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stfeed due to a sexual urge. This is extremism. They claimed that the restrictions on this urge have created repression.

“Brothers, I got the following numbers from American sources: There are currently 1,000 Jewish soldiers in Fallujah. This is according to American sources. Among them are 37 rabbis. The rabbis raise the morale among the Jewish soldiers fighting in Fallujah. So America is fighting for Israel. It is not fighting for Iraq’s oil, since it has been drilling it for some time.

“The Jews are fighting now. Even before we read the information about Jewish presence in Fallujah we thought that storming houses with boots from one house and moving from one house to another by explosions are actions we have already seen in Balata, Jenin, and Rafah. The Jews came to conduct urban warfare on behalf of America, and America is supporting them in exchange.

“What is America’s interest in this mess? Many Americans, after their president won a second term, opened a small window toward Canada: The electronic escape window [sic] to Canada has become increasingly popular because they want to escape the land of freedom and democracy. If America wants to preserve the country it has established, it must listen to [Benjamin] Franklin’s advice, who warned them against the Jews. Now the Jews are leading them into these battles and this mess.”

Not sure about the “permissiveness” school of thought, but he’s certainly got Freud’s number.

Anne Applebaum on the freedom-haters (via Chrenkoff):

At least a part of the Western left — or rather the Western far left — is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States. Many of the same people who found it hard to say anything bad about Saddam Hussein find it equally difficult to say anything nice about pro-democracy demonstrators in Ukraine. Many of the same people who would refuse to condemn a dictator who is anti-American cannot bring themselves to admire democrats who admire, or at least don’t hate, the United States. I certainly don’t believe, as President Bush sometimes simplistically says, that everyone who disagrees with American policies in Iraq or elsewhere “hates freedom.” That’s why it’s so shocking to discover that some of them do.

his is almost certainly not possible: for a start it’s inconceivable that the Iranians will not have anticipated this and spread their facilities accordingly. Ledeen believes that the craven Europeans are quite prepared for Iran to join the nuclear club. So, as it happens, are some Israelis. The only other option is to press for sanctions, via a Security Council resolution, but that wouldn’t make it past Russia or new friend China.

For the moment the way it’s being played, with the European three playing good cops to the American bad cop, is about as promising an approach as we can hope for. For sure Iran is being cynical about the negotiations, but that doesn’t mean we should stop talking to them.

Update: it’s gratifying to see the level of maturity that the Iranians are demonstrating in their diplomacy:

A top Iranian official has claimed a “great victory” over the US after the UN said it would not punish Iran’s nuclear activities with sanctions.

Hassan Rohani said Iran would never give up its right to nuclear power.

He stressed its freeze in uranium enrichment was only temporary during talks with European countries.

The UN atomic agency IAEA has welcomed Iran’s offer to freeze enrichment in a statement on Monday that did not mention any threat of future sanctions.

Washington had been pushing for Iran to be censured by the UN Security Council.

Mr Rohani said the “whole world had turned down America’s calls”.

“We have proved that, in an international institution, we are capable of isolating the US. And that is a great victory,” Mr Rohani said.

He added that the US representative at the IAEA meeting in Vienna “was enraged and in tears, and everybody said that the Americans had failed and we had won”.

According to this article in Newsweek, dear leader Kim Jong-Il is obsessed by the possibility that he’ll meet the same fate as Ceausescu (via The Marmot’s Hole):

For a full week in early 1990, Kim forced North Korean officials to watch multiple video showings of Ceausescu’s bloody death at the hands of an angry mob and warned his colleagues of the dangers of losing control. One defector told Hagiwara that he recalled Kim obsessively repeating, “We will be killed by the people.” […]

For Kim, the next few months could be critical. Domestically, he must deal with the short-term fallout from the limited economic reforms he introduced two years ago. A recent report by the World Food Program states that they’ve caused even more problems for North Korea’s people. By cutting state subsidies and freeing prices, Kim has sent inflation through the roof—making basic foodstuffs catastrophically expensive. Says one recent North Korean defector: “One third of the population can eat rice and meat soup. One third can manage to eat corn. And one third is waiting to die with water-thin porridge.”

The Telegraph has some details from Ukraine:

It was 5.30pm on election day in Ukraine when the thugs in masks arrived armed with rubber truncheons.

Vitaly Kizima, an election monitor at Zhovtneve in Ukraine’s Sumy region, watched in horror as 30 men in tracksuits stormed into the village polling station.

“They started to beat voters and election officials, trying to push through towards the ballot boxes,” he told The Telegraph.

“People’s faces were cut from blows to the head. There was blood all over.”

The thugs – believed to be loyal to the pro-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich from his stronghold, Donetsk – were repulsed only when locals pushed them back and a policeman fired warning shots.

The catalogue of abuses in the contest between Mr Yanukovich, the prime minister, and his opponent, the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, is growing longer by the day. […]

Maya Syta, a journalist working at polling station 73 in a Kiev suburb, witnessed ballot papers destroyed with acid poured into a ballot box. “The officials were taking them out of the box and they couldn’t understand why they were wet,” she said.

“Then I saw they started to blacken and disintegrate as if they were burning. Two ballots were wrapped up into a tube with a yellow liquid inside. After a few moments they were completely eaten up.”

In her polling station, 26 ballots were destroyed and had to be invalidated. Six other cases were recorded of ballots destroyed by acid.

The most common trick was “carousel” voting, in which busloads of Yanukovich supporters simply drove from one polling station to another casting multiple false absentee ballots.

In another brazen fraud recorded by observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, voters were given pens filled with ink that disappeared, leaving ballots unmarked and invalid. […]

Diana Dutsyk, a member of Mr Yushchenko’s campaign team, claimed that “dead souls” – late citizens’ ballots used by imposters – were also used to augment his opponent’s share of the vote.

And late last week Mr Yushchenko’s headquarters released an audio recording in which senior members of Mr Yanukovich’s campaign team were allegedly caught red-handed discussing how to fix the election result.

In the telephone conversation, a member of the team can be heard saying that he ordered a local election commission to disqualify votes. […]

“The openness and cynicism of the manipulation was unprecedented,” said Olexander Chernenko of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine (CVU), an American-funded organisation that has monitored elections for more than a decade.

About 11,000 complaints have been lodged so far with regional courts.

lled in the genocide. The death toll may even be as high as 250,000, and still there is no protection for the vulnerable.

“The Sudanese Government knows it’s off the hook,” a representative of the rebels informs me. “Their officials told me ‘the international community is just not interested in Darfur any more’.”

I wouldn’t want this normblog post about a John Prine song to pass without mentioning what a brilliant debut Prine made with his first eponymous album. In an era when Country music was a bastion of reaction against the counter-culture and all things un-American, Prine was a welcome voice from the left-liberal side. In fact he was bracketed into the singer/songwriter category at first – even as the new Dylan – but gradually eased himself into the area of quirky left-field Country. Or maybe the definition of Country just got broader. Whatever, his first effort was his best. Not that he ever produced rubbish (this is good), but he was one of those artists who arrived fully formed, and produced a masterpiece at the start of his career which he never improved on.

There’s a whole world of artists like that floating round the edges of Country music. Guy Clark with Old #1: Jesse Winchester: JJ Cale . Minor artists I’d suppose you’d call them. The history of American music’s full of ’em.

In an instructive article in the Observer, Frances Stonor Saunders (author of “Who Paid the Piper“, about the cultural cold war) wonders what use intellectuals are:

Last week came an announcement from the University of London’s Birkbeck College that it intends to establish a centre for public intellectuals. Its international director is to be Professor Slavoj Zizek. In case you haven’t heard of this ‘world-renowned public intellectual’, Zizek has published more than 50 books ‘on topics ranging from philosophy and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to theology, film, opera and politics’.

He was also a candidate for the presidency of his native Slovenia in the first democratic elections after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1990. ‘Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians,’ says Zizek. ‘We need intellectuals – not to make decisions, but to make clear what the issues are about.’

We need intellectuals to do no such thing. Saunders looks back at the congress held in Paris in 1935 at which a selection of leading intellectuals led by Malraux, Gide, and Aragon, declaimed on the glories of Soviet communism. She concludes:

In many ways, we are still living out the battles of the Thirties. Fascism and communism have been replaced by Islamic fundamentalism and American freedomism (with America the less plausible enemy). Will Birkbeck’s future generation of public intellectuals, once they have got over Derrida, want to explain to us which barricades to mount? Will their interventions yield a more positive legacy than their predecessors? Or should they, perhaps, stick to Derrida after all?

Still living out the battles of the thirties is all too true as far as Zizek is concerned: he’s still celebrating the glories of Leninist freedom over the false consciousness of bourgeois freedom. American freedomism though? Hmm…..sounds grim.

vania Museum.

Most of the Kabul Museum’s collection, which included Silk Road artifacts from China, Egypt, India, Greece and Rome besides ancient Afghanistan, disappeared following the 1979 Soviet invasion and the years of civil war that followed the 1989 Soviet withdrawal.

Statues and other artifacts considered “un-Islamic,” were smashed by the Taliban after the fundamentalist Islamic militia took power in 1996.

But a total of 22,596 objects, including 2,000-year-old Bactrian gold jewelry and ornaments, ivory statues of water goddesses and Buddhist terra cotta sculptures and carvings, have been recovered in the Kabul stash.

raeli Arab and Palestinian casualties, and because according to foreign reports, Israel already has submarines with second-strike nuclear capabilities. […]

Still, nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran will be a precedent-setting threat to international stability. It will start a chain reaction. Saudi Arabia will want them, and other countries will say that what is permitted to Iran (and North Korea) should also be permitted to them. The danger is that one day nuclear technology and fission materials may “leak” into the hands of terrorists.

Lacking intelligence information and a realistic military option (alongside Israel’s refusal to discuss a nuclear-free Middle East), and in the face of American difficulty in creating an international consensus for sanctions, European diplomacy of delay is the only real chance to stop the dangerous drift.