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Historian Paul Fussell in the Guardian (via ALDaily):

Fussell was vigorously opposed to last year’s invasion of Iraq: “If you don’t get angry about this war you don’t deserve to be alive.”

Well, that’s telling us.

Here‘s an interesting article (via 2Blowhards) on the French paradox – the low rate of heart disease in France compared to similar countries such as the UK. The author is unpersuaded by the answer usually proposed, that the French have some kind of protective factor such as red wine or garlic, and looks instead at eating habits:

Overall [..] there appears to be nothing at all to explain the low rate of French heart disease, either within the classical risk factors, or the emigration/social dislocation model. Or is there?

Here is where I return to a thought that I had twenty years ago, and which triggered my lifelong interest in heart disease. I was at a meeting where a study was presented which showed that rabbits who were fed in a less stressed fashion – by a technician who liked rabbits; had less arterial disease than rabbits fed by another technician – who didn’t think much about rabbits one way or another.

Aha, I thought, so unstressed eating may protect against CHD? If this is also true of humans, I speculated, then populations where eating is an important part of family life should have a low rate of heart disease; on the other hand fast food cultures will have a high rate of CHD. A bit of a leap I admit, but an interesting thought to pursue?

So, I looked around the world at eating habits, and ended up focussing on France. If one thing above all stands out about French culture, in relation to British culture, it is their attitude to food and eating. The average Brit treats meals as a refuelling exercise, the French, most clearly, do not. They spend hours eating meals, relaxing, enjoying the food. It is a social occasion.

I began to wonder it were really possible that the French way of eating protects them against CHD? If so, how? What is the biological explanation? And can this possibly be related to emigration/social dislocation and stress.

There follows a discussion on anabolic and catabolic states, and the dangers of mixing the two, which is mildly persuasive.

I can’t help wondering though – and bear in mind that I have no medical expertise – surely alarm bells should start ringing when you get such a radical difference (in rates of heart disease) between two otherwise remarkably similar groups. Is it not possible that the French are more strict in what they classify as heart disease? That the whole French paradox is due to differences in diagnostics? I only ask….

We shall be looking for brilliant ideas for a name change that will signify something to all.”

No one’s complained about the name, and local Muslims were clearly bemused as to what the fuss was about, but the keen-as-mustard young vicar was unrepentant. It could only be the Anglicans.

g in a speech that Muslims were not “monkeys” and “should not blindly follow” clerics.

The death sentence was later reviewed after widespread student protests, and a retrial saw him jailed for five years instead. Last week, Aghajari was freed on bail.

Meanwhile, in Birmingham:

Opposition Leader in National Assembly Maulana Fazlur Rehman on Monday demanded that the United Nations should declare the defamation of Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) an international crime.

Addressing a large gathering here, Maulana Fazl said the UN needed to adopt a blasphemy law to protect the honour of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and respected figures of other religions and faiths.

He denounced the anti-Islamic attitude by the West and spurned as baseless charges of involvement of Muslims in terrorist acts.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman said Muslims were being victimized in the name of terrorism despite that fact they themselves were a target of violence.

He said terrorist acts in Muslim countries was an intrigue to defame the Ummah and to destabilize targeted states.

lgf links to this article, which is well worth reading in full:

Belgium and France sent troops to Rwanda to evacuate their nationals from the country. Belgium withdrew its forces promptly and cut off military aid in a situation of civil war. French troops, however, stayed on. To Paris, Africa was the one place where the glory of the French empire could still live on. “Without Africa,” Mitterrand had written in 1957, “France will have no history in the 21st century.” Prime Minister Edouard Balladur explained that “France sees itself as a world power. This is its ambition and its honor.” And its “main field of action is Africa,” especially French-speaking Africa. But it was not just a matter of honor. Corrupt African rulers helped finance French political parties, aided with money laundering, provided sweetheart deals to well-connected French companies, and voted with Paris at the UN. And Mitterrand’s son was then head of the Africa Office at the Elysce and personally close to the Habyarimana family.

Habyarimana arrested almost 10,000 of his political opponents, while some 350 Tutsi civilians were massacred in the countryside, the killers acting under the authority of local officials. In early 1991, further massacres were carried out. The Rwandan army grew ten-fold from October 1990 to mid-1992, and France provided all the weapons, either directly or by secretly arranging foreign arms contracts from Egypt or South Africa. The Rwandan government gave a French military officer overall command of counter-insurgency operations, and the French staffed roadblocks, fired artillery, and served as advisers to Rwandan field commanders.

The conclusion:

France is the foreign country bearing primary culpability for Rwanda’s nightmare, but there is little in the record of the United States of which to be proud.

addam Hussein, after a lean stretch under United Nations sanctions, had just cut his Oil-for-Food deal with the U.N., and soon began exploiting that program to embezzle billions meant for relief.

Both Saddam and bin Laden were, in their way, seasoned businessmen. Both had a taste for war. Both hated America. By the late 1990s, Saddam, despite continuing sanctions, was solidly back in business, socking away his purloined billions in secret accounts, but he had no way to attack the United States directly. Bin Laden needed millions to fund al Qaeda, which could then launch a direct strike on the United States. Whatever the differences between Saddam and bin Laden, their circumstances by the late 1990s had all the makings of a deal. Pocket change for Saddam, financial security for bin Laden, and satisfaction for both–death to Americans.

Nothing definite, but it’s interesting and suggestive.

From about 1998 on, Oil-for-Food became Saddam’s financial network, a system he gamed to produce huge amounts of illicit income, in partnership with folks who helped him hide and spend it. If some of that money was going to al Qaeda while Saddam was in power, it may still be serving as a terrorist resource today. Amid all the consternation over missed signals and poor coordination leading up to September 11, is it too much to ask that someone versed in terrorist finances, and able to access both the U.N. Oil-for-Food records and the documents squirreled away in Baghdad, take a look–an urgent, detailed, systematic look–at whether Saddam via his Oil-for-Food scams sent money to al Qaeda?

publican base: religious fundamentalists, fervent believers in America’s unilateralist destiny and culturally conservative.

There are the intelligent decent people – mildly progressive, hey that’s just like us! – who vote Democrat, and then there are the hordes of religious junk-food-guzzling morons, with pea brains and huge arses, most of them inbred, who vote Republican. After careful consideration the Observer decides that it prefers the former.

There’s further good news:

Kerry immeasurably improves our chances of defeating terrorism and making the world safer.

This, one gathers in the absence of much in the way of argument, will be in part because he’s nicer, and one of the key elements in defeating terrorism is to be nice, but mainly because he’ll cooperate with international organisations like the UN. This is obviously the sensible way to do things. He’ll let himself be guided by wiser heads, like the French, and won’t imagine, like that idiot Bush along with poodle Blair, that defying Security Council resolutions actually requires that some action be taken. If we’d listened to the French we could be adding Iraq to that long list of UN triumphs like Bosnia and Rwanda. We’d probably be up to Resolution, oooh three thousand and something by now, telling Saddam that we were really really getting angry now – and boy, you don’t want to mess with Kofi Annan when he’s in a mean mood.

Luckily we’re already seeing this sensible approach when it comes to Sudan. Passing strongly-worded resolutions in the Security Council, that’s the way to behave appropriately on the international stage. Then, when nothing happens, pass even more strongly-worded resolutions. Keep doing this until the problem is over. Then – and I imagine plans are already in place here – commission an enquiry to see what we can take away from this, because it’s terribly important that we “learn the lessons of Darfur”. Never again can we allow this sort of thing to happen. Maybe also try to establish how many tens of thousands were murdered and how many millions displaced. Possibly a monument could be built somewhere; you know, tastefully done, some sort of competition drawing in all the leading architects, so that the victims of Darfur will never be forgotten. It’s the least we can do for those poor people. Really.

ent as we did to the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

We can find nothing in the tenants of the Christian or Jewish books that comes even close to Islam’s way of government. The Judeo-Christian faith has nothing to do with government aside from a Messianic hope, and only when “He” comes with the heavens folding as a scroll, that this theocratic kingdom can take place.

This hasn’t happened yet.

Also, the Bible clearly stated to “obey the laws of the land” making it clear that the biblical God is not about enforcing a theocratic government on earth by the sword of any mortal being, be it vicar or king. The Old Testament either with it’s Temple system, judges, kings, had no place in it that called for expanding Israel.

This is why we can never compare the reforms in the Judeo-Christian culture with reforms in Islam.

Besides this discussion, may I add that I always hear this term “Islamic democracy”. To me it’s absurd, it’s like saying “Capitalistic Communism”. Is there such a thing? So why try to create an oxymoron?

Islam is a moral code, Khilafa, civil law, and a global government. Can anyone honestly say that this is not Islam?

If we’ve got to have public intellectuals, then we could do a lot worse than Richard Dawkins. Here (via Butterflies and Wheels) he’s interviewed by the Beeb:

Do you get tired of being asked about the debate between science and religion – do you think it is time to move on?

We can’t move on as long as more than 50% of American voters believe the entire universe began later than the Middle Stone Age, and Tony Blair encourages such teachings in English schools on grounds of “diversity in education”.

I agree with him that Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for faith-based schools is unfortunate, but it’s interesting – and entirely typical – that his major concern as far as religious fundamentalism goes is with Christian fundamentalism in the US. I wonder if, post 9/11, he might consider that there’s an elephant in the room which he’s just not seeing.

d its racist Nazi essence, he quickly left Israel and returned to Germany in the 1950s. There [in Germany] he wrote a number of important books about the ‘holocaust,’ denying that there had been gas chambers designed for burning the Jews. He said: ‘This is nothing but a great lie, by means of which the extremist Jews wanted to extort Europe – particularly Germany – and to plunder the homelands of others.’ And that is exactly what happened in occupied Palestine.

“Josef Ginzburg was murdered by the Jews when he went to visit his wife’s grave in Munich’s Jewish cemetery, in retaliation for his attempt to expose their falsification.”

Other holocaust deniers get a mention, including of course our very own David Irving.

“No matter what details and proof emphasizing the lie of the burning of the Jews in Nazi crematoria we present, they [the Jews] and the statesmen of Europe who trade in the Holocaust will never believe us. On the contrary – it is almost certain that they will accuse us of antisemitism…

Well he’s not wrong there…

Elsewhere, MEMRI look at a critique of the Arab press by Dr. Mamoun Fandy, columnist and expert on the Arab media, in the London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat:

“‘There are no journalists in the Arab world,’ the editor of one of the Arabic papers said to me when I asked him why [his paper] was not covering a particular journalistic story. I heard the exact same complaint from one publisher who said, ‘We have authors, but no journalists.’

“[Judging by] the Arab media coverage of events such as the trial of Saddam and the situation in Iraq in general, this lack of [Arab] journalists is embarrassingly obvious. We know little about Saddam, who ruled Iraq for over 30 years, except for a single hackneyed story about a doorman or greengrocer in Egypt, where Saddam lived in his youth. If only this story was true! This greengrocer has already changed his story more than once.

“It is interesting to know why Arab journalists have not succeeded in conducting hundreds of interviews with people who knew Saddam up close, or with entire families that were victims of the Saddam era. Weren’t some 300,000 Iraqis buried in mass graves? Or is this, too, an American lie? Didn’t [the victims] have families and relatives who can be interviewed, or aren’t their pain and their lives important? […]

“Senior Arab officials do not respect the press as a means for conveying information. The responsibility for [conveying information] lies partly with the journalist and partly with the senior government official. The journalist’s part is that no [Arab] journalist can make the official respect him. An official’s respect for a journalist can come only from the journalist’s respect for his own profession… The journalist can make the official respect him if he is well-versed in the subject about which he is talking – and doesn’t just position the microphone in front of the official and let him say whatever he wants…

“But even our officials behave differently [than officials in the West]. Instead of rebutting the author of an article by [writing another] article, he picks up the telephone and talks to the newspaper’s owner to [have him] silence the author.

“The main [problem] is that we still have no professional journalists. The proof of this is [first], that the [media] coverage of [events in] Iraq to date have given us nothing but many slogans, [and second], that the [Arab] officials do not respect the press.”