Farewell

Ahh, the time has come to call time at this blog. A general disallusionment with the world of blogging and some of the shit that comes with it, mean this blog has come to the end of its short life. Cheers for reading and take care.


If you are looking for a blog, there are plenty of them over here.

Wholly intelligible? How some of the left covers up for fascist terror.

Simon Cottee, has an interesting piece in the Journal of Human Rights called 'Excusing Terror'. Here's a fairly lengthy extract concerning leftist projection of motivations onto Islamist terrorists.

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From the perspective of the far left, jihadist terrorism has a "root cause": It lies in the humiliations and injustices visited upon the Arab and Muslim world by the West, particularly the United States (and, more recently, by the United Kingdom). Terror is a response. It is, of course, the wrong response, but it is a response nonetheless. Insofar as it responds to the evils of Western governments, we may circumvent it only by putting an end to those evils, by (for example) ending the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and withdrawing financial and military aid from Israel.

The grievances to which the jihadists are responding are therefore wholly intelligible: They are reacting against conditions of intolerable oppression and cruelty—against the systematic rape and defamation of their identity and religion and habitat by the West and its proxies. The resort to terror is misguided, but it is not specially difficult to understand, given the scale and depth of misery to which the denizens of the Muslim world are subjected. Thus in her reflections on September 11, Susan Sontag argued that what had occurred was a consequence of "specific American alliances and actions." Chomsky similarly observed:

"We can think of the United States as an 'innocent victim' only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret."

Among those actions, Chomsky cited the following as preeminent: US patronage of Israel, the pulverizing of Iraq by US-British bombing raids and economic sanctions; and US collusion with corrupt and repressive regimes throughout the entire Middle East. For Ali (2001), the causal context of 9/11 was plain for all to see: "the bombing of Iraq, economic sanctions, the presence of American forces on Saudi soil." From this perspective, Islamic terror is a very specific kind of response, namely, revenge or resistance against the "terrorism of the West."

The London bombings of July 7 provoked a similar set of reactions from the left. Thus Ali is reading from a familiar script when he writes, "the cause of these bombs is the unstinting support given by New Labour and its prime minister to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq . . . the real solution [to terror]lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine."

John Pilger similarly espouses the received leftist wisdom: "No one should doubt that these were 'Blair's bombs'. . . . The bombers struck because he and Bush attacked Iraq.” According to the British newspaper Socialist Worker: "The British government cannot avoid its responsibility for these terrible attacks, which are a consequence of its support for war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The best way to ensure that there are no more such terrible attacks is for British troops to be withdrawn from there immediately"

Now, judged by the standards of what bin Laden and his fellow holy warriors actually say and do, it is hard to avoid the judgment that the left, in characterizing bin Ladenism as a form of political insurgency against the West, is fundamentally mistaken. For bin Laden and his followers say that they love death more than "we" love life, and that the West, being uniformly corrupt, licentious, idolatrous, and soulless, must be destroyed. They also say that they detest, variously, the existence not merely of Zionism but of Jewish people, the heresy of democracy, the spectacle of unveiled women, the solecism of music, the existence of homosexuals, the idea of an independent East Timor, and the existence of Hinduism. And what they say informs—with perfect consistency—what they do: They bomb synagogues, they threaten to kill voters, they throw acid in the faces of unveiled women, they blow up night clubs, they torture and murder gay men, they murder Catholics in East Timor, they destroy ancient Hindu monuments, and they happily kill themselves—just imagine, writes Christopher Hitchens , the "wolfish smiles on the faces of the 9/11 hijackers as they rammed themselves and their human cargo into the Twin Towers, in the name of Allah."

Let us therefore acknowledge, with Paul Berman, that the protagonists of jihad are motivated not by a humanistic sympathy for the victims of Western imperial statecraft but by a deep hatred of the idea of liberal democratic cosmopolitan secularism, that jihadist terror is a reaction against not the vices of the liberal democracies, but their virtues—pluralism, democracy, female emancipation, and rational scientific inquiry. Bin Laden's rallying cry is not freedom (still less democracy) but the lost Islamic Empire. Like his intellectual precursor Sayyid Qutb, his desire is "to restore the dominance of Islam in the lands of Islam" . "Jihad," he believes, "is now incumbent on all Muslims and will remain so until they recapture every spot that was Islamic but later fell into the hands of the kuffar [infidels] . . . Palestine, Bukhara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, Southern Yemen, Tashkent and al-Andalus [Spain]". Thus bin Laden is not so much an enemy of imperialism as a fervent nostalgist for it (see pp. 266–267). Moreover, his vision of the "good society" is conspicuously devoid of any conception of social justice. The political question of what is to be done in the here and now is completely occluded by an unswerving emphasis on the sacrificial: "Being killed for Allah’s cause is a great honor achieved by only those who are the elite of the nation. We love this kind of death for Allah’s cause as much as you like to live. We have nothing to fear for. It is something we wish for."

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Also see Normblog and this discussion about leftist apologia for terrorism. It's well worth getting a copy of, if you can.

Get Geras

Norm thinks he has posted a devastating critique of Flightplan.

In fact, I think he has probably stumbled across the pitch the writers made to the studio.

He's missed his calling in life.

Is this what you want?

Here's an American on Darfur:

Why is it always us? Why the United States? Why not ask Africans to solve the Darfur genocide? Why not ask European countries to send their troops and spend their money to solve this problem?

I'm tired of it always being us. Every time we act, we get stabbed in the back, our money wasted and our troops killed. It is time for the rest of the world to step up to the plate.

Plenty of people moan about US intervention, but is this the sort of reaction they really want from Americans?

Blonde Bond

Je m'appelle Bond, James Bond.

At a blatently blondophobic site, there is an organised boycott of the forthcoming Casino Royale because they think Daniel Craig isn't up to the part - too short, too pugilistic, too haggard, and too blonde...

If Daniel Craig's performance as Bond is as good as his performance in Layer Cake then the film should be something to look forward to, especially since they seem to have dumped all the invisible car guff and gone for a more pared down Bourne Supremacy style.

The Euston Exemption?

Since The Euston Manifesto was launched there has been a lot of talk and a lot of bile. For more informed and intelligent discussion about the manifesto, a visit to Gard du Norm is recommended: Platform 1, Platform 2, Platform 3, Platform 4, Platform 5, and Platform 6.

Will Hutton published his take on the manifesto in The Observer, and although supportive of many of the aims of the manifesto, he accuses the Euston Group of having a hole in its thinking - with regard to the mandate for intervention in Iraq.

But while I support the Euston group's commitment to democracy and the Enlightenment, there is a hole in its thinking which makes it politically dysfunctional. Democracy and the rule of law are indivisible. Thus, without a second UN resolution and a renewal of the mandate for intervention, the US and UK could not legally go to war and are now trying to build a democracy from a fatally flawed position. The failure of Iraqi reconstruction is not just hubris by the Pentagon and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; it goes back to the original illegitimacy of the war. The Euston group states the democratic principle, then exempts itself from its application. The US and UK had to observe democratic rules and they cannot be excused now.

Leaving aside the argument about the legality, or not, of the war, which I do not believe is as clear as Hutton puts it, I have a problem with two points in the above paragraph.

Firstly, even if one agrees that the war was illegal, it does not follow that such illegality undermines attempts to build a democracy. Strategic failures by Rumsfeld are not dependent on the failure to obtain a second UN resolution. They stand on their own. Nor are those trying to de-rail the nascent Iraqi democracy the sort of people who would have stayed at home if only France had delivered a second UN resolution. Attacks on Iraqi civil society have continued after a UN resolution to support Iraq's democracy was passed, and even before that they deliberately targeted the UN in a bombing. Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the UN Special Representative in Iraq, was targeted for his previous work in in East Timor and Osama Bin Laden's recent broadcast again paints the UN as as something to be opposed in itself (this time when the UN may finally be acting to prevent an ongoing genocide in Darfur). If the point is that obtaining a second resolution may have brought more people on side to help bring about a successful outcome, then one has to ask who? The French would have been unlikely to help even if they had decided to enforce UN resolution 1441, and indeed have not helped much since despite since UN resolutions supporting the right of the Iraqi people to exercise their democratic will have been passed.

Which brings me to my second problem with Hutton's analysis. He is of course correct to point out that democracy and the rule of law are linked. However, law can exist outside the rule of democracy. No-one would suggest that a dissident arrested for expressing his views, and thus breaking the law of a totalitarian state, would be experiencing "democracy".

The UN does some good work, and when it was initially formed the intentions behind it were noble. Yet, the UN is not a democratic world government working for the citizens of the world. It is an arena in which the nations of the world fight for their interests, much as they fought for their interests before it was formed. This is not to suggest that there is no such thing as international law, but even on that point the UN is a failure when it comes to enforcement, or even basic recognition of trangressions. Darfur, and Rwanda before it, are examples; the interests of nations prevent action. Is the exercise of China's self-interest in various dodgy regimes, meant to give the UN legitimacy? In the case of the Iraq war knowing what we now know about the Food for Oil programme, the coalition who enforced UN resolution 1441 could equally be seen as acting when a UN paralysed by self-interest was unable to do so.

In a real democracy legislators are answerable to their electorate, and therefore represent their interests. In the UN decisions are, in part, taken by representatives of dictatorships who are in no way anwerable to their populaces. We have no reason to think that they represent their people's interests, and therefore they do not command the respect due to genuinely democratic ones. It is akin to mafia bosses in the dock sitting in the jury that decides on their guilt.

If that is the "democratic principle" that some of the Euston Group are exempting themselves from, it should be remembered not all were in favour of the Iraq war, then can they be blamed?

Bored?

Then why not create a work of genius?

The Euston Manifesto

There's been plenty about this on the web, so why haven't you signed it yet?

The Euston Manifesto.

Sign it now.

Notes to Labour Party

This is lame and comes across like piss-poor student politics.

You are a government, not a comedy show.

There are no prizes for predictable comments exploiting the comedy potential of that last sentence.

And another thing. Can someone train Patricia Hewitt to speak to people in some other tone of voice that doesn't make people feel like they are being disciplined by a patronising school teacher. Even when I agree with what she is saying, she gets my back up. Every time she speaks, you can feel the points falling off Labour's poll performance.

The utopian world of Menzies Campbell

It has always amazed me how Menzies Campbell has managed to maintain his reputation as an international affairs guru. His latest offering over the Iranian situation is mindnumbingly facile:

Iran is not a rogue state. It cares about international opinion: it has signed the NPT

Campbell fails to put forward an argument why signing the agreement and breaking it is better than not signing it in the first place. In Campbell's simplistic and naive utopian world, people who sign treaties don't want to break them. Everybody is also, deep down, reasonable and think exactly the same way as him - not that he's the first to think like this. If it wasn't for those pesky Americans, and their double standards, Iran would cease their defensive nuclear ambitions and stop threatening to wipe countries off the map.

If you disagree with him, he may label you "simplistic", or say you are "full of bluster", or perhaps suggest you are not "dealing with the matter in a sensitive way". For he has a deeper truth and understanding, and he can see the rationality in others that you cannot.

Mad analogies by Presbyterian fundamentalists

Before I clear off for a period (There will be one more post, next week, before I go), I want to mention the opening of a ferry service to a Scottish Island - on a Sunday. Some religious types are concerned about the move, requesting that the Sabbath be kept - while others think the service is essential. But what isn't on the BBC news page is the absolutely extraordinary analogy I heard on Radio 5 live by one of the anti-ferry group. I was in the car when I heard it, but here is my best attempt putting together the argument put forward.

Here it is:

The majority of the people coming on the ferry on a Sunday will not respect the Sabbath, therefore it is an insult to allow these people to drive off the ferry and through a community that respects the Sabbath.

It is like, wait for it, "driving a bus load of BNP supporters into a Mosque during Ramadan." Since no-one would do that, it is unfair to subject the residents of the Scottish Island to the ferry travellers.

While I am one of the first to note that some people give more respect to Islam than they do to the Christian faith which is mercilessly lampooned, this news story ensures that when I do visit, it will most certainly be on a Sunday.

I'll use the swings, too.

Paltry advice

Keep eating chickens, but avoid turkeys.

Statistics

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

And plenty of arguing about them as well...

Drawing distinctions

From the Certificate in Terrorism Studies from the University of St Andrews:

Elective

Terrorist Modus Operandi

This module takes an in-depth look at the structures of terrorist groups and networks. It also examines targeting and tactics, and the impact of technology on those tactics. Special attention will be paid to:

• The relationship between ideology and modus operandi

• Drawing distinctions between "traditional" terrorism (such as the IRA, ETA) and the new international terrorism (al-Qaeda and related groups)

• Terrorist group exploitation of international, regional, and local media, including pan-Arab satellite TV networks such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyya

• The effects of counter-terrorism on the evolution of terrorist timing and targeting

• An evaluation of two case studies, one reviewing traditional terrorism and one reviewing the "new" terrorism

• Best practices for effective inter-agency collaboration in countering terrorism

The diameter of the bomb

BBC film review:

The devastating effects of a suicide bombing are shown in graphic detail in feature-length documentary Diameter Of The Bomb. The UK/Canadian documentary recreates the hours leading up to a bomb blast onboard a Jerusalem bus in June 2002, and interviews relatives of five families who lost loved ones in the blast. At times this is undeniably moving, while at others it verges on the mawkish. What really unbalances the documentary, though, is its overly forensic approach to the bombing itself.

The review goes on to bemoan the lack of understanding about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also suggests that "a Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore-type placing themselves at the centre of the story, trying to make sense of this maelstrom of violence" would be useful. Er, no thanks. Michael Moore making sense of the Middle East?

I've had my fill of others "understanding".

See also the Channel Four Review, which seems somewhat at odds with the BBC's review. Sometimes you wonder if reviewers have even seen the same film.

A question for Jon Snow

Last year I was at a book festival, and after a debate involving Jon Snow I found myself face to face with the unfathomably tall Mr Snow in a crowded bookshop - his new book had just been published. What should I ask him?

I considered the options.

"How did you feel in that interview with Alistair Campbell?"

"What do you think of the Iraq war?"

"What is the role of the media in such a conflict?"

None seemed particularly interesting, and I'm sure he had heard most of them before, so I went with:

"Hello, do you know if Christopher Hitchens is coming soon?"

In defense of Frank Ellis?

Well, I'm not going to defend him, I personally find his views little more than social quackery, but here's a letter in The Times Higher Educational Supplement:

As a black member of academic staff I believe that Frank Ellis should not lose his job but someone at Leeds University should seek to improve the quality of the research he engages in ('"I won't be silenced,' says race tutor", March 10).

To assess intellect, rather than the impact of social factors on intellect, intelligence tests designed to determine the intelligence of different races should be conducted before children start school, before the effects of teaching children from ethnic backgrounds occur. Birmingham Local Education Authority did such a study. It concluded in 2002 that black boys were second only to white middle-class children in achievement.

Although one might conclude that black boys are more intelligent than their poor white counterparts at the age of five, intelligence at the age of five is more a product of parenting than genetics. Is Ellis suggesting that poor white children should be sent down coalmines? Why does he go from intelligence to repatriation?

To assess intelligence based on race, a test needs to be devised that evaluates intelligence rather than familiarity with the environment or language of instruction. But there might be some questions asked if babies of a few weeks or months were tested.

The danger with such poor research is that there are many who will cite Ellis's findings as evidence for their views, thinking: "ees a yuniversiti professor, ee must be rite".

My view is that the quality of Ellis's research is poor. As a minimum, Leeds should get him to engage in a peer-review process before publication.

Carlton McDonald Derby University

It seems to me that if you are going to hound Frank Ellis out of his job, you are no position to argue for academic freedom in other areas you do support.

Four people who can't "sing" but get away with it all the same

Bob Dylan

Jonny Cash

Roger Waters

Billy Bragg

Flickr-nam

I find I can get stuck in Flickr, forever.

What I find most interesting are pictures people took years ago, and have started to scan digitally. So you can see historical events through the eyes of ordinary people.


Like this picture taken in Vietnam in 1968.

Darfur and the blame game...

From the Lebanon Star:

For over three years, in the western Sudanese province of Darfur, government-backed militias have been terrorizing, killing and raping civilians. It is baffling that a crisis of such magnitude - with up to 300,000 people killed and some 2.4 million civilians forced to flee their homes - could be ignored and forgotten for so long. We could blame the United Nations for not responding quickly to the crisis, we could blame the media for not drawing enough attention to the atrocities and we could blame Western governments and citizens for caring too little about the plight of African villagers. But the greater burden of responsibility for the tragedy lies closer to home, where regional officials are still allowing the killings to take place.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is quick to lay blame on others for the death and displacement of his citizens. He has charged that the West has invented a "conspiracy" to plunder his country's resources, and denied his government's well-documented participation in the killings. On Monday, Bashir reiterated this same theme while warning that "Darfur will be a graveyard for any foreign troops" that might intervene. But it is Bashir's own failure to protect the lives and livelihoods of its citizens that has invited external intervention. This failure has already forced Bashir to withdraw his bid for the African Union presidency, and it will probably soon force the international community to send peacekeeping troops. If foreign troops arrive in Sudan, Bashir will have only himself to blame.

Likewise, the Arab League, whose next summit will be hosted by Sudan, has exonerated Khartoum in Darfur, blaming other factors for the conflict, including drought, tribal disputes and underdevelopment. The league has rejected sanctions or foreign intervention in Darfur, saying that Khartoum needs more time to resolve the crisis.

Marc Cooper quoting James Baker

I just had to express my surprise that Marc Cooper is posting reactionary quotes from James Baker, with the implication that George Bush Senior had the best policy on Iraq.

So here it is.

I'm surprised.

Countries Al Qaeda has attacked

create your own visited countries map

The most annoying use of the word decimating I've seen

You too can fight for Stalin, or it's off to the Gulag with you!

Here's the script from a trailer of a huge new online game:

The Most Decimating Front in WWII

11,285,000 Soviet Casualties

Defend Your Motherland

And Fight for Survival

Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45

There's something rather perturbing about the thought of lots of spotty Western teenagers fighting for the Soviet Motherland online.

Danophobia

Yet more unfair vilification of the Danes...

On Guilt

"We only wanted to live a decent life. What is the guilt of my dead children?"

Street vendor Jamil Mohammed, Baghdad. Iraq - who has lost two daughters and a son in a terrorist attack.

He should go and ask the contributors to Biff Boy's blog, Lenin's Tomb, where their guilt is made clear:

"The resistence does primarily target occupation forces but this does include Iraqi collaborators. It's nothing one should take pleasure in and I appreciate that people are desperate for jobs but it's a reality of occupation: if you collaborate with occupiers, you are a target."

David Traynier. Self-confessed loafer from Colchester, UK.

Health tip for Bush

If you have a tumour, let the doctor cut it all out.

Don't let him take only half because your scared of the consequences and then start crying a couple of years later when it has grown twice as big as it was originally.

Biff Boy of the New Party

Rather amusingly, over at Biff Boy's blog, he has introduced comment moderation. This seems to consist of deleting comments he can't cope with (apparently including one of mine) and allowing comments from others he disagrees with which he considers himself able to fend off.

On moderation he says:

"By the way, for those of you who have noticed moderation, it is not directed against anyone in particular except for Baz/Pete/etc. That said, I did just delete a comment from Eric complaining that I was moderating him. I just don't like that young fellow."

My comment had been along the lines of:

"Ha ha, you are moderating my comments. Loser."

Which most certainly is not a complaint.

Still, as a member of a New Party, you can't really expect much else from Biff Boy.

I'm a racist!

According to Lenin, I'm a racist.

Eric - you are the bigot here, not MPAC or the MAB. The demonstration yesterday was sponsored by the Muslim Council of Britain, and it was attended by ordinary Muslims and non-Muslims from across the country to express anger at Islamophobic racism. Your response is to witch hunt two of the groups who attended. You're the racist, you shameless fuck.

The organisations I complained about were MPAC and MAB.

Yeah, right Lenin. Whatever.

Starting the process of systematic desensitisation

"Let’s be frank here. Say someone sketches a picture of a bearded bloke with a fuse in his turban. If he labels that sketch "Dave", it’s unlikely to provoke much response in anyone. But if he labels it "Mohammed", and looking at that sketch suddenly causes you inconsolable grief, or sends you into a murderous rage, it seems reasonable to conclude that you need help."

Media Watch Watch.

Born with religion?

Juan Cole's Everything the West and the Middle East Need Could have been Learned in Kindergarten:

Number 1: Don't make fun of people for things they were born with, like big noses, skin color or their religion.

Obviously, I have to accept that genetics is poorly taught at Kindergarten level, but I'm concerned that Juan Cole thinks there is a specific gene for Islam, Judaism, Buddihism or Christianity at his age.