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So how are the two old rivals doing?

On the one hand (via Melanie Phillips):

Governor Ahmed Sani of Zamfara State [Nigeria], has ordered the demolition of all churches in the state, as he launched the second phase of his Sharia project yesterday.

Speaking at the launch in Gusau, the state capital, Governor Sani disclosed that time was ripe for full implementation of the programme as enshrined in the Holy Quran.

He added that his government would soon embark on demolition of all places of worship of unbelievers in the state, in line with Islamic injunction to fight them wherever they are found.

The governor also disclosed that a law to compel employers of labour in the state to give their employees “prayer breaks” five times daily would soon be enacted by the state House of Assembly.

On the other hand:

A statue in a Spanish cathedral showing St James slicing the heads off Moorish invaders is to be removed to avoid causing offence to Muslims.

lestinian statehood. The first came in 1937, when under the British Mandate the Peel Commission proposed partition and statehood for the Arabs of Palestine; the last, and most recent, occurred in 2000, when Arafat dismissed statehood in favor of a well-prepared and programmatic violence. (The flouting of the Road Map by Palestinian unwillingness to dismantle terror gangs will have counted as the Palestinians’ fourth refusal of statehood; but the Road Map’s callously criminalizing equation of civilian inhabitants of Jewish towns—settlements—with Palestinian murder of Jewish civilians is itself egregious.) After 1948, the Arab war against the Jews of Israel continued through the terror incursions of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur attacks of 1973, and the fomented violence of 1987, the so-called first intifada.

In short, for two-thirds of a century the Arabs have warred against a Jewish presence in “their” part of the world. The 1967 war in defense of Jewish lives (when affected Jews everywhere went into mourning, fearing catastrophe) culminated in Golda Meir’s attempt to return, in exchange for peace, the territories which, in the spirit of partition, Israel had never sought to acquire, and had so unexpectedly conquered. The answer came at an Arab summit in Khartoum: no negotiations, no recognition, no peace. So much for the “crime” of occupation.

And though the Oslo accords of 1993 strove yet again for negotiations, most energetically under Ehud Barak, both the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian public chose killing over compromise—this time with newly conceived atrocities through suicide bombings, always directed against civilians, in buses, cafés, restaurants, supermarkets, or wherever Israelis peacefully congregate.

This is the history that is ignored or denigrated or distorted or spitefully misrepresented. And because it is a history that has been assaulted and undermined by world-wide falsehoods in the mouths of pundits and journalists, in Europe and all over the Muslim world, the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has finally and utterly collapsed.

onists convened their special congress in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, a group of Czarist Russian policemen set fire to the congress hall. The Jews taking part in the congress fled out of fear of the fire. The policemen collected the documents, lists and protocols of the meeting that were lying on the desks and transferred them to Moscow. They found among these writings what was later called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols were divided into 24 parts and included the satanic Jewish ideas of taking over the world using a Jewish government, after destroying all of Orthodox Russia, Catholic Europe, the pope’s reign, and Islam.”

So now you know.

London is timeless. It exists outside the dimensions of ordinary human time, with a secret life that can be measured in hundreds or thousands of years. Time in London resembles a lava flow from some unknown source of fire. Some parts of it move slowly, some parts of it move quickly, and some parts of it have ceased moving altogether. This is what Blake meant by Infinite London.

London is eternal. It is the place where the same life can be repeated endlessly…..

Oh dear, it can only be Peter Ackroyd.

There’s something, I don’t know, un-English about Ackroyd’s blatherings. You could imagine guff like this written about Paris (with Baudelaire instead of Blake)…”Paris is illimitable, like a river sourced at the very fount of human creativity, she exists above and yet within our imaginations, eternal, part of our dreams, yet as real as the sunshine that caresses Notre Dame every morning…. Paris is as old as the stones of the Boulevard St Michel, as young as the smile of a pretty girl on the Metro….” It’s the sort of rubbish you flick past at the start of a Parisian guide book while you’re trying to work out where the hell the exit is from Les Halles. But London?…no.

This latest piece of Ackroyd is inflicted on us as a puff for the forthcoming TV series based on his London: A Biography book, and frankly it doesn’t augur well. I’ll admit that I haven’t read his biographies of Dickens or Blake, and it’s clearly true that the man has a massive fund of knowledge – “London: A Biography” is readable and entertaining – but Ackroyd seems to me to be colossally self-indulgent. His best work, like Hawksmoor, owes more than a bit to Iain Sinclair, while his worst is getting on for unreadable. I couldn’t manage more than a few pages of The House of Doctor Dee, and Albion – the Origins of the English Imagination reads like he just got pissed every night, wrote down what came into his head, bundled it all up and sent it off to his publisher, who because of Ackroyd’s reputation didn’t change a thing. There’s something a bit too calculated about the way Ackroyd has set out to market himself as The London Visionary.

It keeps getting worse for Piers Morgan.

The Commons Defence Select Committee will say today that it wants Mr Morgan to identify the soldiers who handed the photographs to his newspaper.

The regiment involved has given army investigators “killer facts” to demolish the allegations.

Officers of the 1st Battalion Queen’s Lancashire Regiment insist that they did not deploy to Iraq with the four-tonne lorries depicted in the Mirror photographs.

Senior Mirror journalists indicated for the first time last night that they were also having doubts over the authenticity of the pictures. They said that the paper was worried about the origin of the black and white photos, which show a hooded and bound Iraqi being tortured in the back of a lorry.

It now seems that Morgan paid £20,000 for the pictures. How stupid is that?

Jean-Francois Revel has an interesting article on the anti-globalisation movement and its twin, anti-Americanism (via AL Daily).

According to the anti-globalists, the global marketplace will breed ever-increasing poverty for the profit of an ever-richer minority. This is of course the outcome Karl Marx predicted in the middle of the nineteenth century for the industrialized nations of Western Europe and North America. But we all know how history has confirmed that brilliant prophecy. So the old prediction has been transferred to a new locale, new time, and new active agency. Ah, the genius of “scientific socialism.”

On the subject of French anti-Americanism, Revel comes up with this wonderful quote:

This crusade has deep roots. Back in May 1944, Hubert Beuve-Méry, the future founder and editor of Le Monde, the most influential journal in France today, was able to write that “The Americans constitute a real danger for France…. They cling to a veritable cult of the idea of liberty [and] don’t feel the need to liberate themselves from the servitudes that their capitalism entails.” The fact that an important Frenchman was able to argue this even while France was occupied by the Nazis, with the possibility of American liberation being their only hope for a different future, indicates the depth of both the hatred for economic liberty and the anti-American obsession in France.

I’ve never been to North Korea, but it seems to me to be the nearest any country has ever been to realising Orwell’s 1984 dystopia. Peter Crowcroft has been there three times, and he thinks so too. This diary of his latest visit is well worth reading – plus pics! (via North Korea Zone):

1984 is the DPRK. Or go and see The Godfather trilogy; that is how the DPRK works at the top.

1. Reunification. Forget it. It is never going to happen. It is a pipe-dream being peddled to the DPRK masses. The USA is the bad guy always finding excuses to stop it. All media from outside the DPRK is banned – no radio, newspapers, movie films. Personal contact of foreigners by local people is banned.

2. Collapse from Within. Forget it. The indoctrination system for the masses is now so well honed that I see no sign of discontent. As long as the Kim Family look after the top cadres and the Army with gifts and perks the Family will be secure. People have been predicting the demise of the DPRK for years. Most recently Victor Cha in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (March 2, 2004) said: “the overturning of systems like North Korea occur not when things are at their worst, but when they begin to get better.” Well sorry, but there has never been a socialist state like the DPRK where information is totally controlled. KJI almost never appears in public no doubt remembering how Ceausescu met his end – boos from the masses. In Eastern Europe TV and newspapers freely flowed over the borders.

Yet another area in which Britain leads the world: complaining diplomats. Our brave boys were showing the way over a week ago, well before these copycat US diplomats started moaning. Another first for Britain!

at the victim was tortured and beaten.

The soldier’s boots are laced in an unusual way and appear to be brand new; they are certainly far too clean to have been worn in Iraq. He also lacks a bungy cord around his trousers that soldiers often wear to keep sand out of their boots.

Rifle in groin. Anyone having a rifle thrust into their groin would be curled up in a foetal position and not have their legs open. It is also quite likely he would have lost control of his bladder.

Kick in face. The so-called victim in this picture is not tensed, as he would be if he was really being kicked in the face. Again, there are no injuries, which would be visible had the victim been subjected to an eight-hour ordeal.

The four-tonne truck in which the pictures have been taken is another cause for concern. They are not used in Iraq, as they are considered to be sitting ducks for insurgents. Armoured vans that had been used in Northern Ireland were shipped there for that reason.

[into the Army’s prison system, authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq], obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added—“detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence.” Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their “extremely sensitive nature.”

The photographs—several of which were broadcast on CBS’s “60 Minutes 2” last week—show leering G.I.s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are forced to assume humiliating poses. Six suspects—Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II, known as Chip, who was the senior enlisted man; Specialist Charles A. Graner; Sergeant Javal Davis; Specialist Megan Ambuhl; Specialist Sabrina Harman; and Private Jeremy Sivits—are now facing prosecution in Iraq, on charges that include conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty toward prisoners, maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts. A seventh suspect, Private Lynndie England, was reassigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after becoming pregnant.

The question Hersh asks is, how high up does the responsibilty go. Lt. Frederick – “Chip” – is going for the defence that he was just carrying out orders. Well, he would say that of course, but whatever the outcome of the court-martial, the damage to US credibility is enormous.