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he notes. “So it’s very hard to bring up condoms.”

Mhlolo speaks from both professional and personal experience. She is HIV-positive, infected by her late husband. As AIDS eroded his immune system, he suffered from herpes, which broke into open sores on his penis. Mhlolo suggested condoms, “but he said, ‘Now that I’m sick you have gotten yourself a boyfriend.’ It was very hard.”

Many people balk at discussing the sexual practices of particular cultures because the issue is too sensitive — and, in Africa, too racially charged. Whites have caricatured African sexuality for centuries, casting black men as sexual beasts, and some whites still whisper that this is why HIV is running rampant among Africans. But such stereotypes miss the point, which is not the libido itself but the culture in which it finds expression. […]

Of course, Africa contains thousands of cultures, some of which have strict sexual codes. But common to many sub-Saharan societies are the gender roles epitomized by dry sex: Women are unable to negotiate sex, and so must risk infection to please the man. In fact, there are very few female checks and balances on male behavior. This stark inequality “is part of our culture,” Mhlolo says, “and our culture is part of why HIV is spreading.”

This conclusion seems about right:

What South Africa and southern Africa need to save us from AIDS is nothing less than a cultural revolution. Mbeki was right about one thing: AIDS is a disease of poverty, but mainly because at this level the stark discrepancy between the power of men and women puts women at such extraordinary risk. Of course we need to deal with the appalling economic and health situation in our country, but we also have to deal with a culture that empowers its men so much more than its women when it comes to sex. In Africa, AIDS is a gender issue, and until we address it as such, we an never win the war.

Butterfliesandwheels link to the latest from Christopher Hitchens, on Jihad in the Netherlands:

When the bin-Ladenist forces in Spain committed mass murder in the center of Madrid earlier in the year, they did so amid a huge controversy over the war in Iraq and on the eve of a general election. So badly did the Spanish government handle the affair—seeking to blame it all on a Basque nihilist faction—that many Spaniards were able implicitly to indict George W. Bush for the whole mess. This social and psychic suicide was not possible in the Dutch case. Holland gave up all concept of “empire” a generation ago. Moreover, it has since been the most generous and multicultural society in Europe, welcoming not only its former subjects from Indonesia but becoming a haven in general. And its reward has been to be targeted by Tawheed [“the current Islamic extremist abuse of the Qur’anic word for “unity” or oneness against all heretics”]. One cannot emphasize enough that the victims here are not just secular artists like Theo van Gogh but people of Muslim origin who do not accept homicidal fundamentalism. This is the warning that many liberals have been overlooking or denying ever since the fatwah against Salman Rushdie in 1989. And it is spreading: even as I write this, a Belgian legislator of Moroccan extraction, Mimount Bousakla, has been threatened with “ritual slaughter” for denouncing van Gogh’s murder. Any thinking person can see that we will soon be facing jihad on the streets of Germany and France and England as well. A secret army has also been formed within our borders in the United States, though its triumphant first operation did not alert as many Europeans as it might have.

Since all we’ve heard from Darfur recently has been bad, it’s worth registering this sliver of good news:

The humanitarian crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region, once labelled the world’s worst, appears to have eased – with the death toll from disease dropping – the World Health Organisation said yesterday.

Although confirmation was pending, there were clear signs the numbers dying from hunger and infectious diseases among the more than 1.5 million refugees in the western Sudan region had fallen, said the WHO’s crisis chief, David Nabarro.

A massive appeal for aid was launched last year when details began to emerge of the plight of hundreds of thousands of black Africans in Darfur, forced from their homes by Arab militia.

Millions of pounds was raised and a major relief operation was rolled out to tackle the looming humanitarian crisis. […]

The WHO yesterday said that, while the crisis was far from over, some positive signs were becoming apparent that the relief operation had alleviated the worst of the suffering.

“The kinds of information that I am receiving on water supply, sanitation, food access and health services … would mean that the death rates are likely to have reduced,” Mr Nabarro said. “We have almost certainly gone down to within the threshold limit for a humanitarian crisis.”

In particular, there appeared not to have been the outbreaks of dysentery, diarrhoea and hepatitis in October, November and December that had occurred over the previous three months, Mr Nabarro said.

A Mark Steyn-style piece in the Aussie Daily Telegraph from David Penberthy (via Dhimmi Watch):

Here’s a challenge for swimwear designers. Britain’s advertising watchdog last week banned a series of television commercials featuring bikini-clad women because they were offensive to Muslims.

Stand by for the burqini, a fetching one-piece ensemble made entirely of black hessian, measuring 2m in length and equipped with a small vent through which women can stick their snorkel.

Also in Britain, the Fox network has agreed to demands from the Muslim Council of Britain for talks over a BSkyB drama depicting middle class Muslims as members of a terrorist sleeper cell. Just where do television executives dream up such fantasy?

Unless they were aiming for an accurate account of that September 11 hiccup, where middle class Muslims who were members of a terrorist sleeper cell murdered 3000 innocent people.

Again in Britain, a search and rescue service near the town of Preston had last week its funding slashed when authorities discovered it hadn’t rescued enough ethnic minorities.

It wasn’t that the Bowland and Pennine Mountain Rescue Team had done nothing while minority folk lay stranded at the bottom of cliffs.

In fact, it soon emerged there hadn’t actually been any to rescue. But that’s hardly the point.

And on Sunday, the Home Office confirmed it was considering a request, again from the Muslim Council of Britain, for this week’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz to be made racially inclusive.

Muslim leaders are threatening to boycott the event unless it acknowledges the holocaust of the Palestinian intifada.

In Britain, the cancer of political correctness seems all the more malignant, fuelled perhaps by the fabled determination of the Brits to be unfailingly polite.

As a result, the country looks through Australian eyes like a multicultural worst-case scenario, where befuddled Poms tie themselves up in knots to address all sorts of ludicrous grievances and in doing so undermine the values which have made this country a beacon for democracy and free expression throughout the civilised world.

Well yes, it’s over the top, but I can’t resist that “befuddled Poms”.

MEMRI translate some recent articles by Arab columnists pointing out that terrorists are motivated by cultural and religious factors, not poverty (nor, indeed, “because they can see no other way of attaining justice”). For instance, in the United Arab Emirates daily Al-Itihad, columnist Abdallah Rashid has this to say:

“The greatest mistake of the social and political commentators is their attributing the cause for the spreading of the phenomenon of terrorism in the Arab and Islamic world solely to the lack of social justice, the spreading of poverty, and the harsh social conditions in most of the Arab and Islamic countries.

“The socio-economic situation of most of the terrorists who participate in the criminal operations around the world is very good. Thus, for example, Faysal Zayd Al-Matiri, a young Kuwaiti man from an economically well-off family, went to Fallujah to fight alongside the terrorists supporting the Al-Qa’ida organization, together with the terrorist Abu Mus’ab Al-Zarqawi. He left behind his parents, his wife, and his three girls. He was killed in the fighting, leaving a widow, three orphan girls, and stricken parents mourning his death…

“Interrogations by the Iraqi authorities of terrorists arrested during raids and searches in Iraqi towns revealed that most of the Saudi youth and some of the [youth] from the Gulf who went to Iraq to join the Al-Qa’ida terrorist groups come from families that are not poor and from a social environment that does not suffer from economic problems.

“What is the reason for the involvement of the Arab Muslim youth in such criminal and despicable acts?

“The simple reason is the terrifying brainwashing suffered by most of the Arab youth at the hands of ‘religious clerics’ and particularly at the hands of the extremists with backward views. [These ‘clerics’] nourish the Muslim youth with various kinds of racist views and destructive extremist principles, and nurse them with hostility, hatred, and resentment towards other people and towards members of other divine religions.

Ian Buruma (author most recently of Occidentalism) is always worth reading. Here he is (via The Marmot’s Hole) on ethnic nationalism in the Far East:

[P]atriotism, based on a sense of collective victimhood and a resolve to be a supreme survivor among nations, has come to replace Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as the official ideology of the People’s Republic of China. We will no doubt hear more of it in this anniversary year. Chinese government leaders are adept at using Japanese war guilt as leverage in Sino-Japanese diplomacy. One of the main issues dividing the two nations is the fact that Japan’s prime minister Junichiro Koizumi pays his respects at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where the souls of those who have died for their emperor (including convicted war criminals) are worshipped. When Japan protested against a recent sortie by a Chinese submarine in Japanese waters, the Chinese once again brought up the issue of Yasukuni. […]

But there is something else too. Patriotic education is full of a type of nationalism, born in Europe and transplanted, often through Japan, to China and Korea, which has had lethal consequences: ethnic nationalism combined with social Darwinism. It is the struggle for survival of the fittest nations and races. The weak must perish. This ruthless notion was harnessed to the cause of American conquest and late European imperialism. First world war propaganda, particularly in Germany, was soaked in it. Nazi anti-Semitism, and the resulting genocide, was an extreme version. And it drove the Japanese conquistadors in China and Korea in the first half of the 20th century. As the superior race in Asia, so the Japanese were told, it was their duty to invigorate the weaker races of Asia with a firm crack of the imperial whip.

Now the Chinese are being told that only discipline, vigilance and ever greater national strength will save China from future humiliations. Civic patriotism of the French republican or traditional US kind has no place in an authoritarian system such as that of the People’s Republic of China, let alone the vague post-national idealism of the European Union. Japan’s official pacifism, which is fast crumbling anyway, certainly has little appeal. Ideologically, the PRC, like North Korea, and to a much lesser extent South Korea, is firmly stuck in the late 19th century, when Darwinist ideas made their first impression.

This short film reveals at last the truth about Japanese culture (via Japundit).

the crushing of the human spirit. Anyone who doubts the misery of fundamentalist rule should buy Azfar Nafisi’s memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, to see what the mullahs have wrought.

Among the Iranian people there is a yearning to break free, expressed in surprisingly pro-American ways. There were spontaneous demonstrations of solidarity with the victims of 9/11 which were brutally put down by the ruling elite. But agitation for democratic change continues in the face of imprisonment and execution. The advent of free elections in neighbouring Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the prospect that fellow Shias across the border, such as the moderate Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, can enjoy the fruits of democracy is profoundly encouraging for the Iranian opposition.

What is profoundly depressing for them, however, is the continued indulgence of their oppressors by the West. That is why President Bush’s inspirational inaugural address matters so much. Just as Ronald Reagan’s condemnation of the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire gave Soviet dissidents hope that they were not alone, and thus the courage to fight on, so America’s delineation of Iran as an “outpost of tyranny” gives hope to the democratic opposition in that country.

n by France which, with Germany, has the most to gain by selling arms to China.

The embargo was laid down after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

Last week, The Scotsman understands, US diplomats officially warned both Brussels and London that if the embargo was lifted, the US Congress would retaliate. A US government official said: “We would like to believe that Prime Minister Blair does not fully appreciate what he’s getting into. But we have made it clear enough – and when Foreign Secretary Straw arrives next week, we’ll make it clear to him too.” […]

Mr Straw is keen not to draw attention to the genuine and widening rift over the EU and China – which strategists on both sides of the Atlantic fear will spell the end of NATO. The White House has said that the alliances Britain joins now may decide the coalitions of the future.

From the Sunday Times:

British Muslims are to boycott this week’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz because they claim it is not racially inclusive and does not commemorate the victims of the Palestinian conflict.

Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, has written to Charles Clarke, the home secretary, saying the body will not attend the event unless it includes the “holocaust” of the Palestinian intifada.

The boycott was condemned by Khalid Mahmood, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr:

“I’m proud to be a Muslim. But if people are boycotting this then I think it’s a mistake. People who were exterminated in the Holocaust were not just Jews. There were Romany gypsies as well. Anybody who is interested in human rights should support this remembrance.”

Well there’s a powerful argument: People who were exterminated in the Holocaust were not just Jews. Yes, I think we get the message.