Blog

As Private Eye point out, Sir Ivor, the British ambassador to Rome who recently described George Bush as “Al-Qaeda’s best recruiting sergeant ever”, was formerly the British ambassador to Belgrade, and well-known as someone who boasted of his “closeness of access” to Slobodan Milosevic, and a great believer in the British policy under Hurd and Rifkind that no obstacle should be placed in the way of Slobodan and his thugs. From an article from 1996 by Morton Abramowitz:

[A]lmost weekly since Dayton, US officials have carried their red carpet to Belgrade, giving Mr Milosevic every reason to think he holds the key to our Balkans policy. The British have been even worse in playing up to Mr Milosevic. In Belgrade, their ambassador [Sir Ivor] is widely regarded as his handmaiden.

Since Bosnian Muslims were the main victims of Serbian aggression, and since some of the recruits to the training camps in Afghanistan were motivated in part by the West’s indifference to their suffering, Sir Ivor could well be said to have played his own small part in recruiting for Al-Qaeda.

charge that he’s simply made things worse. He’s come as near as he could to an outright apology, an admission that he got the whole thing horribly wrong, but, hey, we’re there now so we better make the best of it.

[I]f the implied reason he went to war was wrong, then what was the justification for removing Saddam? Just getting rid of a bad man won’t do at all — not least because this was not the reason for going to war. It was because Saddam posed a threat to the world, and had refused to show the world, as it had demanded, that he no longer posed that threat. But the result of Blair’s words today is that people are none the wiser about what that threat was, not least because of his bald statement that the information that there were actual WMD was wrong. No word about the 12 year breach of UN resolutions. No reference to the reports that WMD components were moved to other countries. And most crucially, no word about Saddam’s involvement with terror, including the frequent contacts with al Qaeda.

This was clearly a strategic decision to draw a line under the whole WMD issue by stating the worst case scenario that the intelligence was wrong. But in doing so, Blair has done the cause of truth and rationality a grave disservice. Nor has he drawn a line under the controversy that dogs him over Iraq. He might have done so had he come out fighting. But he blew it.

The whole post is well worth a read.

Is Syria going down the Iranian path, or is it taking a leaf from Gaddafi’s book on the question of whether to go nuclear? (via OpinionJournal)

Syria’s President Bashir al-Asad is in secret negotiations with Iran to secure a safe haven for a group of Iraqi nuclear scientists who were sent to Damascus before last year’s war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Western intelligence officials believe that President Asad is desperate to get the Iraqi scientists out of his country before their presence prompts America to target Syria as part of the war on terrorism.

The issue of moving the Iraqi scientists to Iran was raised when President Asad made a visit to Teheran in July. Intelligence officials understand that the Iranians have still to respond to the Syrian leader’s request.

A group of about 12 middle-ranking Iraqi nuclear technicians and their families were transported to Syria before the collapse of Saddam’s regime. The transfer was arranged under a combined operation by Saddam’s now defunct Special Security Organisation and Syrian Military Security, which is headed by Arif Shawqat, the Syrian president’s brother-in-law.

The Iraqis, who brought with them CDs crammed with research data on Saddam’s nuclear programme, were given new identities, including Syrian citizenship papers and falsified birth, education and health certificates. Since then they have been hidden away at a secret Syrian military installation where they have been conducting research on behalf of their hosts.

Growing political concern in Washington about Syria’s undeclared weapons of mass destruction programmes, however, has prompted President Asad to reconsider harbouring the Iraqis.

ly.

There are three ways, in particular, in which the media collectively have played into the terrorists’ hands. The first is through personalising the drama so as to skew the whole notion of responsibility. The construction of a narrative in which the Prime Minister is to be judged by the efforts he makes in resolving one man’s destiny, the Bigley family become the arbiters of how effectively he has handled matters and it is up to the British Government to race against the clock to find a “solution” to militant grievances, may make for a compelling human-interest drama. But it unbalances the ethical picture radically. If and when Mr Bigley is murdered it will not be because of any lack of effort on the part of Mr Blair but because Islamist barbarians have, once again, decided to shed infidel blood in pursuit of a medieval ideology of death. Those barbarians know how a story such as that of Mr Bigley can capture our imagination and they are exploiting not just our compassion but also the media’s addiction to life-by-a-thread, something-must-be-done, ministers-yet-again-found-wanting stories.

The second manner in which the media are contriving to help the terrorists is by playing their perennial game of pin the blame on the donkey in the White House. On the Today programme last week there was agonised discussion of the extent to which the US had stood in the way of a satisfactory resolution of this crisis, and further “infringed” Iraqi sovereignty, by refusing to bow to al-Zarqawi’s wishes and release two female germ warfare specialists. Never mind that releasing two female Mengeles would send a signal that terrorism works, would dishearten every Iraqi who wants to see the rule of law upheld and encourage the jihadist belief that the West was weakening in its struggle against terror. Instead, just ask yourself what is happening to a country when the nation’s principal broadcaster sees a mass-murderer torture an innocent 62-year-old in the name of Allah and decides the real story is “Bush To Blame Again”.

The third way in which the media have helped to advance the terrorist agenda is simply by giving the story the prominence it has so far enjoyed. Networks, and newspapers, have given al-Zarqawi all the coverage he could ever have wanted. Executives at Sky and ITN argue that to have downplayed the issue would have been censorship and, besides, the most disturbing elements of the story, such as Mr Bigley’s videotaped appeal for help, would have been made public by other means, such as the internet or Arab channels such as al-Jazeera. They want to treat the Bigley story like any other. And therein lies their error.

Responsible news organisations do not broadcast material which they know will help our enemies at time of war. And a failure to realise that we are in a war with al-Zarqawi and al-Qaeda lies at the bottom of so much of the media’s failure properly to cover the challenge the West is now forced to confront.

Update: from Melanie Phillips:

Mr Blair says that, no matter what people thought about the war itself, surely everyone can see that the terrorists in Iraq cannot be allowed to win. But he fails to appreciate that what is now taking place is not a disagreement about whether war was the right way to tackle the threat posed by Saddam. It is a denial of the threat itself.

At Bloghead, a rejection letter received by an Israeli woman who applied for a job with a London company:

Speaking personally however may I suggest that for European consumption you would be wise to omit details of your national service, which you describe with such evident and ingenuous pride?
The natural reaction of most educated Europeans to the information you provide is likely to be “so it was she who guided those guinships to targetted assasinations and the murder of women and children with indiscriminate bombing and strafing of refugee camps (refugee camps!!!! 50 years after your compatriots drove them from their homes – and you have done nothing for them ever since.)!”. Most educated Europeans – and as a matter of fact a large proprtion of educated Americans too – now view ‘Israel’ as a brutal undemocratic (where are the votes for the indigenous inhabitants whom you have helotised?) colonial state, run by criminals who defy all international law and natural justice. And a sizeable proportion doubts the ‘right’ of Israel to exist.

This has nothing to do with anti-semitism. nor is it racism – that is the kind of disgusting attitude which one might say is inherent in the idea of the state of Israel, and one might say among a large section of believing Jews elsewhere, who regard the rest of us as inferior and unclean – and not chosen by God. What could be more racist than that? And what happens to those of your race who dare to speak out against the wickedness that your fanatacsim inevitably leads to? they are murdered or have acid thrown in their faces like Yael Dayan

ces of further kidnappings. What Blair does, or what Bush does, is effectively irrelevant to the fate of Kenneth Bigley. But the way his relatives talk, and the way the media report it, are highly relevant, and neither group are helping.

there were hundreds of tough smart sexy women in Hollywood – actresses like Barbra Stanwyck or Katherine Hepburn. Jean Harlow was no pushover, and Jane Russell was notably sexy and tough, nevermind Mae West. Marilyn wasn’t the first dumb blonde but she pretty much set the agenda: completely vapid, just there to look nice, arm candy, simpering her way through a gruesome “Happy Birthday Mr President”: whatever the men wanted. At a fifties party she’d be sitting at the side eyes wide open in reverence as boorish pipe-smoking men furrowed their brows over the great problems of the day, like Existentialism, or how-do-we-live-with-The-Bomb. “You’re a playwright / professor / scientist! Gee that’s so interesting! You must be so clever! I wish I knew half as much as you!” Because Marilyn didn’t have a clue outside of pleasing men, she fed the assumption that it was a condition of all women to be so pathetically accommodating, ignoring the history of women using their charms with wit and intelligence and not a little Machiavellian cunning.

Smart sexy women didn’t just feature in pre-Marilyn Hollywood, of course. They go all the way back in history, past Cleopatra. If Chris Knight is right in his “Blood Relations” book, the origins of culture are to be found in an age when the women in a group would synchronise their menstrual cycles so there was no chance of the men straying off when their partners were sexually unavailable, and so no escape from the “no meat, no sex” imperative. They then took it a stage further with the help of some crafty subterfuge – red dyes and such like. The men, sadly outmanoeuvred, tried to fight back with a bit of their own subterfuge and set up mysterious male coming-of-age rituals, and religions populated by gods who decreed that women were the inferior sex. Whatever the truth in all these speculations, it seems clear enough that when it comes to sex, men are the buyers and women are the sellers. Women, that is, have the power. “You want some, darlin’, it’s gonna cost you.”

Considering that prostitution and pornography aren’t going away any time soon, it seems to me an altogether healthy development that women are at least beginning to take control of the sex industry, and it’s a shame this isn’t something that many feminists celebrate. And that’s why Jordan is an improvement on Marilyn. She’s undoubtedly not as “nice”, but she’s honest about it, and she’s in control. Having inserted large quantities of silicone in her breasts, she earns an excellent living by flashing them about for the benefit of men who’ll pay money for the privilege of looking at them. Maybe it’s sad, but if it is it’s the men who are sad, not Jordan. That’s the way it is.

at an Iran with nuclear capabilities is a very bad idea indeed. So…we get a Security Council resolution, and then we get Iran flouting it. Hmm, sounds familiar. Then what?

ericans’ once gushy support for the U.N. during its adolescence is gone. By the 1970s we accepted at best that it had devolved into a neutral organization in its approach to the West, and by the 1980s sighed that it was now unabashedly hostile to freedom. But in our odyssey from encouragement, to skepticism, and then to hostility, we have now reached the final stage–of indifference. Americans do not get riled easily, so the U.N. will go out with a whimper rather than a bang. Indeed, millions have already shrugged, tuned out, and turned the channel on it.

“The papers are always going to pick on me. It does make me think sometimes why do I still live in this country?” Come on now, who on reading that could deny a reaction of, “well please, don’t stay on my account”?

So yes, I do have a problem with Emin, and I don’t think I’m alone. Am I being sexist? That’s a difficult one to answer. Certainly I would be equally unenthusiastic about a male equivalent of Emin’s bed, with crumpled Kleenex tissues….well, let’s not go there. I suppose some sort of defence of Emin might be mounted on the idea of her art as confessional and personal, and therefore uncomfortable to the average male, but I don’t buy it. If art is just about confession and therapy then it’s not much use as art.

If the British public is showing its philistinism, well, good for them. Since Tate Britain now has a whole room devoted to Emin, it’s clear that the art world no longer has any criteria for deciding what’s good art and what’s bad art beyond what creates column inches in the media, and assumes idiotically that what’s hated now will inevitably become the classic of the future – but it ain’t going to happen with Emin. She’s iconic, but for all the wrong reasons. She’ll be famous for showing, finally, that the art world has disappeared up its arse.