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Interesting interview at NKZone with Tim Peters, who runs an organization to help North Korean refugees, Helping Hands Korea. He describes how things have become more difficult recently for North Korean refugees making it over the border to China, and emphasises the importance of putting human rights on the agenda for the latest round of talks:

I’m a strongbeliever that human rights issues need to be put squarely among the priority items on the agenda of the six-party talks. This idea, so prevalent in South Korea and in some quarters in the west as well, that nuclear and economic issues need to be resolved first, then we can turn to human rights, is to my mind fundamentally flawed. I believe we can learn a lot by looking at the Helsinki Accords as a model. The US was absolutely resolute in insisting that human rights issues be included in key negotiations with the Soviet Union. Brezhnev yielded, perhaps concluding that it was a minor issue.
Those human rights led to Solidarity in Poland, to give but one example, and the rest was history. Moreover, human rights monitoring is a hell of a lot easier to verify than verifying dismantlement of nuclear programs. Why not use human rights access and improvements in the DPRK as a litmus test of how sincerely the North Koreans are complying with their agreements?

I can’t imagine that the Bush people want to repeat the absolute idiocy of trumpeting breakthroughs as the Clinton people did in ’93 and ’94, only to find out later than Kim Jong-il was laughing up his sleeve and steaming full-speed ahead with his nuclear program(s). Another advantage of having human rights issues, e.g. gulag visitations, full access to food aid deliveries, is that there would be ongoing dialogue and engagement, but not only on the issues that the DPRK wants to talk about. Nothing else has worked, and I think it’s worth a try. A final thought: How much longer will the beggar (NK regime) get to dictate the terms and conditions of how the benefactor(donor countries, international agencies, NGO’s) give their voluntary aid? How many people put up with a homeless person dictating to them how much spare change to give, what pocket to give it from and tolerate a spit in their face for good measure?

Incidentally, if anyone is interested in reading a first-hand account of the NK gulag, and escape over the Chinese border, I would strongly recommend “Aquariums of Pyongyang“.

Well there I was last night, thinking no, I can’t spend another evening watching football can I? But I’ve pretty much given up on EastEnders, so I found myself watching Italy – Bulgaria playing in a half-empty ground, the rain pissing down, wondering why they chose this instead of the Sweden – Denmark game. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we had to endure David Pleat’s leaden observations. The pundit’s a difficult role to fill since Big Ron has been moved on, but I thought Mick McCarthy was good (though to the refined upper-class sensibilities of the chaps at Private Eye, he has a “comedy” accent, which makes me think perhaps someone should tell Mick about this: if he can see off Roy Keane he should make short work of Ian Hislop), and Joe Royle was even better: in the Czech Republic – Holland match, after Heinz was brought on, “Am I allowed to say that Heinz has brought variety to the Czech game?”

A friend reckoned that football’s only worth watching when there’s a team you support, but I disagree. England games tend to be too tense, whereas a less stressful encounter allows you to sit back and just enjoy it. Okay, Croatia – Switxerland was 90 minutes of my life wasted, but Czech Republic – Holland, Portugal – Spain…..great stuff. And then there was last night, another great match, with Italy making the usual drama out of going out. I was sort of supporting them, and the last minutes were wonderfully tense (but, you know, with it not being England, not too tense), but it’s difficult to have much sympathy for them. They should have done better. I suppose there’s an element of schadenfreude (see my previous post below).

So, what are the chances on Thursday night, if we beat Portugal, of John Motson coming out with, “well, Gary, the Portuguese have a word “saudade” for a deep feeling of sadness, and you can be sure there’ll be a lot of saudade in Lisbon tonight.”

Problems for translators:

The Times has translated for you the most untranslatable word in the world.

The word is ilunga, from the Bantu language of Tshiluba, and means a person ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.

It came top of a list drawn up with the help of 1,000 translators, narrowly beating shlimazl, Yiddish for a chronically unlucky person and radioukacz, Polish for a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain.

In the English language, googly (as in cricket), Spam (as in tins) and gobbledegook (as in every Plain English Campaign press release) were among the most untranslatable words, but the top place was, surprisingly, reserved for plenipotentiary.

It’s a shame that the article isn’t more choosy about what to include. There are, surely, interesting and uninteresting untranslatables. They’re interesting if they represent a concept we simply don’t have in English; uninteresting if they’re just culture-specific. Ilunga is genuinely odd, but radioukacz? – well, frankly, who cares if there’s not an English word for “a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain”? It’s hardly a major gap in the language. Similarly googly is not interesting as an untranslatable word; it’s just one of a whole range of sporting metaphors in English (in this case, in English English). And Spam? – surely that should be spam, ie unwanted e-mail crap.

The Portuguese saudade is one of my favourites though: the spirit of Fado (try this or this for a modern take).

What we do in English of course is simply import the word. If any of these words met a need, we’d appropriate them. Schadenfreude is the example usually cited – often with the snide remark that it would have to be the Germans, wouldn’t it, to coin a word for pleasure in the misfortune of others: a little unfair considering how often it’s used. Is there a word for taking over a useful concept while denigrating those who originated it?

Here‘s a very powerful presentation by Anne Bayefsky to the UN on the subject of anti-semitism (via Instapundit):

What does discrimination against the Jewish state mean? It means refusing to admit only Israel to the vital negotiating sessions of regional groups held daily during U.N. Commission on Human Rights meetings. It means devoting six of the 10 emergency sessions ever held by the General Assembly to Israel. It means transforming the 10th emergency session into a permanent tribunal–which has now been reconvened 12 times since 1997. By contrast, no emergency session was ever held on the Rwandan genocide, estimated to have killed a million people, or the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands in the former Yugoslavia, or the death of millions over the past two decades of atrocities in Sudan. That’s discrimination.

The record of the Secretariat is more of the same. In November 2003, Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a report on Israel’s security fence, detailing the purported harm to Palestinians without describing one terrorist act against Israelis which preceded the fence’s construction. Recently, the secretary-general strongly condemned Israel for destroying homes in southern Gaza without mentioning the arms-smuggling tunnels operating beneath them. When Israel successfully targeted Hamas terrorist Abdel Aziz Rantissi with no civilian casualties, the secretary-general denounced Israel for an “extrajudicial” killing. But when faced with the 2004 report of the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions detailing the murder of more than 3,000 Brazilian civilians shot at close range by police, Mr. Annan chose silence. That’s discrimination.

At the U.N., the language of human rights is hijacked not only to discriminate but to demonize the Jewish target. More than one quarter of the resolutions condemning a state’s human rights violations adopted by the commission over 40 years have been directed at Israel. But there has never been a single resolution about the decades-long repression of the civil and political rights of 1.3 billion people in China, or the million female migrant workers in Saudi Arabia kept as virtual slaves, or the virulent racism which has brought 600,000 people to the brink of starvation in Zimbabwe. Every year, U.N. bodies are required to produce at least 25 reports on alleged human rights violations by Israel, but not one on an Iranian criminal justice system which mandates punishments like crucifixion, stoning and cross-amputation of right hand and left foot. This is not legitimate critique of states with equal or worse human rights records. It is demonization of the Jewish state.

As Israelis are demonized at the U.N., so Palestinians and their cause are deified. Every year the U.N. marks Nov. 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People–the day the U.N. partitioned the British Palestine mandate and which Arabs often style as the onset of al nakba or the “catastrophe” of the creation of the state of Israel. In 2002, the anniversary of the vote that survivors of the concentration camps celebrated, was described by Secretary-General Annan as “a day of mourning and a day of grief.”

Hitchens doesn’t like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 very much (via Lileks):

Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything.

Moore has announced that he won’t even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack. He’ll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to bring pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation.

However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that “fact-checking” is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyers—get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let’s redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let’s see what you’re made of. […]

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture.

The total number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less than that of 6 million Israelis. Birth rates in the region are very high, increasing the poverty, the social gaps and the cultural decline. And all of this is happening in a region, which only 30 years ago, was believed to be the next wealthy part of the world, and in a Muslim area, which developed, at some point in history, one of the most advanced cultures in the world.

It is fair to say that this creates an unprecedented breeding ground for cruel dictators, terror networks, fanaticism, incitement, suicide murders and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and anything, except themselves.

It’s nothing new, of course, but it’s good to see it so clearly spelled out:

A few more years may pass before everybody acknowledges that it is a World War, but we are already well into it.

t home from Denbigh high school in Luton for wearing a jilbab, an ankle-length dress that leaves only the face and hands visible.

Begum, who was regarded as a promising pupil, was orphaned last April with the death of her mother. Her father had died in 1992. Her 21-year-old brother, Shuweb Rahman, who helped her bring the case, is an HuT supporter. […]

Mahmood, who has in the past likened HuT to the British National party, said it had a record of targeting young people in schools and universities to lure them away from the mainstream of the Muslim community in Britain. “It is important that social services look into that role,” he said.

Denbigh High school was an unlikely target for criticism. Almost 80% of its 1,000 pupils are Muslim, and its dress code, which allows pupils to wear a shalwar kameez (trousers and a long tunic), was introduced with the support of the town’s Council of Mosques.

The school argued that going further, by permitting the jilbab, might create divisions by implying that those who did not wear it were not as devout as those who did. It also suggested that the garment posed a safety hazard. […]

HuT’s ultimate aim is a worldwide Muslim state, ruled by sharia, Islamic law, and it urges Muslims not to participate in democratic politics. It was founded in 1953 in the Middle East, and was banned in Egypt after an attempted coup in 1974.

I didn’t watch this week’s Question Time, but was amused to read that Germaine Greer had come out strongly against the High Court ruling. Didn’t she used to be a feminist?

The Observer’s war-on-terrorism special – “9/11: At last, the full story has been told” – highlights a quotation from April Gallop, a survivor of the Pentagon attack: “There’s a wound in my heart that can only be closed with truth and by someone accepting responsibility”. Good lord, has no one told the poor woman? It was Al-Qaeda who were responsible. They’ve admitted it. They’ve even boasted about it.

But of course that isn’t what she, or the Observer, mean. There’s only one culprit here, and that’s the administration in Washington and its disastrous failure to tackle terrorism.

Indeed yes, and this is just the latest in a long list of complaints. All those attempts by the administration to tackle terrorism, by overthrowing the Taleban in Afghanistan, or by detaining suspects in Guantanamo: they’re disastrously wrong, immoral even. People’s rights are being trampled on.

Curiously though, as Jason Burke reports, there are signs that the Muslim world is beginning to turn against the militants (known outside Guardian/Observer circles as terrorists):

Few people noticed the statement by two Saudi Arabian clerics denouncing attacks, on locals and Westerners alike, by Islamic militants. It came not from the usual tame clerics, but from Safar al-Hawali and Salman al-Auda, two rabble-rousing prayer leaders imprisoned several times for their hardline views.
The statement last week was part of a phenomenon which, though its outlines are barely discernible, give us a glimpse of light at the end of ‘the war on terror’ tunnel. For, though it is gaining in many areas, the radical Islamic militant movement labelled ‘al-Qaeda’ is beginning to lose public support in others.

Good news: but there’s one point that must be borne firmly in mind:

This is despite the actions of Bush and Blair, rather than because of them, but is heartening nonetheless.

So, to sum up:

1) the US administration was grossly negligent in its failure to tackle terrorism.

2) any attempts by the US/UK to tackle terrorism are utterly repugnant.

3) if there’s any reduction in terrorism it cannot possibly be anything to do with attempts by the US/UK to tackle terrorism, which by definition only make matters worse.

President Putin says that Iraq was planning a US attack:

Russian President Vladimir Putin says that after the 9/11 attacks Moscow warned Washington that Saddam Hussein was planning attacks on the US.
He said Russia’s secret service had information on more than one occasion that Iraq was preparing acts of terror in the US and its facilities worldwide.

Mr Putin said he had no information the Iraqi ex-leader was behind any attacks.

It came a day after US President George W Bush insisted there had been links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

He disputed the preliminary findings of a US commission investigating the 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York that found no “credible evidence” of a relationship between the two.

Speaking on a visit to Kazakhstan, Mr Putin said Russia had warned the US on several occasions that Iraq was planning “terrorist attacks” on its soil.

“After the events of 11 September 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services several times received such information and passed it on to their American colleagues,” he told reporters.

He said the information received by Russian intelligence suggested Iraq was planning attacks in the United States, “and beyond its borders on American military and civilian targets”.

Hmm. Roger Simon thinks this is all realpolitik – that Putin is helping out Bush as payback for the US administration’s soft-pedalling on the Oil-for-Food and related scandals. Who knows. Does this imply it’s all fiction, or that it’s true, and Putin is just choosing to reveal it now? In which case why did the US Administration not make this known earlier? Because the Russians would simply deny it? So are the Americans now going to confirm that they received these warnings? [Gosh it’s complicated, all this realpolitik.]

to the role in which they have been cast for over a century – as exponents of humane and liberal values, as revolutionaries, gadflies, the ones who see further than ordinary mortals.

What’s striking is how dated this formulation sounds. Who now, apart maybe from Arts programmers for the BBC, believes that artists see further than ordinary mortals? And why would anyone want them to? See differently, yes, I can understand that, and if artists see differently and have the skill to communicate that vision, well, that’s great. But artists as moral arbiters or seers? No thanks. There’s certainly no obvious connection between artistic greatness and moral vision: if anything it’s the other way round, and all the better for it. Perhaps one of the saddest facts about the current art world is the degree of consensus: how narrow and circumscribed it is, and how the targets for attack – bourgeois consumer society, religion, the US – are so utterly conventional.