against terror. Yassin Rehman, the head of the Council of Mosques in the suburb of Luton, blamed such groups as Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed’s Al-Muhajiroun sect and Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian wanted in Yemen on terrorism charges who still preaches outside the Finsbury Park mosque on Fridays, for actively recruiting jihadis behind the shields of free speech and religion.
“This country has given us freedom and we should never abuse those freedoms,” Rehman told the BBC.
Reasons not to go to the theatre, pt. 74:
He [Richard Suart] must be the most manically inventive G&S exponent of our era. Indeed, his impersonation of Olivier playing Richard III is worth the price of admission by itself. But it was when he added “George W. Bush’s poodle, whose name is Tony Blair” to Ko-Ko’s wishful list of those “who won’t be missed” that he brought the house down.
When Julie’s good, she’s very very good….. Today she’s talking about beauty vs. brains:
We have never been so confused about beauty as we are now, and it really is the oddest thing to be confused about. You can understand people not getting quantum physics or being baffled by the offside rule, but even a tiny baby shown a series of mugshots ranging from the grim to the gorgeous will smile at the lookers. Being without jealousy, sexual desire or status anxiety, perhaps only a baby can see beauty for what it is; a wonderful thing, as meaningless and transient as a perfect rose. But once these gatecrashers make their presence felt, beauty stops being simple and becomes all about us. And we all know how peculiar that particular can of worms is.
I’ve always thought that having a love-hate relationship with anything was a sure indicator of profound stupidity — surely you know if you like something or not! — and beauty brings out this cretinous tendency in so many of us. While pursuing it for ourselves and slavering over those who have it, we also — women even more so than men; this is not a feminist issue — mock those who undergo cosmetic surgery or who live off their looks. The tyranny of the sisterhood has made many professionally beautiful women apologetic as never before; Michelle Pfeiffer thinks she looks like “a duck”, Uma Thurman is forever pointing out how weird she is, while Keira Knightley claims never to have been chatted up.
Maybe I’m missing something, but for the life of me I can’t understand why such body-dysmorphia (if they really mean it) or sucking-up (if they don’t) should be seen as a sign of being pleasingly modern, normal and nice, and make these starry creatures “one of the girls”; in my book it’s old-fashioned female self-loathing/cultural cringe/lying to keep the peace, and as such it should be discouraged. The shameless, blameless days when Ursula Andress was asked why she stripped off for Playboy and answered simply “because I’m beautiful” are long gone; now we get our kit off in a caring way, to empower ourselves/other women/heal our dysfunctional child inside.
This culture of tits-out self-righteousness is so much the norm these days that when the breath of fresh air that is Jordan comes along, stating plainly and repeatedly that she does it for the money, that she can earn more in a day doing this than she would in a year doing the sort of job generally available to someone of her social class, she is reviled as a moron and a monster, someone not quite human. Just for telling the truth, and for being robust and sensible enough to see her beauty as a thing apart from herself.
Good stuff, but a bit disingenuous: it surely is a feminist issue.
y!
This is entrapment; this is fraud. This experiment tells us nothing except the lengths psychologists will go to to justify disgraceful behaviour and then build a career on it. So why is it so highly regarded, and so often cited as one of the key experiments of the 20th century? Because it fits in with the cliched thinking that we all have a dark side, that we’re all capable of being Eichmanns, that underneath the cultured surface we’re all monsters. We’re all guilty. But as Justman concludes: “we find the Milgram experiment illuminating less for what it reveals about any presumed tendency to dumb obedience than for what it says about the beliefs of a culture where such manipulations could be prized as a contribution to knowledge.”
I would go one stage further though. The experiment as normally understood certainly has no relevance to the Eichmann situation. Eichmann and his like were not conflicted about what they did; they didn’t suffer agonies of conscience. It didn’t occur to them, because they accepted the moral consensus. They believed that Europe should be cleansed of Jews because they accepted the Nazi view that Jews were a contamination that needed to be removed. Eichmann didn’t sit at his desk sweating away, “Oh God, if only someone else had this responsibility! I know it’s wrong, but I can’t disobey the Fuhrer!” That’s not how it was. He just accepted that suffering was necessary in the name of a higher cause. But there is a real lesson for us now. The parallel to Eichmann is not in the subjects’ behaviour but in Milgram’s: how people can blithely inflict suffering in the name of a higher cause, never have a moment’s doubt about what they’re doing, and be lauded for their efforts by their peers.
ime — a decision about college. For Kash it was easy: he was heading to the bright lights and the big city: “London . . . man! ” he would scream at the top of his voice.
The next time I saw Kash was 11 years later, just after 9/11. His beard was raggedy, he wore the salwar kameez of our childhood and he had rejected everything we ever shared. “You’re lost, bro,” he told me. “You need to open your eyes. Look at the filth around you. It’s a sick society and only Islam is the cure.” I asked him what he meant by sick. “There is a cancer, Christianity is a cancer, Judaism is a cancer, materialism is a cancer, all destroying us, the Muslims.”
Yes, Kash had been listening to Abu Hamza, of Finsbury Park mosque.
One of the other people Khan talks to is Sayful Islam:
Sayful Islam is a spokesman in Luton for the radical Muslim group al-Muhajiroun. The town’s central mosque banned his organisation for being too extreme. When I asked him about Tuesday’s raids his answer gave me a chill: “At the moment we live under a covenant of security in this country, we are well treated and therefore should not do operations in this country, terror or otherwise. But if the police and the establishment keep treating Muslims in this way, arresting them and harassing them, then we cannot guarantee the security of this country.”
Chilling indeed: but this is how Khan finishes the article:
The impetus for peace on Britain’s streets is now firmly in the hands of the Government. Sayful Islam is under no illusions. “They have started a crusade against Muslims and that road, unfortunately, can only lead to violence.” In order to stop the small fringe element who think like Sayful gaining a foothold and allowing the jihad to enter Britain, the Government faces a real challenge: to make its priority not letters to mosques, but to understand people such as Sayful.
The problem is not for the government to understand people such as Sayul. That’s not hard to do. Sayul is threatening violence if the government acts to protect us from terrorist attacks. What should the government have done? Clearly for Sayul they should have ignored the information they were getting about groups of Muslims acquiring large amounts of explosive materials, and then subsequent to the bombing have invited Muslim leaders around to Downing Street to assure them that of course they fully accepted that ordinary decent Muslims had nothing to do with the hundreds (thousands?) of deaths. They should then have issued a statement condemning Islamophobia. And this is an argument which sections of liberal opinion seem to agree with: as though the occasional mass murder is a small price to pay for being multicultural.
The problem and its solution lies within the Muslim community, but, as here, their record is not encouraging. It’s always up to the government to do something, or its because Muslims are discriminated against.
The truth is that things are becoming difficult here. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Muslims outwardly to express their faith and this is leading to anger. My wife was in a kitchen store when the shop assistant bombarded her with questions about Islam. The shop assistant was convinced that terror was just around the corner because of her new Muslim neighbour. The Government’s anti-terror laws are now contributing to an unprecedented climate of fear among Muslims.
The government is not toughening up on terrorism for the fun of it, or because they’re in the grip of Islamophobia. They’re doing what they’re doing because of a clear threat from Muslim extremists to kill large numbers of British citizens. If Muslims don’t like it, the answer’s in their hands: denounce the extremists, throw them out of the mosques, clean up their act. The message may be getting through to some, but clearly not all.
t year. The Populist Party was established and directed by Willis Carto, head of the now-defunct Liberty Lobby. The dean of American neo-Nazi politics, Carto also founded the Costa Mesa-based Institute for Historical Review, a group whose central purpose is Holocaust denial. In a written statement, Baker claimed he did not know the Populist Party was racist and that he never shared Carto’s racist politics. […]
In addition, evidence supplied by the Anti-Defamation League shows that Baker delivered a 1983 speech to the racist Christian Patriot Defense League in Licking, Missouri, in which he made several references to Carto’s neo-Nazi newspaper, Spotlight. He also described his disgust at traveling to New York: “God help me. Why? ’Cause the first people I meet when I get off the plane are pushy, belligerent American Jews.”
While Baker claimed graduate studies at Oxford and the “Near East Institute,” he could only substantiate a bachelor’s degree from Ozark Christian College.
No prizes for guessing the subject matter of Baker’s book “The Theft of a Nation”.
tion to call the tune in a way that it has scarcely felt confident about in the past. Most immediately, this means being able to hold China’s neighbors to pledges not to support Islamic militancy or Uighur separatism.
Worth reading.
strong>What is your outlook for Israel’s future? Are you depressed?
I think I’m basically depressed. I think unless there is a basic change of heart and mind—a change of mindset—among Palestinians and in the Arab world in general about Israel, we’re in for a continuous struggle over the coming decades. Basically what is needed here is a compromise based on two states, and that in effect requires Arab acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy. But so long as there is this view of Israel as a cancer in the Middle East—which like a Crusader’s stake must be uprooted and will be uprooted—there will be no compromise here. It doesn’t matter what agreement is signed or what temporary ceasefires occur. In the long term of history, it’s meaningless. So long as Israel’s legitimacy is questioned, its existence is not assured.
At the I Love Books site, they’re combining book titles (via Blog of a Bookslut):
“Gone with the wind in the willows” Thrills, romance, voles.
“Lord of the Ringflies” Three-book fantasy epic about rectal parasites.
“Heart of Darkness at Noon” English explorer misreads map, winds up in gulag.
“Of Stupid White Mice and Men” searing indictment of the vast albino mouse conspiracy that controls America.
Appropriately enough, with the Normblog Dylan Poll coming to its climax, I happened on a remaindered copy of Greil Marcus’ “Invisible Republic” (his book about the Basement Tapes) the other day. Not being a great fan of Marcus I never bought the book when it came out, but I figured I couldn’t lose at £2.95.
Has anyone ever managed to get through it? I made it to somewhere round page 60 before giving up. There’s some nuggets buried away in there, but I found it deeply turgid and self-important, which is a shame when you consider how open and unpretentious and just sheer enjoyable the Basement Tapes are. The songs are performed almost as throw-away items: just Dylan and the Band jamming in the basement at Big Pink – a bunch of musicians completely free from the pressures of recording studios and deadlines.
The wonder of it is that Dylan manages to sound as though he’s making it up as he goes along; it’s such a phenomenal outburst of creativity. Robbie Robertson has a nice quote about how half the time they didn’t know if Dylan was coming out with old tunes or if they were his own compositions. He just plugged in to that wealth of folk/blues/country (mapped by Harry Smith, as Marcus points out, in his Smithsonian Folkways recordings) and these amazing songs came out.
I didn’t vote for any of the BT songs in the NDP: they’re all so seemingly light-weight on their own. But it may be my favourite Dylan album. And if you haven’t voted yet, you’ve got one more day. I confess I’m curious to see what the results will be.