at some modern research and adds something fresh to the debate.

But it’s the second part, “Fleas, Fish, and the Careful Art of Deconstruction“, which is the more surprising, with the focus on organisms that lose their sight, like cave fish or fleas. It turns out to be more interesting than you’d think.

Syria responsible for Hariri’s murder? Nah….according to Al Jazeera, Lebanese authorities are on the lookout for twelve Australians.

Lebanon’s Justice Minister Adnan Addoum said on Friday that authorities were hunting for twelve Australian men wanted over the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri.

Addum said that six of the suspects left Beirut for Australia hours after Monday’s deadly blast, adding that police found traces of explosives on aircraft seats.

Update (via a pyjama-clad Omar at Iraq the Model): Al-Jazeera are conducting an on-line poll on who killed Hariri. The choices? Israeli agents, Syrian rebels, US agents, or Lebanese rebels. No option for the Syrian government – or for Australians. So far Syrian rebels are ahead with 66%. Do the voters understand by Syrian rebels what Al-Jazeera understand by Syrian rebels, I wonder.

y source and in all forms, and it must not let it spread like wildfire in a field of thorns…… There is no escape from struggling against and restricting the individual ridda so that it will not worsen and its sparks scatter, becoming group ridda… Thus, the Muslim sages agreed that the punishment for the murtadd [who commits ridda] … is execution.”

From the Jerusalem Post (via lgf):

In the first decision of its kind since he succeeded Yasser Arafat, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has ratified death sentences against three Palestinians found guilty of “collaboration” with Israel.

It is not clear when the three men, whose identities were not revealed, will be executed by firing squad.

However, senior PA officials told The Jerusalem Post that the three were Gaza Strip residents who had been convicted of “high treason” for tipping off Israeli security forces about the whereabouts of wanted gunmen. […]

At least 51 Palestinians are on death row, including several suspected “collaborators.” Under pressure to crack down on an upsurge in crime and anarchy in PA-controlled areas, Abbas earlier this month instructed the mufti to quickly review the cases of the convicts so that the executions may be carried out as soon as possible.

Most of the death sentences were issued by the controversial “state security” courts in the Gaza Strip, which were dismantled two years ago after drawing sharp criticism from Palestinian human rights organizations and reformists. […]

“People convicted of ‘collaboration’ with Israel face extremely harsh treatment. Two were executed in January 2001. Amnesty International delegates were told that the Palestinian Authority had promised the European Union not to carry out any further executions. However, according to reports, at least 28 alleged collaborators have been killed by armed Palestinians in 2002.”

Within a decade, Mongolia is expected to convert the nation’s written language from the Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet, as English replaces Russian as the second language (via The Marmot’s Hole):

“We are looking at Singapore as a model,” Tsakhia Elbegdorj, Mongolia’s prime minister, said in an interview, his own American English honed at graduate school at Harvard University. “We see English not only as a way of communicating, but as a way of opening windows on the wider world.”

Camel herders may not yet refer to each other as “dude,” but Mongolia, thousands of kilometers from the nearest English-speaking nation, is a reflection of the steady march of English as a world language.

Fueled by the Internet, the growing dominance of U.S. culture and the financial realities of globalization, English is now taking hold in Asia, and elsewhere, just as it has done in many European countries.

In South Korea, six “English villages” are being established where paying students can have their passports stamped for intensive weeks of English language immersion, taught by native speakers imported from all over the English-speaking world.

The most ambitious, an $85 million English town near Seoul, will have Western architecture, signs and a resident population of English-speaking foreigners.

In Iraq, where Arabic and Kurdish are to be the official languages, there is a growing movement to add English, a neutral link for a nation split along ethnic lines.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, there is an explosion in English language studies, fueled partly by an affinity for Britain and the United States, and partly by the knowledge that neighboring Turkey may soon join the European Union, where English is emerging as the dominant language.

In Chile, the government has embarked on a national program of teaching English in all elementary and high schools. The goal is to make that nation of 15 million people bilingual in English within a generation. The models are the Netherlands and the Nordic nations, which have achieved virtual bilingualism in English since World War II.

Smart move by philosopher Harry Frankfurt to call his book “On Bullshit“, thereby creating that little transgressive frisson necessary for publicity purposes: especially with the NYT referring to it as “On Bull – – – – “. But if you can get through this (via AL Daily) without your eyes glazing over, you must be a professional philosopher.

This guy, on the other hand, seems to be on to something:

How do you acquire credibility as an intellectual? You basically need to demonstrate your independence of thought, what Immanuel Kant called autonomy. Autonomy is most effectively conveyed by being “cast against type”, as actors say. In other words, you should adopt positions that do not seem to be in your interest to uphold. The more mysterious the benefit you would receive from the truth of your position, the more intellectual integrity you will appear to have. You should seek to plant a chronic nagging doubt in your audience, which causes them to leave your speech or text thinking: “She must have a point; why else would she say these crazy things?”
It is relatively easy to demonstrate autonomy if you come from a wealthy or aristocratic background. You simply need to disown your status and champion the poor and downtrodden. It worked for the Buddha, and it enabled socialism to gain a political foothold long before it became a proper workers’ movement. Moreover, this strategy may even help socialism to survive long after the workers have abandoned the movement in search of middle-class identities. (Socialism’s most steadfast defender in the UK over the past half-century has been the aristocrat Anthony Wedgwood Benn, better known as Tony Benn.) The strategy typically involves denouncing the corrupt conditions that maintain your status. Your discovery of this corruption turns out to be an unintended consequence of the superior education and leisure that you enjoy. You then dedicate the rest of your life to undoing the inequities, in part to atone for your own complicity in them.

Class conflict in London yesterday, as nice fresh-faced middle class Greenpeace protestors came head-to-head with horrid working class oiks:

When 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail. What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.

“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”

Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.” Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.”

d in no uncertain terms that he should not play with dangerous ideas. […]

Syria had a clear motive in killing Hariri. It also had the means, if only because its security services control Beirut. Certainly, no one could have smuggled hundreds of kilos of explosives into the heart of the city without the Syrian Mukhaberat learning about it.

Syria also had a long history of murdering its political foes in Lebanon: two of Lebanon’s presidents, Bechir Gemayel and Rene Mouaouad; the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt; the publisher Salim al-Lawzi — these are only the best-known victims of Syrian assassination policy.

Friends of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad claim that even if the Syrians murdered Hariri, young Bashar knew nothing about it. Rather, some rogue elements in the Syrian Mukhaberat did the dastardly deed. But this excuse is worse than the crime. Syria claims to be in Lebanon to protect it against rogue elements. If it can’t do that, there is even less reason why it should continue to occupy Lebanon.