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The Mufti of Australia and New Zealand, Taj Al-Din Hamed Abdallah Al-Hilali, has some interesting opinions (via Belmont Club):

Sheikh Al-Hilali [..] claims that Afghan Muslims preceded Captain Cook in his discovery of Australia: “Australia is an old-new continent. The Europeans issued a false birth certificate for it when the British seafarer Captain James Cook reached it. However, Australia already had the most ancient race of men on the face of the earth – the Aborigine people… They continue to live their primitive lives to this very day.

“But when you become acquainted with their traditions among their tribes, you find that they have customs such as circumcision, marriage ceremonies, respect for tribal elders, and burial of the dead – all customs that show that they were connected to ancient Islamic culture before the Europeans set foot in Australia.

“That is, Islam had roots deep in the Australian soil and read the Qur’an and called to prayer before the bells of the churches rang in Australia. The best evidence of this is the hundreds of mosques in the center of Australia built by the Afghans. Some of them were destroyed, and others were turned into Australian archeological museums, and still others remained unharmed, and they bear a history that proves that Islam has roots and ancient connections to Australia.

“But because they did not have the proper conditions to continue to exist, such as schools, propagation of the religion, and connection to the Islamic world, the first generation of our Afghan ancestors dissolved…

“I visited the town of Alice Springs in central Australia, and found there a map [of Alice Springs] under the name Mecca. Alice Springs is surrounded by high black mountains, similar to the mountains of Mecca. Summer there lasts 10 months, and winter only two months. The temperature is above 50 degrees Celsius.

“There are several kinds of dates and palm trees there. We did not believe that dates could grow there. Now that we know the reason, we no longer wonder. We found that our ancestors the Afghans were among the first Muslims, and they settled this area and called it Mecca.

“The strange thing was that when our muezzin [who accompanied Sheikh Al-Hilali on his visit to Alice Springs] stood up to call for prayer, the old people of the town came out, and so did men and youths, and they looked different than the black Aborigines. They were a mixture of Afghan and Aborigine, as a result of marriages of Afghan men and Aborigine women. When the muezzin called ‘Allahu Akbar,’ they said, ‘We have heard this song from our ancestors…’ When they asked us ‘What is this song you are singing?’ we told them that this was an announcement of prayer time. When we asked them their names, they answered John, or Steve, but their names ended with Saraj Al-Din, Abdallah, or Muhammad…”

Jenny Tonge was invited by BBC’s Today programme to visit Israel and the West Bank in the light of her remarks about suicide bombers (via Biased BBC), but clearly (and predictably) she’s learnt nothing:

In Israel, the armed forces have F16 fighter planes, helicopter gun-ships, tanks, even nuclear weapons. The disparity was pointed out to me by a civil society group in Bethlehem, when I asked why Palestinians used suicide bombers. “Tell the US to give us the arms that Israel has and we will stop such attacks,” was the response. [….]

It is certainly true that suicide bombers are regarded as national heroes here, but what else do they have – born out of despair and the desire to resist occupation, laced with religious belief. Civilian targets are chosen because there is no way of getting at military targets.

Well obviously they have to kill someone, so if they can’t get at the military, killing civilians will have to do.

l worth is only measurable when it comes to standing out against the West, or more particularly America; and given the chance to contribute to an exercise like this they can’t help but get all competitive and try to outdo each other in the depth of their outrage. It’s a pitiful sight. As DM Thomas says:

I would much rather trust the views of taxi-drivers on any matter of great political importance than those of writers and intellectuals. History shows that the latter almost always get it wrong.

sh swirling around your legs…

This guy would seem to have it nailed:

Local resident Marcus Fairs, editor of architecture magazine Icon, said: “In my opinion the place has never worked properly. The Clissold is a monument to architectural arrogance and local government ineptitude. “It was clearly designed to look good in glossy design magazines and boost the egos of the architect and the councillors who commissioned it. I got so fed up and frustrated that I cancelled my membership last September – but they’re still charging me.”

An interesting article by Edward Rothstein in the NYT (via AL Daily) reports on a conference organised by the magazine Social Text on “Fear: Its Uses and Abuses.”

[T]he dominant idea was that, as the conference’s thematic statement put it, fear was being “encouraged by our government and exacerbated by our media.” It was compared with the irrational fear of Communism and the perversions of McCarthyism. It was described as part of a counter-constitutional coup by a radical right. Talks about other aspects of fear — how, for example, it tends to drive out reflective thought with its stimulus of the “lateral nucleus of the amygdala” — mainly served to frame the theme. Mr. Hollander devoted some time to discussing Roosevelt’s classic statement that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but after a while it became evident that “fear itself” was what many speakers wanted to inspire, not just to describe.

Here are some sentiments we’re now familiar with from our intellectual elite:

Mr. Kateb, an emeritus professor of politics at Princeton, saw a conspiracy at work. He compared President Bush to a “despot.” In Chomskyesque fashion he argued that the American government is using its war on terror “to justify the national security state” and feed its economy, and that terrorism is just a stand-in “for a much larger enemy, which is made up of Arabs and Muslims everywhere” who are now being tyrannized in a “racist” and “imperialist” enterprise.

Rothstein brings in Lee Harris (from his new book “Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History”) for some apposite quotes:

For we live, according to Mr. Harris, in a civilization with an intellectual culture that is reluctant to take the idea of an external enemy seriously; its enemies, though, have no such qualms. “We are caught,” Mr. Harris writes, “in the midst of a conflict between those for whom the category of the enemy is essential to their way of organizing all human experience and those who have banished even the idea of the enemy from both public discourse and even their innermost thoughts.”

I can’t resist adding that Social Text is the magazine which back in 1996 published in all seriousness an article by Alan Sokal entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. As the Amazon review describes it:

[P]acked with recherché quotations from “postmodern” literary theorists and sociologists of science, and bristling with imposing theorems of mathematical physics, the article addressed the cultural and political implications of the theory of quantum gravity. Later, to the embarrassment of the editors, the author revealed that the essay was a hoax, interweaving absurd pronouncements from eminent intellectuals about mathematics and physics with laudatory–but fatuous–prose.

Good to know they’re maintaining the same intellectual standards.

Dyke:

When he took over as director-general four years ago, Greg Dyke was determined to shed the dowdy image of “Auntie,” as the British refer to the Beeb with a mixture of affection and disdain. The BBC would get more scoops. The BBC would be edgier. Dyke was a good motivator, supportive of his charges and popular with much of the staff.

But some say the desire to make the BBC edgier left its credibility open to cuts that bleed. Some longtime fans of the BBC, like Jeffrey Dvorkin, the ombudsman for National Public Radio, saw Hutton’s findings not just as an indictment of sloppy reporting and lax editorial oversight in an isolated if sensational case. Dvorkin said the report had called into question the BBC’s drive to find “the largest possible audience,” a mission he says has in practice been at odds with its job as a public broadcaster.

The key point is not that the Beeb may be left-leaning, or that it cultivates a disdain of politicians, but that there turned out to be a contradiction at the heart of Greg Dyke’s vision: you can’t have a public broadcaster with a world-wide reputation for honesty and integrity adopting the tactics of the tabloids:

Gilligan, formerly a reporter at the Sunday Telegraph, was among a group of BBC reporters hired several years ago specifically to bring in more “exclusives,” which are a vehicle for self-promotion in print journalism. Obsessed with sex and scandal, Sunday newspapers in Britain regularly print “exclusives” that are not true — such as the front-page claim made in 1996 that an aide to Senator George Mitchell, then trying to broker a peace agreement in Northern Ireland, was having an affair with a convicted IRA bomber. Unless there is a legal challenge, few incorrect stories are corrected in print. And few, meanwhile, are believed beyond the circle of readers whose politics or prejudices the stories appeal to.

But it is precisely because people expect what they hear on the BBC to be true that Gilligan’s report was taken so seriously, and why the Hutton inquiry was so important.

And why it was quite right for Greg Dyke to resign, but unfortunate that he did so with such ill grace.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Times’ Weekend Review, Seamus Heaney is asked this question:

During the invasion of Iraq it seemed that the voices of “intellectuals” were silent. Are their voices strong enough?

The voices of intellectuals silent over Iraq?? If only.

Heaney’s reply is nicely judged to avoid actually saying what his views are on Iraq:

What intellectuals have to do is be true to themselves, honest with themselves and with others. We have come to associate the committed intellectual with left-wing causes, and there are shining examples of that all through the last century. Camus, for example. I like what (the writer) Tzvetan Todorov said recently on this subject, asking that intellectuals be “responsible” rather than “committed”. This wasn’t just a play on words but a demand that they should “maintain a consistency between their words and their actions”. But I agree, that still does not absolve them from the need to speak truth to power.

was meant to kill Hitler? Better than the bombs dropped on Dresden and Cologne which so helped to destroy the blind German faith in their vile war machine and their democratically elected Führer? Really?

Oooh! She throws in these comments deliberately designed to sniff out and enrage lefty liberal types. Celebrating Dresden?? That’s, um, going a bit far, isn’t it? I’m a bit of a liberal lefty type myself at times, but she carries the whole thing of with such energy that I don’t mind. Especially as she’s talking about Iraq and is making some solid points:

When the war started, I could comprehend why some of those who were against it felt as they did. I could understand that certain racists and xenophobes and grumpy old men believed that the life of one British soldier was worth more than the lives of a thousand Iraqis. I could understand why the Catholic Church was against the war; after all, they above all have shown such great empathy and support for fascist tyrants down the ages. These people were merely being consistent; they didn’t approve of personal freedom in their own countries/congregations, so why should the Iraqis have it either?

But what I couldn’t understand were the huge numbers of what I thought were People Like Me who were willing to march against the right of Iraqis to have a chance at freedom, an escape from tyranny. Women, gays, trade unionists; all of them, their snuggly self-righteousness coming off them in radiant waves, like in the old Ready Brek adverts, marching for the right of Saddam and his psychotic gang to continue torturing and murdering the people of Iraq — and Iran, and Kuwait — as he pleased.

And in conclusion:

He who is interested, then, in making love when, how and to whom he or she wants, without getting stoned to death for it, must be willing to support his system against other systems that would happily take away most of our rights to enjoy sex, love, music, art and pleasure itself, all in the name of some unproven fairytale.

servers of Amazon.com noticed something peculiar this week: the company’s Canadian site had suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews on the United States site under signatures like “a reader from New York.”

The weeklong glitch, which Amazon fixed after outed reviewers complained, provided a rare glimpse at how writers and readers are wielding the online reviews as a tool to promote or pan a book — when they think no one is watching.

Apparently a number of authors were caught, embarrassingly, praising their own work, and the review sections have become battle zones between warring groups of writers.

I used to enjoy the Amazon reviews, but I think the golden age is over. In particular I used to look out for reviews by Henry Raddick on the US site, but alas the great man hasn’t posted a review now for nearly a year. He had a style all his own, and rather than quote him, I direct you to his reviews here.

For any Country fans out there, here’s a classic: “Flowers in the Wildwood: Women in Early Country Music”.
It came out last year on the Trikont label, based in Munich. As they say on the cover, “Rare Songs aus der Zeit vor dem 2. Weltkrieg, als die Frauen im Suden der USA sich daran machten, die Countrymusic fur sich zu erobern.”

Apart from the Coon Creek Girls, the Girls of the Golden West, and the Chuck Wagon Gang, there are contributions from the DeZurik Sisters, Samantha Bumgarner, Fred & Gertrude Gossett (with the frankly rather gloomy “All the Good Times Are Past & Gone”), and, with a fine rendition of “On the Banks of the Old Tennessee”, Mr. & Mrs. J.W.Baker. Yodelling cowgirls, wonderful harmonies: what more could you want?