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rg/dhimmiwatch/archives/002992.php”>Dhimmi Watch):

It seems that all she did was to take off her headscarf and insist that she was the victim of an older man’s advances: but even if she had stripped naked and called the judge a fat ignorant bastard, those actions would hardly merit death, even under Islamic law. Nevertheless, the judge was so outraged that he decided he would personally put the noose round the child’s neck.

That disgraceful and disgusting “punishment” has excited a great deal of condemnation in Iran among the reformists. As far as I can see, it has not produced any comment here. Amnesty International issued a statement expressing outrage at the execution (the tenth of a child in Iran since 1990) – but no British newspaper or television station has reported this.

Why not? The two extremes of pro- and anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain are now united in not expecting even the most minimal ethical standards from Islamic countries such as Iran: the pros because they think that Islamic laws should not be criticised for fear of giving offence; the antis because they think all Muslims are just a bunch of irredeemable barbarians.

Those two extreme views have infected media coverage. What would be headline news if it happened in America (can you imagine the response if a 16-year-old girl was executed for having sex in Texas?) is, because it happens in an Islamic state, apparently too banal to count.

That attitude guarantees that more children will suffer Atefeh’s fate. Of course, it suits our Government – which is pushing for greater trade links with our new-found ally, Iran – just fine if people think that criticism of Islamic judges is inappropriate because standards are different. But respecting Islam does not require accepting the judicial murder of 16-year-olds (or indeed anyone, of any age) for having sex. That’s wrong wherever it happens. We need a Government, and a press, that says so.

In the light of John Humphrys’ overblown opinions on the corrupting influence of soaps – too aggressive apparently – I feel I should, as someone with a passing familiarity with the genre, point out his error. The real problem with soaps is not the aggression, it’s the fact that the characters spend all their time lying to each other. It’s one porkie after another: they can’t help themselves. “Where are you off to, Tom?” “Just off down to the butcher, Mavis.” But he isn’t of course, as any soap aficionado will immediately realise. He is in fact just off down the pub, or the bookies, or the travel agent, or for a walk by the canal – anywhere but the butcher. Why? Because you’ve then got a plot, you’ve got a bit of tension. At what point will Mavis discover that Tom has been lying to her? Maybe she’ll quite by chance bump into Terry from the butcher’s later that day (walking by the canal perhaps, after telling Tom she was just off to the supermarket). “Hello there Terry. Hope you didn’t palm Tom off with some dodgy piece of scrag end this morning!” Terry looks puzzled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about Mavis. Haven’t seen Tom all day.” At which point we get a close up of Mavis as her expression flickers tantalisingly between puzzlement and anger.

Every time there’s a situation where someone has to report what they’ve been doing, they will inevitably lie about it. Doesn’t matter whether it’s trivial like Tom’s non-visit to the butcher, or more serious, as in the current EastEnders storyline where Dot starts feeling pain, goes to see the doctor, gets an appointment at the hospital, goes through an extensive range of tests, is told that she has cancer, is offered an operation which might save her life, decides not to have the operation; all this without bothering to tell her husband, resorting instead to an increasingly bizarre range of explanations as to why she’s just popping out for an hour or two. I hate to think what effect this incessant fibbing has on impressionable young minds.

It did nothing to improve security outside the camps for the displaced, but in a single camp in a single day arrested, and then reportedly tortured, 50 men it accused of encouraging others to balk at returning to burned villages that are beyond the reach of relief.

To this day, Khartoum refuses to countenance a peacekeeping force to protect civilians in Darfur, insisting that this is the job of its own security forces – the very same forces supporting the janjaweed. […]

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, after a lightening visit to Darfur, said the Khartoum government had made progress. “The last thing we want is the international community to be in conflict with the government of Sudan,” he said.

Why on earth not? Could it be because Khartoum has warned, brazenly, of Iraq-style opposition to any foreign intervention to save lives in Darfur? But this is a government that seized power by force and wields it by force – one that hosted Osama bin Laden not that long ago and that spends its oil revenues on arming itself to murder its own citizens. It is also a government whose proxy militia in Darfur has “chained civilians together and set them on fire,” according to the AU.

The few expedient modifications Khartoum has made to its behavior in Darfur will doubtless provide the excuse most Security Council members want to temporize yet again next Monday. If they fail to endorse a new action plan that is backed by sanctions against government officials responsible for Sudan’s militia policy, they must be deemed to have failed in their “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.”

The present impasse not only guarantees tens of thousands more deaths in the short term, but wider instability in the longer term. After Monday, the Security Council, too, must be in the dock.

r: “For me the root of evil today is the policy of President Bush. It is a fascist policy. I cannot understand how is it that the Jewish people, who have been the victims of Nazism, can support such a fascist policy. No other people in the world support those policies but Israel! This situation saddens me. I am a friend of Israel. I am a friend of the Jewish people. But the policy of Sharon and the support for the policy of Bush darkens the image of Israel. I am afraid that Sharon is going to lead the Jews – just as Hitler led the Germans – to the root of evil.”

Even today, 10 months later, you don’t think you made a mistake when you uttered those words?

“No, but it’s important for me to emphasize that I never said that the Jews are the root of evil. I said they are at the root of evil.”

So you have no regrets?

“No. And I was very much hurt by the Jewish reaction to what I said. It was not a civilized reaction. I got hundreds and hundreds of poisonous e-mails from Jews all over the world. I couldn’t understand this hatred toward me. I fought against racism all my life. I was for Israel. I wrote “Mauthausen.” After all that, how could I become from one day to the next an anti-Semite?”

Let me explain to you the context for this reaction. Many Jews have a renewed fear of Europe. We are afraid that there is a new kind of anti-Semitism in Europe. So when you said what you said there was a feeling of thou too, Brutus. There was a feeling that even our old friend Theodorakis turned against us.

“I don’t believe there is anti-Semitism in Europe. There is a reaction against the policy of Sharon and Bush. I think it’s artificial to think there is a new anti-Semitism. It’s an excuse. It’s a way to avoid self-criticism. Rather than ask themselves what is wrong with the policy of Israel, Jews say the Europeans are against us because of the new anti-Semitism. Because they don’t love us. And even Theodorakis says we are at the root of evil. This is a sick reaction.”

Why? In what way is it a sick reaction?

“Because this kind of reaction is relevant to the psychopathology of the Jewish people. They want to feel victims. They want to have this comforting feeling. We are in the right, we are again victims. Let’s create another ghetto. It’s a masochistic reaction.” The Jews are masochists?

“There is psychological masochism in the Jewish tradition.”

Is there sadism as well?

“I’m certain that when Diaspora Jews talk among themselves, they feel satisfied. They feel that now, when we are so close to the greatest power in the world, no one can do anything to us. We can do whatever we like. This is why the claim of new anti-Semitism is not only a sick reaction, it’s a sly reaction as well.”

In what way is it sly?

“Because it really allows the Jews to do whatever they want. Not only psychologically, but also politically, it gives the Jews an excuse. The sense of victimhood. It gives them a license to hide the truth. There is no Jewish problem in Europe today. There is no anti-Semitism.”

Theodorakis is hardly a fringe figure:

In Greece itself, Theodorakis is considered a provocative public figure. His transition from left to right to left drew quite a lot of criticism. In spite of that, his name is still mentioned as a possible candidate for president. His status as the most important Greek musician is unquestioned. Even in France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries, Theodorakis is a cultural figure of the first rank. Some consider him a person whose work and life embody the spirit of the contemporary European left.

rted to Najaf for burial close to Ali’s mausoleum. Five generations of my family are buried there thanks to a tradition that began in the 17th century.

Death is at the centre of life here. Tens of thousands of grave-diggers, undertakers, masters of funeral ceremonies, tomb watchers, givers of prayers for the dead, intercessors, Koran reciters, mediums for communication with the departed, and so on make up the bulk of the workforce.

While Najaf’s chief import is corpses, its major export is mullahs. The city hosts the most eminent of Shia seminaries which, at the height of its theological boom in the 1950s, boasted 124 madrassahs with 40,000 trainee mullahs. All the grand ayatollahs of the past 150 years either studied or taught there. […]

Najaf’s local and national importance is complemented by a regional dimension. Once the city regains its place as the centre of Shia scholarship it could pose a threat to the mullahs who have ruled Iran since 1979. The brand of Shia Islam offered in Najaf today, especially by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is in sharp contrast to that peddled by the Khomeinist mullahs of Tehran.

While Khomeinism preaches direct rule by the mullahs, Ayatollah al-Sistani’s traditional Shia Islam distinguishes between political and religious spaces. His prestige reached a new height this week when he succeeded in preventing a full-scale battle in Najaf. His intervention showed that the cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr was nothing but a maverick with a few hundred gunmen and little popular support. It also exposed the weakness of Iyad Allawi’s American-backed interim government. […]

Ayatollah al-Sistani succeeded by deploying people’s power, something he hopes to do in January’s election when he is expected to endorse a list of “pious candidates”. The emergence of Iraq as a moderate Shia power in which the clergy act only as “consultants” for politicians could become the biggest challenge that Tehran’s Khomeinists have faced.

This is why it is hard to believe that we have heard the last of the troubles in Najaf. The mullahs of Tehran are determined to shape the new Iraq in the way that they, and not the Americans, want. The Americans, for their part, are equally determined not to allow the emergence of a Khomeinist regime in Baghdad. Hojatoleslam al-Sadr remains one wild card among the many that Tehran still holds in Iraq. On Thursday he escaped arrest thanks to Ayatollah al-Sistani. But he may well come back to make more trouble. Iraq, and Najaf, are not out of the woods yet.

was real. Those who need reminding that it is might look to the case of Maxine Robinson, one of the first cases to be reviewed. At a hearing in April, Robinson confessed that she had killed three of her children.

The larger question, then, is whether M.S.B.P. is best thought of as a disorder or simply as a criminal act. People who rob banks aren’t usually called victims of “bank robber’s syndrome,” after all, and parents who beat their children are simply called child abusers. And nobody assumes that these wrongdoers are all driven by the same set of motives—let alone by a discrete mental illness.

If M.S.B.P. is to be thought of as a criminal act rather than a disorder, and if there are no common patterns to the behaviours involved, then it’s entirely reasonable to regard the syndrome as discredited. Citing the case of Maxine Robinson in defence is surely a little too glib. Even if she did kill her children (and how reliable is her confession in the circumstances?) there’s no evidence that this fits into an observable pattern of women like her mass-murdering their offspring. And the article makes no mention of Professor Southall’s more recent problems, accusing Sally Clark’s husband of murdering their children solely on the basis of seeing him on TV, and, protected by an armour-plated conviction in his own diagnostic skills and the reality of M.S.B.P., showing absolutely no remorse. As one of the contributors at the BMJ comments:

This issue is […] that there are increasing concerns of professionals in medicine, social work, the law, researchers, academics, and parents falsely accused of child abuse, that the child protection system is deeply flawed, erratic, and dysfunctional and the child protection system is `per se’, causing severe and long-lasting harm to many thousands of children every year. On the other hand, many children are suffering harm and death because of failures to intervene appropriately and responsibly.

A major contribution to this dysfunctionalism of the child protection system is the unscientific theories espoused by a small number of paediatricians and the dogmatic, inappropriate, irresponsible, misleading presentation of their opinions and suppositions to Courts and the abuse of their professional positions, as stated by Courts and the GMC.

talk about the great landscape painters of the 19th century like these little-known Russians because we don’t know how to describe what they were doing. They wanted to show the extraordinary beauty of nature: not just how it looked, but how it was. They were trying to show the essence of it, the soul, to extract the beauty from the everyday with their skill. But we don’t talk about soul or essence anymore because we don’t know what they mean. The artists themselves, though perhaps individually as ambitious as modern artists, were self-effacing in their art, trying to be transparent, pointing to something else. Instead nowadays art is all about ego. We go to a modern exhibition to be impressed by an individual’s artistic talent, their particular vision. The only place they’re trying to point us to is an appreciation of their own genius. The whole way that art is presented to us now is as a succession of individuals whose life stories are treasured as exemplifying some sort of struggle of genius against conformity. An idea of art as attempting to convey the beauty of nature would be seen as hopelessly naive.

The exhibition catalogue is a sad affair, since the quality of reproduction just isn’t good enough. I did come away with one good reproduction, “Rye” by Ivan Shishkin, which is wonderful. The trees in the field of rye are placed with a random precision that a Zen master would be proud of. It’s clear though, after you’ve been looking awhile, that the trees (elms?) are enormous, and are painted that scale to add to the astonishing sense of the immensity of the landscape that you get. [Indeed if there’s a theme to the exhibition that’s it: the immensity of the Russian landscape. There’s one small painting, called “The Steppe” which at a distance is just bottom half green, top half white, but closer up is amazing in the way it suggests vast distances.] But I doubt that Shishkin wanted the observer to notice that detail: he wanted to convey immensity and that’s one of the devices he used. The painting is so successful, for me, because, to put it plainly, it takes you there at the same time as being beautiful.

Maybe that’s why in general I prefer photography nowadays. Someone like Cartier-Bresson (BBC2 tonight) understood, and personified, that idea of self-effacement that I find so attractive in these Russian landscape artists.

The National exhibition closes on the 12th of September, so hurry. It’s a small exhibition, but how could anyone with poetry in their souls not want to see a painting with a title like “Moonlit Night on the Dnieper”?

After Intelligent Design, there’s a new threat to scientific orthodoxy (via Panda’s Thumb):

A Georgia group calling itself Teachers for Equal Time has asked that stickers be placed in all new physics textbooks which note that mutual attraction and relativity are not the only theories available to explain gravity and should not be taken as fact.

Teachers for Equal Time hopes that the addition of the warning stickers will pave the way for the teaching of its alternative theory, Intelligent Grappling, the theory that certain intelligent and conscious agents “push” things together.

Dr Elf M. Sternberg, the originator of the theory of Intelligent Grappling, or “IG” as some call it, and president of Teachers for Equal Time, announced the group’s plans to seek legislation requiring the stickers at a Cobb County school board meeting.

“Mutual attraction has had a monopoly on the truth for too long,” said Dr. Sternberg, “it is time we let children see all of the theories.”

Dr Sternberg founded Teachers for Equal Time soon after getting his PhD from the Alabama School of Divine Motion.

Most mainstream scientists have concluded current theories of gravity are sufficiently capable of explaining such things as the motion of planets and why things fall.

Dr Sternberg denies this conclusion and claims the popular theory of gravity “doesn’t explain why objects fall, it just describes what they do.”

“There are theories by atheists and secular humanists that try to explain gravity,” explains Dr Sternberg, “but they all lead to crazy conclusions no human being has ever seen, like black holes and the so-called “Big Bang”. Intelligent Grappling only deals with the visible world.”

Daniel Mason, a Georgia science teacher, is critical of Intelligent Grappling Theory and claims “IG theory isn’t at all scientific. It appears to just be a thin veneer for the idea that ‘little angels’ push things around. This is a religious idea, not a scientific one, and as such has no place in science class.”

“I’m not saying they’re little angels,” says Dr Sternberg, “Intelligent Grappling only says that conscious agents are the cause of all apparent ‘gravitic’ phenomenon. There’s no religion involved.”

From Iran Focus (via Dhimmi Watch):

On Sunday, August 15, a 16-year-old girl in the town of Neka, northern Iran, was executed. Ateqeh Sahaleh was hanged in public on Simetry Street off Rah Ahan Street at the city center.

The sentence was issued by the head of Neka’s Justice Department and subsequently upheld by the mullahs’ Supreme Court and carried out with the approval of Judiciary Chief Mahmoud Shahroudi.

In her summary trial, the teenage victim did not have any lawyer and efforts by her family to recruit a lawyer was to no avail. Ateqeh personally defended herself. She told the religious judge, Haji Rezaii, that he should punish the main perpetrators of moral corruption not the victims.

The judge personally pursued Ateqeh’s death sentence, beyond all normal procedures and finally gained the approval of the Supreme Court. After her execution Rezai said her punishment was not execution but he had her executed for her “sharp tongue”.

As Dhimmi Watch’s Robert Spencer points out, the fact that she told the judge he should punish the perpetrators rather than the victims suggests that she was raped.

Every week columnists for our broadsheet papers have to come up with another offering. The easy option when inspiration runs dry: take some trivial event that’s happened to you – someone jostled you on the street, a shop assistant was rude, a car cut you up at the traffic lights – and write a “what does this tell us about the state our society’s in” article. Here’s Mick Hume in the Times today:

What happens when your children make friends on holiday and the other kids’ appalling parents want to be your friends too? Perhaps we have to stop allowing our offspring to run our lives.

They were words to fill any holidaying parent with dread. As our young daughters played on the sand with a German girl, her father turned to us and said (sorry, can’t do the accent): “Zo, vere shall ve all go togezzer tomorrow?” We had met barely 24 hours before, but now we were apparently inseparable. Since our children were getting on well, he assumed that we, too, must be instant best friends. So began a grim week of afternoons spent with people with whom we had little in common except the biological capacity to procreate. We happened to be in France. But wherever you holiday, chances are you have been there.
It is a symptom of the fact that our society is no longer simply child-centred — we have become child-obsessed. More than ever before, adults seem to be living out their lives through their offspring

No Mick, perhaps you have to stop your offspring running your life. Or, more accurately, perhaps you should learn how to politely decline the offer of friendship when it’s not welcome.

What does it tell us about the state our society’s in that our newspapers are full of such vapid nonsense?