Blog

From The Mesopotamian (via Solomonia):

[T]he daily massacre of completely innocent people goes on. The very best people in society are targeted. The hardest hit is the professional middle class. Many Doctors and professionals are closing down their very profitable businesses and escaping outside the country.

These zombies are at it again. As if all the murders and mass graves of the past are not enough they continue their orgy of killing and torture under the very nose of the MNF and the Iraqi security forces who are themselves victims of the most atrocious massacres. Any assumption that we are dealing with human beings is completely wrong. These are monsters and must be dealt with as such.

As for the elections, they are doing their best to intimidate and threaten people. What can be more abominable than this; openly intimidating people from participating in the first truly free elections in the history of not only Iraq but also probably the entire region. And what lame excuses they give! The security situation? But it is you gentlemen who are responsible for the havoc. And; what guarantee can there be if the elections are postponed that the situation will not get worse? In fact, we all know that you will do your damn best to aggravate it further in the vane hope that you might achieve your vile objectives. Fair elections cannot be held under occupation! : As if we ever saw any fair elections when there was no “occupation” for almost a whole century when your minority clan was lording over the people. Besides, Palestinian elections were recently held under Israeli occupation, and we did not see anybody objecting. You are not telling us that the Israeli occupation is better than the presence of the MNF who have liberated the country from your tyranny. Oh, and they want a precise timetable for the MNF to leave. That, we assure you does not stem from any patriotic sentiment. You can be certain that within few hours from the departure of the last American soldier, the old Saddam military and security apparatus will reemerge from their holes, reinforced this time with the vampires of the Bin Laden clan and their likes.

Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, al-Qaeda admirer and leader of al-Muhajiroun, is at it again:

An extremist London cleric is using live broadcasts on the internet to urge young British Muslims to join al-Qaeda and has condoned suicide terrorist attacks. Omar Bakri Mohammed, who has lived in the UK for 18 years on social security benefits, pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and told his followers that they were in a state of war with Britain.

The Times monitored Mr Bakri Mohammed’s nightly webcasts in which he declared that the “covenant of security” under which Muslims live peacefully in the UK had been “violated” by the Government’s tough anti-terrorist legislation, The Syrian-born radical said: “I believe the whole of Britain has become Dar ul-Harb (land of war). In such a state, he added, “the kuffar (non-believer) has no sanctity for their own life or property.”

In his broadcasts, conducted through an internet chatroom, Mr Bakri Mohammed stopped short of calling for terrorist attacks in Britain. But he said that Muslims should join the jihad “wherever you are” and told one woman that she was permitted to become a suicide bomber.

832/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_10_7/026-5906907-5609234″>Proust Among the Stars“:

The hyperbole put at the service of this effort can be absurd: the dust jacket of Proust among the Stars even ventures to claim that it “sends Proust into orbit and sends back truly startling pictures of our world.” What, in earth or in heaven, can this possibly mean? Naturally one hesitates to pay too much attention to jacket copy, but then again Bowie’s text is itself not entirely free of such overheated and borderline perplexing rhetoric. (“Proust’s political imagination plunges with abandon toward the abyss.”) Nor does he refrain from tedious professorial posturing. (“There seems to me something unsatisfactory about any reading of the book that does not resist as well as endorse Le temps retrouvé in the performance of this harmonizing and integrating role.”) Divided into seven chapters, each devoted to a major Proustian theme—self, time, art, politics, morality, sex, death—Bowie’s study (whose precise, unhurried prose moves at a pace rather reminiscent of Proust’s own) intermingles long quotations, plot paraphrases, commonsensical explications, the occasional genuine insight about syntax or perspective, and loads of hyberbolic huffing and puffing about paradox, ambiguity, “the ‘self’” as “mobile force-field,” and suchlike.

Bawer doesn’t mention the thinker to whom Bowie is most indebted in his analysis: Jacques Lacan. What a regrettable enterprise – to try and explicate Proust, the clearest, most lucid, most intelligent of French writers, through Lacan, who, um, isn’t.

Second link is to the Crumb Museum. No substitute for having his stuff in print (I was going to recommend this, till I saw the price), but anything to do with the maestro is welcome.

Justice Munby. He ruled that the passing of details of the case to Harriet Harman and Margaret Hodge were contempts of court. He said she was guilty of ‘suppressio veri and suggestio falsi’, which is fighting talk even for non-Latin speakers, and she now faces potentially ruinous disciplinary action.

een there on both sides. Saying one thing in public while holding on to a different opinion is characteristic of both sides. The last three decades of oppression by the Sunni minority have only made things worse.

I have heard some terrible prejudices against Iraqi Shia from people I have contact with, some of whom are educated and sophisticated. Although I have heard these things for all my life, it has never been as widespread as it is now. This is the underlying reason for boycotting the elections, Sunnis know they will lose even if the whole governorates of Nineva, Salah Al-Din and Al-Anbar vote. They believe they can save face by not participating.

Amir Taheri sees lessons for Iraq in the recent history of Algeria:

The turning point came in 1995 when Algeria organized its first ever pluralist and direct presidential election. This is was not an ideal election. The candidates were little known figures that had appeared on the national political scene just a couple of years earlier. None presented a coherent political program. To make matters worse the terrorists did all they could to prevent the election. They burned down voter registration bureaus and murdered election officers. Masked men visited people in their homes and shops to warn that going to the polls would mean death.

And, yet, when polling day came it quickly became clear that the terrorists, in the forlorn attempt at stopping democracy, were, as in so many other instances in history, facing certain defeat. Never in my many years of journalism had I seen such enthusiasm for an electoral exercise anywhere in the world. The “silent majority” spoke by casting ballots, not because it particularly liked any of the candidates but because it wanted to send a message to the terrorists that they had no place in Algeria.

That one election did not make Algeria a democracy. Since then Algeria has held three more presidential and a dozen local and parliamentary elections. None of these exercises have been perfect, and Algeria may need dozens more elections, which means many more years, before it can achieve the standards set by mature democracies. But the Algerian exercise has made one fact clear: The only way to defeat terrorism is by involving the mass of the people through elections.

Algeria was the first major Arab country to be attacked by Islamist terrorists on a large scale. It is also the first to defeat them.

f members have been strongly partisan in their political and military work, should cast immediate doubt upon its credibility as an organisation and the accuracy of its work.

Has he evidence that MEMRI has lied about Al-Qaradawi? No. Instead he relies on Al-Qaradawi’s publicised statements:

The dossier repeatedly charges Dr al-Qaradawi with anti-Semitism. When asked about this at City Hall in July, in front of TV cameras from all over the world, Qaradawi reiterated his often stated view that ‘we do not hold any enmity towards the Jews’ and that ‘Judaism is regarded as a message with a divine origin and a high status’

Naive isn’t the word.

MEMRI have put together a compilation of their material on Al-Qaradawi. They “will soon be issuing an official response, as well as additional new material on Qaradhawi”.

by Beijing – is a factor in the gradual transformation of Japan from a pacifist nation, with pacificism enshrined in the US-imposed constitution, to one that assumes a more powerful role on the world stage – and will not countenance a perceived threat from its formidable neighbor to the west. To handle this seeming “threat”, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is rushing to change Japan’s traditional pacifist military posture – urged on by Washington to play a larger role and expand its military operations in the so-called “arc of instability” stretching from Northeast Asia to the Middle East.

Faced with China’s strengthening military power, the United States and Japan are reinforcing bilateral security relations by changing Tokyo’s pacifistic military posture for their common interest – to prevent an ever-stronger China from emerging as the global and regional superpower, especially militarily, in the coming decades. For the US, China is the only country that has high potential to threaten US global dominance in the 21st century. For Japan, China could jeopardize political and economic stability in Asia, threatening Tokyo’s credibility as the leading economic power in the region. To cope with this “China threat”, Tokyo is adopting a more muscular military posture, one that causes alarm to its neighbors in Beijing, Seoul, Manila and elsewhere.

The Chinese are building up their forces in the Nanjing Military Region directly opposite Taiwan:

China has not ruled out the use of force to reunify Taiwan and the mainland, especially if Taiwan declares independence.

Meanwhile, China issued late last month the White Paper, which outlined the country’s new national defense policy. The document, the fifth on national defense since 1995, described Taiwan relations as “grim” and made clear that any attempt at independence would be dealt with harshly. “Should the Taiwan authorities go so far as to make a reckless attempt that constitutes a major incident of Taiwan independence, the Chinese people and armed forces will resolutely and thoroughly crush it at any cost,” China’s 85-page White Paper said. “The Taiwan authorities under [President] Chen Shui-bian have recklessly challenged the status quo … and markedly escalated the Taiwan independence activities designed to split China.”

And now, in case the message wasn’t clear enough, they’re proposing a 100-mile bridge:

China is planning an engineering feat even grander than the Great Wall and the Three Gorges Dam. But politics rather than nature may turn out to be the biggest obstacle.

Zhang Chunxian, China’s Communications Minister, announced plans yesterday for a 100-mile fixed link to Taiwan, the island that has fought a cold war with the mainland for more than five decades.

“There will be a special corridor linking the mainland to Taipei,” said Mr Zhang, insisting that the project was feasible. “It may be a bridge. It may be a tunnel.”

The greatest minds of all time – now with the bodies to match! Check out “Bashin’ Bishop Berkeley” (close his eyes and his enemies disappear), “Rough Russell” (there is an x such that: x is the originator of the theory of definite descriptions: and for any y, if y is the originator of the theory of definite descriptions, then y is identical to x: and x is unbeatable in combat), and many more (via Metafilter).

consider whether Professor Meadow should be accused of serious professional misconduct. The GMC says that it usually takes between 15 and 18 months to mount such a hearing. Exactly how busy are these people? How long is the backlog of doctors accused of ruining women’s lives?

Home Office bureaucrats seem to think that they do not even owe an explanation of their refusal to compensate a woman who spent 18 months in jail on false charges being treated as the vilest of the vile, who lost her house and almost lost her surviving daughter to the social services. She escaped, like Mrs Clark and Mrs Patel, only through sheer determination. Few mothers can imagine marshalling such strength at a time of such unutterable grief. Mrs Clark looks unlikely ever to recover fully from her ordeal in prison. Yet it was she and her husband who first forced intelligent judges to see what they should have spotted long before: that the science behind Professor Meadow’s claims was ropy to say the least. When challenged to produce his research papers to justify his original findings on MSBP, he claimed to have destroyed them.

Meanwhile Richard Webster – author of “Why Freud was Wrong” who also writes about sexual abuse panics – points to this item from Scotland on Sunday a couple of months back, on the Lewis abuse case of 2003, when eight people were charged with sexual offences against children involving Satanic ritual child abuse, only for the charges to be dropped in July 2004.

A woman whose claims of Satanic child sex abuse helped put eight people in the dock had a history of making false allegations, which was known to police, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.

Angela Stretton was the key police witness in the Lewis abuse case which collapsed this summer with charges against all the accused being dropped.

An investigation by this newspaper has revealed that Stretton was convicted of making false allegations of child abuse in 1987, and that Scots police were aware of her track record of false claims before deciding to press charges.

Last night, several of the accused – some of whom are suing for compensation – demanded to know why they were dragged through the courts by social workers and police on the evidence of a discredited witness.

The results of our investigation also raise serious questions about whether the authorities have learned the lessons of previous abuse inquiries, and whether similar mistakes will be made in future.

The Lewis case began in January 2003 when a small group of children told social workers they had been sexually abused. Initially, the allegations related only to two individuals and involved inappropriate touching.

Island resident Stretton, now 37, emerged as crucial adult police witness in the case. After she became involved, the number of suspects spiralled to eight and the nature of the allegations broadened dramatically.

Police documents seen by this newspaper show that Stretton told police that Satanic rituals were used in the abuse, and that adults were filmed having sex with children. The evidence included lurid claims of drinking blood, orgies, and slaughtering animals.