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Mujoma, Namibia’s leader and head of SWAPO, is, according to this account at Tech Central Station, following in the less-than-glorious footsteps of Robert Mugabe:

Nujoma, shouting from a Lutheran Church pulpit, announced last month that he would expropriate land to punish white farm owners who “dumped” their workers by the roadside. Speaking at May Day celebrations at Karibib, Nujoma issued an unequivocal declaration that expropriation of farms would not only target underused land but would serve as a punitive measure. “My Government will not, tolerate insults in that way,” he said after singling out “some white farmers” who had legitimately dismissed some of their farm hands. Nujoma later called these white farmers ‘snakes’. But he denied he was a racist, claiming the whites were the racists, and would be removed from the land.

And the process has begun. Two weeks ago Namibian Land Minister Hifikepunye Pohamba sent letters to about 10 white farm owners urging them to “make an offer to sell their property to the state and to enter into further negotiations in that regard”.

The farmers were given 14 days to respond. The commercial farmer’s representative I spoke with said they did not know what they were going to do. But do something they must. Since Nujoma will take silence as weakness. He says his “Government will expropriate this land as an answer to the insult to my Government. We want peace in this country.”

ist boss, about as “spiritual” as Osama Bin Laden.

Yet, in the British media, every Israeli sin is amplified, while those of the Arab world are ignored. The million dead of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein’s 300,000 victims, thousands more massacred in Chechnya, the Arab militias killing black Sudanese, the torturing Middle Eastern tyrannies are ignored – but in Britain, every Palestinian death is reported like a sacred rite. Our media conceal the venom directed at Israel by Arab clerics, television and the internet, presenting Israeli complaints as propaganda. The Middle East commentator Tom Gross revealed in the National Review that when the “moderate” Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais visited Britain this month, the BBC hailed him as a brave worker for “community cohesion”. Yet his Friday sermons call for Jews – “scum of the human race, rats of the world” – to be “annihilated”.

Also in this week’s issue, though only available to subscribers: articles on France’s secret dirty wars – “In looking after their interests abroad, the French have overlooked bribery, corruption and even genocide. Becky Tinsley reports on a foreign policy based on the cash register” – and The philosopher as dangerous liar – “Michel Foucault taught that might is right, truth is relative, and history just an interesting narrative. Why do we still lionise the French philosopher?”. I might even invest in a copy for the first time in a good few years, despite the inevitable Pilger contribution.

Reading of the terrible accident in Iran today, in which at least 70 people were killed when a tanker crashed into some buses, I saw this statistic:

This is one of the worst ever single accidents on Iran’s roads, which are notoriously dangerous, our correspondent says.

Around 22,000 people are killed every year in traffic accidents in the country.

On a monthly average, that is higher than the death rate in the eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, our correspondent notes.

22,000 killed every year?

What makes the new translation of the Bible especially wonderful is its sheer ham-fistedness. And yet here‘s Williams the Archbishop idiotically singing its praises. This has already been well covered by Oliver Kamm, Peter Cuthbertson and Laban Tall, but I can’t resist adding my own favourite:

The translation is pioneering in its accessibility, and changes the original Greek and Hebrew nomenclature into modern nicknames. St. Peter becomes “Rocky,” Mary Magdalene becomes “Maggie,” Aaron becomes “Ron,” Andronicus becomes “Andy” and Barabbas becomes “Barry.”

Are they sure this isn’t a joke?

Ross Clark in the Times takes apart the whole witch-hunt mentality which has seen the vilification of the Chief Constable of Humberside:

The authorities in Salem, Massachussets did not have a computer database of alleged and suspected offences back in 1692, but we can imagine how useful they would have found one. It would not just have been 20 citizens executed for witchcraft; it would have been half the town. Replace the “witch” with “sex offender” and 17th-century Salem has more than a little in common with 21st-century Britain. The murder of Soham schoolgirls Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells was a despicable crime, for which former caretaker Ian Huntley has properly been jailed for life. But the fallout from the Bichard report into the Soham case threatens our liberty by putting us at the mercy of rumour and false allegation.

The nub of Sir Michael Bichard’s report is this: Huntley would have been prevented from taking up his job as a caretaker at Soham and, therefore, from murdering Jessica and Holly, if the Humberside Police had only bothered to keep proper records and been prepared to share those records with potential employers. For his failure to do this, David Westwood, the Chief Constable of Humberside, has been ruined. He has been suspended by the Home Secretary and vilified by the general public.

Yet there was a good reason why Mr Westwood and his staff did not go about telling all and sundry that Huntley was a vicious sex offender. Until the conclusion of the Soham trial in December, Huntley had never been convicted of any sex offence. He had been accused of having sex with four under-age girls, of raping four women and indecently assaulting an 11-year-old girl. But in a free society, the weight of allegations does not equal guilt.

If Huntley was guilty of these earlier offences, some of which he was charged with and appeared in court over, the failure lies with the Crown Prosecution Service for failing to construct a convincing case against him. Possibly Humberside Police, too, failed in their investigations into the earlier offences. But to suggest that the force should hold and disseminate damning information on citizens merely on the basis of unproven allegations is tantamount to calling for a police state.

Memories of the last World Cup: beaten by a lusophone team coached by Scolari; England looking exhausted, not used to the heat and with too many games too close together. Yes we were unlucky, but it was our worst performance of the tournament. Still, there are memories to cherish: you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh as Beckham sent his penalty effort way over the crossbar.

There’s only bad news on Darfur (via Daniel Drezner):

NASA photos of the Darfur region of western Sudan show destruction in nearly 400 villages, and there have been reports of fighting or threatened attacks in every camp for displaced people, the U.S. aid chief said Wednesday.

Andrew Natsios, administrator of the Agency for International Development, warned that time is running out to help 2 million Sudanese in desperate need of aid in Darfur. He said his agency’s estimate that 350,000 could die of disease and malnutrition over the next nine months “is conservative.”

Fighting between Arab militias and African residents has killed thousands of people and forced more than 1 million to flee their homes. International rights groups say the government has backed the Arab fighters in an ethnic cleansing campaign against the African villagers.

Natsios put the blame for the crisis squarely on the Sudanese government, saying U.S. and U.N. reports from the country show clearly that the Sudanese military is directly connected to Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, that are fighting in Darfur.

Meanwhile, as Anthony at Black Triangle reports, polio is spreading up from Northern Nigeria after Islamic leaders there condemned the vaccination programme as part of a secret US plan against Africans:

The people of Darfur are stuck between religious fundamentalists deliberately murdering them with AK47s and religious fundamentalists in another country condemning them to disease.

Butterflies and Wheels link to Prospect’s list of the top 100 British intellectuals, from which you can vote – ooooh! – for your favourite five.

There’s something deeply depressing about this. It’s that whole idea of an intellectual. One thing I particularly like about British culture is something that’s often taken as its major weakness: its dislike of intellectuals. Through most of the 20th century, intellectuals were almost invariably Marxists or Freudians or both. More recently they’ve been followers of Derrida or Lacan or Althusser or some such modern master. Intellectuals, basically, don’t have a clue. Much of the history of the 20th century is the history of intellectuals getting it wrong. A nation of shopkeepers, traders, money-grubbers, as opposed to those who devote their lives to higher things like the, um, French? Fine by me. We’ve managed to produce some fairly decent culture on our way as we scrabbled to make ourselves rich.

So what do we need intellectuals for? I understand what journalists or philosophers or playwrights do, but what do intellectuals do? Attract acolytes? Formulate Casaubon-style theories-of-everything? Appear on TV to tell us how to live our lives, or what to think on issues of the day? Um, no thanks; I’d rather listen to my newsagent on the subject of, say, Iraq; especially as he wouldn’t be speaking from the assumption that he was my moral and intellectual superior. And that whole telling truth to power thing – it’s self-indulgent, it’s offensive, it’s dated. We no longer – if we ever did – need smart educated people to stand up for us poor stupid proles. We can think for ourselves.

I’m not particularly concerned about the list itself. It’s not like I’m outraged that X or Y are missing. There are some individuals on there whose work I’ve enjoyed or profited from, some who I’ve never agreed with at all, some who I think are massively over-rated, and some I’ve never heard of (Adair Turner?). I imagine most people would have the same reaction. So what? Good luck to them. But our top 100 intellectuals? What a load of self-indulgent media-bollocks.

Schadenfreude has featured in a couple of recent posts (here and here). All I need to add now is that scoreline: Germany 1 – Czech Republic (B team) 2.

MEMRI translate an article by the Kuwaiti author Ahmad Al-Baghdadi on why muslims should be grateful to Western orientalists:

“What is important during the period [of study] is that when they [Arabs studying in the West] read, the students are given an opportunity to compare the complexities of Western thought with the primitive nature of Arab and Islamic thought, as compiled by the scholars on each side. On top of this, they [the Arab and Muslim students] come to know the enormous body of scholarship by [Western] Orientalists in Islamic and [Arabic] literary studies, [which these Orientalists accomplished] by way of translation, or by exact scholarly philological editing, or by critical methodology.

“For a simple proof of this, let any serious reader take any book about Islamic civilization by an Arab Muslim author and a book by one of the Western scholars – say, ‘Al-Hadara Al-Islam’ [Islamic Civilization] by Grunebaum. [3] Or compare any book on the history of the Islamic state with books such as those by Wellhausen and Brockelman. [4] Even in writing about Islamic jurisprudence, they [i.e., Western scholars] are much better than the Muslim experts in Islamic jurisprudence, on both the analytical and the critical level.

“Regarding the area of my own research, I found that the book ‘The Rules of Government'(‘Al-Ahkam Al-Sultaniyyah’) by Al-Mawardi was discovered by a German Orientalist, and that libraries in the Western world contain unique Arabic and Islamic manuscripts, well-catalogued so that the researcher can easily locate the information. [These libraries also contain] many books of our heritage, which, were it not for the West and the efforts of the Orientalists, the Muslims would never know exist. Thanks to this intellectual heritage, the West was able to master the East, as it still does. […]

“If Arab scholarly institutions had an inkling of sense, there would be serious contacts and efforts to translate [into Arabic] many of the impressive volumes in the field of Islamic and [Arabic] literature studies. Unfortunately, however, this is prevented by the religious oppression on the part of the Ministries of Awqaf [i.e., religious endowments] and religious associations and institutions that prevent the translation of many impressive scholarly studies.

“In short, we are talking to the ignoramus graduates of religious educational institutions or Arab universities that are devoid of learning – those [graduates] who cover up their ignorance by accusing Orientalism of conspiring against Islam or distorting its image. [We are telling these ignoramuses] that had it not been for the efforts of a group of Orientalists in religious, literary, and historical studies, we would never have known much of the heritage in which we take pride – and without making any effort to discover it. Nay, it has come to us readymade, on a silver platter, thanks to the efforts of those Orientalists. We don’t have to look far for an example.

“Let us ask ourselves: How much effort have the Arabs expended in deciphering the Pharaonic Rosetta Stone, and how much effort have the Orientalists expended on this? Were it not for the efforts of those Orientalists who were fascinated by Pharaonic civilization, the world would never have known how to read hieroglyphics.

“The problem of the Arabs is that they suffer from a compounded ignorance – namely, they are ignorant of their own ignorance.

Nowadays of course, thanks to Edward Said’s book, the term Orientalism carries all sorts of negative correlations about stereotyping and racism, so it’s good to see an Islamic writer acknowledge the debt that scholarship owes to Western orientalists.