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Anthony Browne in the Times:

What sort of mind could believe that the Holocaust, the industrialised murder of six million civilians, was an act of God to punish Jews? And what sort of people would promote him? Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian scholar, wrote in his essay Our struggle with the Jews that Jews have been punished for their “unprecedented abominations”, but “then the Jews again returned to evildoing and consequently Allah sent against them others of His servants, until the modern period. Then Allah sent Hitler to rule over them.”

Qutb, born in 1906, dedicated his life to making the world a fundamentalist Islamic state, and is seen as the spiritual inspiration of al-Qaeda. He is also promoted by the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), our most active Islamic political group. The MAB has on its website a glowing account of Qutb’s life, concluding that he died smiling “showing his conviction of the beautiful life to come in paradise — a life he definitely and rightfully deserved”.

The MAB says that it is opposed to anti-Semitism, but this is as convincing as the British National Party’s saying it is opposed to racism. The MAB published an article calling Jews “vampires”, claiming that it was written by Benjamin Franklin; in fact it was a forgery. The MAB’s high-profile spokesman, Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian academic, wrote: “If they want to be as human as anybody else, Jews must wake up before it is too late.”

On its website, MAB has equated Israel with Nazi Germany. The Internet Watch Foundation (a partnership between the Government and service providers) has referred the website — along with that of the BNP — to the Home Office for containing allegedly criminally racist material.

The MAB, of course, are the co-organisers of the Stop the War Coalition.

Like the BNP, the MAB presents a moderate face to hide its extremism. Just as the BNP says it represents mainstream Britain, MAB says it represents mainstream British Muslims. But there the similarity ends. Unlike the BNP, which is rightly tackled at every turn, the MAB is uncritically accepted by the liberal Left, including the BBC, The Guardian and The Independent.

When I debated on the BBC with MAB last week, I briefed the producer on MAB, but I was told not to bring it up. When I did the presenter silenced me.

The liberal Left need to ask themselves what they hope to achieve by giving such uncritical support to Islamic extremism.

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But the most significant point here is that Bhutto is completely misrepresenting what is generally understood by “Clash of Civilisations”, and in a way designed to appeal to Guardian readers. Samuel Huntington is referring to the clash between Western civilisation – liberal, democratic – and Islam. It is in large part the post-Christian nature of Western society that Islamic fundamentalists find most offensive. But to portray it as a clash between the fundamentalisms of Islam and Christianity is to play on a familiar Bush-hating theme – Bush as Christian-fundamentalist-moron, and Iraq as (misplaced) revenge for 9/11.

Bhutto’s piece is headed “Without a war on poverty, we will never defeat terror. Dictatorship and religious extremism are fuelled by gross inequality”. Again a favourite Guardian line, but demonstrably untrue, as has often enough been pointed out. Here’s Walter Laqueur:

It is not too difficult to examine whether there is such a correlation between poverty and terrorism, and all the investigations have shown that this is not the case. The experts have maintained for a long time that poverty does not cause terrorism and prosperity does not cure it. In the world’s 50 poorest countries there is little or no terrorism. A study by scholars Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova reached the conclusion that the terrorists are not poor people and do not come from poor societies. A Harvard economist has shown that economic growth is closely related to a society’s ability to manage conflicts. More recently, a study of India has demonstrated that terrorism in the subcontinent has occurred in the most prosperous (Punjab) and most egalitarian (Kashmir, with a poverty ratio of 3.5 compared with the national average of 26 percent) regions and that, on the other hand, the poorest regions such as North Bihar have been free of terrorism. In the Arab countries (such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but also in North Africa), the terrorists originated not in the poorest and most neglected districts but hailed from places with concentrations of radical preachers. The backwardness, if any, was intellectual and cultural — not economic and social.

Omar at Iraq the Model tells a story of life under Saddam, as featured on Al Iraqyia TV:

Al Iraqyia met a number of undertakers and clerics who work in the largest cemetery in Iraq; Al Najaf cemetery (Najaf city). One of those undertakers said, “the security guards used to come often at night carrying the bodies of those who were executed secretly or died under torture. The burying procedure used to be done very quickly and we never dared to ask anything about the dead men and women, who were they and why were they killed. There was only a brief document with the name of the victim on it and no one from the victim’s family was allowed to attend the ceremonies which were very short.

One night in the beginning of the 80s 10 security cars came carrying the bodies of 10 young men who all seemed in their early twenties. We started to burry them but as we were writing down their names we noticed something really strange, they were all carrying the name “Sabah”! What was even stranger that the same thing happened for the next days. Every day a new group of dead men all named “Sabah” until the number reached 40!

We didn’t know the reason at that time, was it just a coincidence or what? Later on, after the war we knew what happened after one of the security officers was arrested and told the story. The reason behind this strange story was that one of Al Dawaá party members was arrested. He refused to give them the name of the guy in charge of his group and during the terrible torture and as he was about to collapse he broke down and said, “Sabah, a student in the college…” he couldn’t finish his words out of pain and exhaustion and went in coma soon. The man died and they (the security) never knew anything more from him.

Destiny had an appointment with all the student named “Sabah” in the colleges in Baghdad as the arrested man was from Baghdad, and especially with Sheát ones or those who are not know to be loyal enough to the regime. 40 young men died just because they carried the name “Sabah”!”

I posted about the Aquatic Ape hypothesis some time ago. Now I’ve had a comment from Jim Moore, who is not impressed:

I’ve been looking at the evidence used by “aquatic ape” supporters, including Elaine Morgan, for about 10 years now, and the reason it isn’t better known is not because Morgan is not a professional. It is because she uses bogus “facts” as evidence, alters quotes and conclusions from good scientists to make them say the opposite of what they actually said, and generally does a bad job of it. And she’s the best of the proponents of the idea.

He has a website “Aquatic Ape Theory: Sink or Swim”, devoted to a sceptical look at the theory. A very sceptical look.

Coincidentally, Roger Deakin mentioned the very same theory in an article in the Times on Saturday on the atavistic pleasure of swimming:

It may be that swimming really is our natural condition, that we evolved as primates through a sea change. The marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy’s theory, published in 1960, was elaborated by Elaine Morgan in The Descent of Woman. They believed we spent ten million years of the Pliocene era of world drought evolving into uprightness as semi-aquatic waders and swimmers in the sea shallows and on the beaches of Africa. Hardy discovered that if you put a swimmer into a water tunnel, the hydrodynamic pattern coincides exactly with the natural streamlining of body hairs. We also differ from the rest of the apes in being hairless, like dolphins, and having an insulating layer of subcutaneous fat.

Our instinct to migrate to the beach, love of seafood, the warm south, and our natural affinity with whales, dolphins, otters and water-rats all look like convincing evidence to me, too. But then, as a swimmer, maybe I’m just biased.

Seems like it’s entered into the realms of myth.

A tolerant European Islam, we are in danger of forgetting, already exists in Bosnia. This article reports an interview with Mustafa Cerić, the reisu-l-ulema, or leader, of Bosnia’s Islamic Community (thanks to Anthony Cox for the link):

Cerić denies that there is a specific ‘Bosnian Islam,’ but argues that Islam in Bosnia has experienced unique developments in the course of the past 500 years. He calls the result ‘an Islam that threatens nobody and is directed neither against other peoples nor against its own society. We are for tolerance and civilized behaviour and reject the mentality of tribal society.’ Cerić notes that Jews and Christians also have their religious roots in the Middle East, adding that it should come as no surprise that Muslims, too, honour their own ties to that part of the world. ‘But we live in Europe, and I as a European Muslim would like to make my contribution to European civilization and be recognized accordingly.’ […]

But does Bosnian Islam have a particular contribution it can make to Europe? Cerić suggests that the Islamic Community and the institution of the reisu-l-ulema provide form and direction to the Muslim community of Bosnia, and that consequently he is not worried about its future. What he does worry about is Muslims in Western Europe, who are primarily a diverse mixture of immigrant communities. ‘The Muslims in Europe must develop their own unified [institution]. This is in Europe’s interest. Our religious teachers should be educated in Europe and regard themselves as European Muslims,’ Cerić says.

And what about the United States, whose military and diplomatic intervention in the Bosnian conflict is often credited with having saved the Muslim side from military defeat and worse? In the 15 October 2003 issue of Preporod, a front-page editorial entitled ‘American Friends’ quotes Cerić as saying that the Americans are indeed the friends of the Bosnian Muslims, who should make this point clear to their Muslim friends around the world. The Americans remain Bosnia’s friends, he adds, even if one would wish that the United States had a different policy in the Middle East. The editorial points out that the United States came forward with a donation of $1 million to make the proposed Srebrenica memorial centre a reality in 2003. Preporod also recalls the hospital visit of former US President Bill Clinton to Izetbegović in his final days, and quotes former US Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke as calling indicted Bosnian Serb war criminals General Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić ‘the Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein of Europe’.

ten. Yes, indeed, Martin Amis appears to be very angry about something. Perhaps he is very angry about his father’s death. Perhaps he is very angry about being a fiftysomething novelist who has run out of things to write about. Yet by inexplicably funneling his displaced anger into a poorly conceived, improbably hysterical diatribe against Stalinism, he has neither revealed anything new, nor retold old stories in an interesting way, nor done any victims any favors. Amis poses, at the start of the book, a legitimate question: Why do we think it is OK to make jokes about Stalinism, to laugh at a political system that killed millions of people? By the end of the book, we no longer want to know the answer.

The whole point of Amis’ book, the skill of it, is precisely in making it entirely plain how despicable the whole system was. He manages this much better than Applebaum because he’s an excellent writer. He doesn’t claim to be an expert. It’s a polemic, not a work of history. He’s pointing out the wood for those who tend to get absorbed in looking at the trees. And he’s wondering, amonst other things, why it was that Nazism was agreed to be evil, but to talk of Communism in those terms branded you in liberal circles as some sort of right-wing nutter.

A reasonable point, you’d think, but Applebaum wasn’t alone in hating Koba. Its publication marked open season on Amis, prompting this , for instance, from Johann Hari:

This is an important book, then, because it exposes a lacerating flaw in one of our most critically (but not popularly) acclaimed novelists. There is a hole at the core of Martin Amis’s personality, and his florid prose and arid intellectualism has, for too long, prevented us from admitting it. (It feels cruel to write so personally, but in this book, Amis dedicates barely 50 pages in a 300-page book to anything other than his personality. It is impossible not to respond in kind.) This book confirms something that I feared to be the case when I read his last few books: that he equates human worth with literary worth. […]

This is a chilling book, because apparently without knowing it, Amis has revealed his own deformed personality. The proper response is not the anger displayed by so many critics. The only human response is to pity poor, preposterous Martin Amis, deluding himself that he – or his talentless father – have more merit than toilet cleaners like my granny, who read little but love more than he can ever know.

You’d think Amis had written a book on the joys of child abuse.

Applebaum, of course, cites Christopher Hitchens in her review. He was the friend who Amis mentioned in the introduction to Koba, as he was the speaker who prompted Amis to write Koba in the first place. And he it was he who delivered the supposedly devastating riposte to Amis (and here) though to me there’s a great deal of Hitchens bluster here. I suppose it all boils down to one thing: whether or not you believe the chanting of the magic word “Trotsky” serves to wash away all the sins of Marxism-Leninism, leaving it pure and uncontaminated by Stalinism. On that I shall say no more because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that life is too short to get into an argument with a Trotskyist.

Yes, it’s one of the big unanswered questions after the overthrow of the big man: whatever happened to all those Saddam doubles? Worth 1000 have tracked them down (via Amaravati).

Raymond Tallis is a remarkably productive man. He’s Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Manchester University, and the author of numerous books on philosophy, notably Not Saussure, a critique of the way that post-structuralism has used Saussurean theory, and Enemies of Hope, a general assault on the cynicism of post-modernism.

The Times has been running extracts from his latest book, Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and its Discontents, this week. In this piece he attacks alternative medicine, and has this to say about Mbeki’s policy on AIDS:

In South Africa there has been, in recent years, an appalling example of the effects of a government-sponsored attack on the “hegemony” of Western, science-based medicine in President Mbeki’s refusal to acknowledge that Aids is a sexually transmitted disease caused by a virus that could be prevented or treated by anti-viral drugs. He was attracted by the ideas of Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who claimed that Aids was a lifestyle disease and had nothing to do with HIV. Mbeki would have liked this notion perhaps because it was unorthodox, anti-establishment, anti-pharmaceutical industry and, therefore, somehow allied with his own “anti-colonialist” stance.

Moreover, Mbeki approved of Duesberg’s denial that Aids could be heterosexually transmitted. Given the high prevalence of the disease among heterosexuals in sub-Saharan Africa, Mbeki argued that the conventional story of the sexual transmission of Aids denigrated “black people as vice-ridden germ carriers unable to control their lust”. He brooked no dissent: black people who accepted the orthodox understanding were “negroes of enslaved minds ”.

Of the 70,000 children born annually to HIV-positive mothers in South Africa, about half could have been protected from becoming HIV-positive themselves, and suffering a painful, protracted death, with a single dose of a cheap anti-retroviral drug. Mbeki did what he could to stop this happening. Many of the 800,000 non-infant deaths a year from Aids could also be prevented by making antiretroviral drugs available, but Mbeki’s ideological views did not permit it. According to a recent study (suppressed by the South African Government, which maintains that anti-HIV drugs are toxic and will primarily benefit pharmaceutical companies) immediate provision of such drugs could save up to 1.7 million people by 2010. As one of his former supporters, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, the Most Rev Njongonkulu Ndungane, has said, Mbeki’s Aids policies are as serious a crime as apartheid — and have already killed many more people.

The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, has just been published in the States. The more criticism of Chomsky there is the better, as far as I’m concerned. This blog, The Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite, is worth checking out.

Here‘s the introduction to the book, and this is how it starts:

Of all the pseudo-religions corrupting our thinking–Freudianism, Marxism, Darwinism, to name a few–anti-Americanism is the most bizarre and dangerous.

Chomsky and his followers must be laughing at that. Darwinism, the central plank of modern biology, a pseudo-religion? Immediately the authors are revealed as cranks. Why bother to read any further? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot….

According to Nicholas Kristof (via Milt’s file), new Koranic scholarship is disputing that old line about 72 virgins waiting for you in paradise:

[N]ow the same tools that historians, linguists and archaeologists have applied to the Bible for about 150 years are beginning to be applied to the Koran. The results are explosive [sic].

The Koran is beautifully written, but often obscure. One reason is that the Arabic language was born as a written language with the Koran, and there’s growing evidence that many of the words were Syriac or Aramaic.

For example, the Koran says martyrs going to heaven will get “hur,” and the word was taken by early commentators to mean “virgins,” hence those 72 consorts. But in Aramaic, hur meant “white” and was commonly used to mean “white grapes.”

This could be the big breakthrough in the fight against Islamic terror. Who’s going to blow themselves up for a bunch of grapes?